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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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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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.
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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
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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.
The very core of pretty much every enshittification you can put a finger on
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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
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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:
I receive: half-decent product
You receive: my money
end of story
The sad thing is that them having a half decent product is something special in this world
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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
Believing that sales exist to save people money is the funniest shit i have ever seen.
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.
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When he dies gaming lives on within us.
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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They only began giving refunds when the European Union mandated it, back then only Origin (EA) gave refunds. Some times the EU is useful.
The EU definitely helped. I'll add that this was actually kicked off by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) in 2014. They took Valve to court over their insistence that they can ignore Australian Consumer Law rights - in particular that if a product is 'not fit for purpose' then the buyer is entitled to a full refund, with respect to games. Valve offered no possibility of refund at the time. The case dragged on, but Valve eventually lost and was told to pay several million in fines, they appealed it to the High Court of Australia in 2016 - and lost also on appeal.
The judge was pissed at Valve, and wrote in their ruling:
“Valve’s culture of compliance was, and is, very poor”. Valve’s evidence was ‘disturbing’ to the Court because Valve ‘formed a view …that it was not subject to Australian law…and with the view that even if [legal] advice had been obtained that Valve was required to comply with the Australian law the advice might have been ignored”. He also noted that Valve had ‘contested liability on almost every imaginable point’.
Valve are generally a very positive force in gaming, but they're definitely not the saints that OP image text implies.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/australia-fines-valve-over-steam-refunds
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"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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This is such a controversial person to discuss. On one hand, loot boxes, the steam market for trading, and a lot of gambling and profiteering going on. At the same time, all of the OP comments are also true.
Out of all the billionaires, I dislike gaben the least. The net good he's done for gaming may not balance the scales entirely, but at least there's a discussion to be had whether what gaben has done is for the better, or for the worse. Which is more than I can say about most billionaires I know of.
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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
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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~~ above anything else. Sony and Microsoft do this all the time simply for market share.
Edit: didn't check autocorrect before posting
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".
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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.
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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Forgot about steam's forced DRM on purchases. Forgot about their inconsistent policing of content in games they sell. Forgot about steam not wanting accounts to be inherited when you pass away. Forgot about their 30% cut for small devs while bigger devs get a smaller cut. Forgot about a lot of things.
Don’t read this as a general defence of steam but I do want to correct a factual mistake: there is no forced DRM on steam.
Plenty of games are released on steam which do not rely on the steam client to be started and are in fact DRM-free. They can be backed up, and played on any machine without steam installed.
Some examples are Cyberpunk2077, the System Shock remake, Shadow tactics, and most of the devolver digital catalogue. The issue I personally have is that steam itself does not declare the difference anywhere in the store front, but at least it is always accurately catalogued on the lovely pcgamingwiki.
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Never thought I’d see the day when Lemmy has nice things to say about a billionaire who owns multiple yachts!
There’s a story recently about how a huge percentage of people’s steam libraries are never played. People just spending money on steam sales and amassing huge backlogs of games they’ll never get to. Valve has mastered the art of using sales to create FOMO and drive unnecessary spending!
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