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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2026
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Today I Learned
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friendly reminder that valve is not your friend. they operate the way they do because that's their business strategy to make the most money long term.
Within faulty power structures, we should make the sober decision to support the ones we seem are best fit for us!
Their organizational method is pretty cool and their book on it is open sourced.
It is very cool
No corporation or billionaire is your friend. No matter how nice they appear just because the rest are genocidal sociopaths.
Not all of them are necessarily evil either, but regardless of their intentions, they're almost always a net loss for society.
Regardless, we should reward socially beneficial behavior. Billionaires are humans, and as such trainable through a correct reward structure. Harm reduction is important.
Should've worked with Musk...
They deserve negative reinforcement though. “Rewarding billionaires” for anything feels very wrong, regardless of the ends.
Do you want to punish billionaires for their wealth hoarding sociopathy or to make things better? Both is ideal, but one matters more than the other.
Ppl used to worship billionaires, musk, gates, etc. were very popular until recently, musk killed his reputation overtime by not shutting up lol
Pavlov has upvoted your comment
But remember the CIA is TOTALLY your friend!
~unless you are a third world country. Terms and conditions may apply~
Fairly happy to find a business that wants to make money long term. Pretty rare these days. I would say thats a good thing, wouldnt you?
How do they do it? Looks like expanding into the open hardware space, the open source space, have good customer service and avoid ads except to promote games.
And the alternative is what? GOG?
In the end they are just a store front, so it isnt even like they are the only place to buy a product, yet somehow they are the only ones that seem to even give a shit about me playing games on Linux.
And then there are the employees. As far as we know (please if you work at valve say something) they are the highest compensated people in the it/game industry.
Valve is legendary for being a good employer. I remember hearing about an employee who tried to tender a resignation when he was diagnosed with something chronic and debilitating. Can't remember what. Anyway, point is, he decided he couldnt do his job, tried to resign, Newell refused to accept it and told him "your job at Valve is to get better. Come back when you're better." So the employee kept his pay, his benefits, all of it. And this was right around the release of HL2, so Valve was not yet the monopoly market maker it is today. Gabe Newell is a billionaire. He may or may not be a good person. But he is a forward thinker and a good boss.
Yeah there was some leaked payroll data around 2021, so its old info, but with bonuses, profit sharing and base salary the average compensation is something like 1.4 million per employee.
Way back when Gabe said he didnt want employees he wanted partners and they would share the success. I don't know what its like today though.
Yes, that's why I simply reminded folks that they are a business and not your friend. So many people jumping to Valve's defense over a perceived slight makes me feel the reminder is necessary.
He's also not an enemy though. For an extremely wealthy person he's a decent guy imo. Then again, I don't know everything about him
Quite a lot of people thought Elon was a decent guy once upon a time.
I just think Gabe is a bit smarter in what he says and does publicly. Most extremely wealthy people seem to be higher in measures of narcissistic traits, self-entitlement, and egocentrism.
Elon had a full time PR team that was pushing that image since he wanted to be known and popular, then he started posting stuff himself and we all saw the mask fall off. I don't think Gabe has the same thing since he seems to try and stay out of the spotlight as much as possible.
Elon also had staff who described their actual job as essentially jangling keys in front of Elon, because he has a tendency to just randomly have an insane idea and decide everyone is doing that now.
So, they had to distract him from making too many stupid decisions, fucking up workflows and procesesses. He's just an idiot, who's probably mildly aspy/autistic, and that got PR transformed into 'quirky genius'. But look into what happened at PayPal, or Tesla, anything. He's incompetent at anything other than corporate ratfuckery, he's never coded or designed anything novel or useful.
This uh... was from Tesla, a decade ago. Now of course, its all sycophants.
Compare that to Valve's odd, flat-ish hierarchy, 'just work on something cool and be useful' work culture.
Gabe has been known to occasionally bring the hammer down, but the vast amount of Valve's style, intentionally created and maintained by Gabe is... hands off. Hire the actual best, they'll direct themselves, kind of thing.
Ain't perfect, but... probably a lot less of an insane tyrannical bastard than Elon.
Gabe has a very good PR team. Don't you remember all the "Gabe plays video games too" articles? Staying out of the spotlight isn't the same as being a good person.
If he was a good person, he would be using his wealth to help society instead of owning more than a billion worth of boats. If he was a good person tbh, he'd close the spigot a bit so more profit would go to devs but he takes his fat cut like all the other store owners.
I don't. Literally the first I'm hearing of it.
You see articles like these pop up every few months. The theme is usually along the lines of "he's not just any billionaire. He is filthy rich but he is also just like you". It's transparent pandering imo.
So we should hate him on the off chance he might one day be a douchebag?
Why take away a motivation to be a decent person by punishing them for it? I would say give them every opportunity to be decent human beings, dont pre-crime their ass because you have a prejudice against people in their social class.
Fair points. Let's hope he doesn't lose his marbles
Oh man you're about to get attacked for this one. I've been piled on massively for simply suggesting he was better than others.
I like Gabe to be clear but come on. Even if he just isn’t as shit as the others, the guy clearly knows to separate his public and private profiles. This guy knew that him simply hammering three times on something was going to be dissected by 1 million nerds and used to confirm a game that never came.
Let’s not forget that Valve essentially made a significant portion of their money selling gambling to kids. He’s “better than others” sure, that’s because the others are so subsumed by their narcissism, they’re doing Nazi salutes on podiums while gutting welfare and spouting stale memes. It’s not exactly a high bar to stumble over.
I like steam I send them a christmas card every year with my life updates.
That's...that's how a business should operate. Not chasing quarterly reviews and stock prices, but being in business as long as feasibly possible. Making products and/or services that meet the need of the market and continual improvement of them.
Instead most businesses, especially dealing with video games, are ran by short term thinking psychopaths who only care how a quarter looks and not the long term sustainability of the entire company. They saw a massive influx during the Covid lockdowns and didn't realize that was temporary growth for a particular difficult time so keep chasing those kinds of profits with layoffs, studio closures.
No, Valve is privately owned. That means the company does whatever the owners want it to do. Unlike public companies which can be sued by their own shareholders of they don't pursue profits hard enough.
That's not to say we should blindly idolize a billionaire, but he and in turn Valve can in fact do things that are friendly to consumers.
You can be sued by anyone for anything, but many actions are unlikely to be successful, including that one. In practice, company executives have extremely broad latitude to pursue profits in a way they see fit. If the make the argument in front of court that using Linux, having pretty good customer service, a UI that doesn't suck donkey balls, and not monetising gambling addicts TOO much is the best path to long term profit, the court isn't going to say, "you know what I know better than you".
The shareholders can sue in situations where execs embezzle money, or deliberately fuck the company and leave evidence that they've done so, things like that. Not just because they think that the company should do something else.
What absolutely can and does happen is that the shareholders fire the CEO. But a public company doesn't have to be structured so that that can happen.
I think Gabe acts more like the European rich. They are still pieces of shit, but they learned a long time ago to STFU about their money after a long history involving guillotines and the like that the U.S. hasn’t experienced to the same extent just yet.
You are not my friend, doesn't mean you are my enemy either.
I will settle for a company who's demonstrated long term strategy is mostly in line with my interests. It's not perfect, but I'll take "morale because it's profitable" over "enshitifcation for a quick profit"
that's why i said friendly reminder and not "boycott valve"
Fair, fair.