Guys I know he is not perfect but it's understandable that people like him in a world where the average CEO drinks the blood of newborns daily.
this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2025
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Huh, so that’s why they’re all so prolife. Need to keep the source of fresh babies going…
"Don't get an abortion! Have that baby and dispose of it at your nearest "Leave your baby here for our coalition of friendly CEOs to take care of" location for a 25$ amazon gift card!"
That fully sounds like a program a literal vampire would implement with wild success. Parents selling their kids for money happened in the past, so not even that much of a stretch. It does sound like a potential cobra problem though.
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Mmmm billionaire boot must be delicious
Steam is not a bad company but it is still a company that holds a lot of power, don’t forget that.
Yeah. I am a fan of valve but their complicity in cs:go skin gambling uhhh... gets worse and worse the more closely you look at it.
Its fair to appreciate the good they have done for linux and largely very consumer friendly business practices AND, companies are not your friends.
Valve's "hands-off" approach extends far beyond CS:GO gambling. They have the same willful negligence toward moderating their own official group chats.
For weeks, the official Steam Deck group chat has been flooded with racist slurs and hate speech. I and many others reported the individuals responsible, yet weeks passed with zero action taken.
Frustrated, I opened a formal support ticket. I detailed the offenses, provided evidence, and explained why a basic filtering system or active moderation is necessary for their own official spaces. Valve's response? They closed my ticket without taking any action at all. They have confirmed, through inaction, that providing a non-toxic environment in their official communities is not a priority.
This experience has made me lose a significant amount of respect for Valve. I will now be actively purchasing my games elsewhere in protest.
Steam has had this power for ages tho and never abused it to the disadvantage of customers.
Supporting companies that don't shit on consumers is equally important as boycotting companies that do.
And if they get rid of most of the competition then they can treat us like garbage and we'd have nowhere to go.
If Valve would want to do that, they could have done so years ago. To the contrary, there are more stores where you can buy games online then ever before (Epic, Windows Store, GOG, Itch.io, Fanatical, Humble and so on, with steam keys and without), and i haven't heard of a single aqcuisition by Valve yet.
What competition lol
At least they are not beholden to parasitic shareholders that demand quarterly grow at all costs.
It seems from your response that you have at least some desire to educate... Why must that also come with derision?
It isn't that hard to convey a message without such a contemptuous tone, and I'd venture to guess it would be more likely to persuade. Someone has seen some good in a thing. You can disagree without scorn.
My apologies, this community is generally memey/jokey in tone, and I was going with that. /gen
I’m also firing off dumb comments at like 2 am where I am, lol. Please do not take my short soundbites (text bites?) seriously.
On a more serious note, one billion dollars is a legitimately unfathomable amount of wealth and, by extension, unilateral power. That’s a dangerous thing for any one person to hold, regardless of how kind their heart is since it means the use of that power is dependent on the whims of one person.
Corporations are also, by their nature, driven by a profit motive. A corporation can do non-evil, customer-friendly things but that can also change very quickly. It’s important to differentiate between beneficial behavior and altruism.
Also, I typically don’t expect people to read my unsolicited soapboxing rants under a green text meme lol.
Also also, I am quite appreciative of the benefits of Valve’s efforts. I just don’t assume they’re purely doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. Nor do I expect/demand them to.
I've lurked on Lemmy for over a year and this post, for whatever reason, compelled me to register an account to respond; I took your comment to be a tad critical. It seems I may've misread the room here - my apologies if so. I agree wholeheartedly with pretty much all you've said. Thanks for the response.
Your concerns are valid since text is hard to interpret due to lack of inflection, context, and other intonation indicators. I try to remember to use tone tags but don’t always.
Thank you for your thoughtful responses and engagement, though. Good faith discussion is an important thing on the web, and is a large part of why I like Lemmy over Reddit and other centralized social media sites. I appreciate you for that and adding to the constructiveness and positivity :) /gen
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I am a fan of Valve, but this is just way exaggerated. For example, encourages you to save money by having sales? Isn't that about manipulating you into buying more games than you would otherwise, because you perceive the value as being better?
I fall for it every time and I couldn't be more proud
Yeah, Valve are certainly one of the best options for buying games other than sometimes GoG or directly from the developer. But this level of simping for Valve is odd.
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Gaben and steam are not perfect, but are monumentally better than what we would be stuck with on sony-soft
They're succeeding by not actively running their platform into the ground, which is somehow inspiring and disappointing at the same time
That's because they're a privately owned company. They can decide when to prioritize long term profits over short term profits.
Most of their competition are publicity traded companies that have no such luxury. They have to make next quarter's number higher no matter what.
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STEAM- Give a reasonable good platform for gaming.
OTHER- Kill themselves with shitty optimization and spam policies.
STEAM - Sit enjoing the sunny day, drink a coffee. Improve a bit the navigator to find new game.
OTHER - Keep a their shitty platform and doble down on AI Slop.
STEAM - Doing some yoga. Walk the dog. Add an AI disclaimer for the games.
BTW the way refunds work is that steam withholds the money for a month to pay refunds with it. The publisher has no say, they just get gross - 30% - VAT - refunds.
Also giving refunds is required by law in some countries, it's not like valve invented it out of the goodness of their heart.
Australia sued them into their current refund policy
Is this supposed to be a negative?
Well the op said it was out of their own pockets, this is saying that op's claim is fake.
The fact that you immediately got weirdly defensive about it tells me you think it's a negative, and I agree since this policy applies equally to EA garbage as it does for your cute little indie game.
I know this novel strategy that Valve employs might be difficult to conceptualize for people whose thinking only extends as far as "company evil, success bad", so let me summarize it in a format that is easier to understand:
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When he dies gaming lives on within us.
Believing that sales exist to save people money is the funniest shit i have ever seen.
Step 1. Make a good product
Step 2. Corner the market
Step 3. Build up good will
Step 4. ...?
Step 5. Keep building up good will
Step 4 is "buy the company that builds the yachts you like"
I was extremely impressed that Valve did an RMA replacement for one of my Index base stations even out of warranty. They explicitly did not have to do that. It’s been years but I’m still amazed
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I think this is factually wrong, Steam only introduced refunds because they were forced to for the European market
I believe it was Australia
"Sells hardware at a loss to hook you into the steam ecosystem and make more money by selling you software" FTFY
Don't get me wrong, as companies go I like valve, but to say they aren't making decisions based on making more money and just out of altruistic motives is madness. Businesses that aren't healthy and competitive die, even if they have rabid fans.
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People saying that when Gabe dies so does Steam seem to be missing a piece of the puzzle.
From everything I've read and can tell they work using an ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Program). Meaning each employee working there today is becoming partial owners in Valve. If you think they will allow some new face to show up when Gabe dies and flip the table you are missing the piece where the owners of this company are extremely well compensated today and a core part of making Valve successful today.
2 words though "Kiddie gambling".
Sure Steam is one of the less evil companies out there, but they're far from innocent.
I suspect translation later for ARM will be industry shaking
They sell their hardware at a loss?
Also, that's not necessarily because they put the consumers' needs advice anything else. Sony and Microsoft do this all the time simply for market share.
Not at a loss. We still don't know the prices of the new wave of hardware, but some Valve spokesperson has said that they wouldn't subsidize the price of the hardware with future game sales. They've also said, when the Steam Deck was launched, that affordability was a massive factor in the design, and that some of the decisions to make that happen were "painful".
Unfortunately gaming might already be dead with these RAM prices and Micron giving up on the consumer space. Unless Valve wants to start buying chips wholesale and selling DIMM and SODIMM modules.
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When he dies gaming is indie.
All of the Valve employees are making bank. I don't think they'll be changing their core values any time soon even if he dies.
It seems like everyone has already forgotten how he introduced gambling to kids.
nahhh, lootboxes existed before CS:GO or TF2. and neither was supposed to be for kids in the first place! card games like MTG were one of the first mass created to use those mechanics
you know what was supposed to be for kids, had (& still has) lootboxes galore and other predatory monetisation tactics? Wizard101 (2008)
i don't see many people complaining about MtG or Wizard101, but folks love to point out how Gaben did a bad thing by taking something that was already a concept (that people liked) and making it digital, whereby he accidentally created something he could never uncreate
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