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[–] 77 points 7 months ago (3 children)

I'm not even sure Valve has 1000 employees. They're notoriously small with a weird structure, iirc something like 300ish people who are free to just take on projects and are well paid.

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  • [–] 208 points 7 months ago (21 children)

    The actual quote that the tagline paraphrases:

    "And so Tim has gone from making games to making one game, spending all his time doing that and trying to make as much money as possible," says Faliszek. "And I guess well, hey, Tim, Gabe's better at that than you. I don't know what to tell you, man, because you stopped caring about making things."

    Other good quote:

    Faliszek says it infuriates him to see "lazy dev" complaints when companies like Epic "just cut them off at the knees, man." He suggests looking at the documentary about Half-Life and Valve: "And how many people still work there after all those years?"

    And it turns out the salary was good. Very good. "They care so much about what they're making that they're still there and they're all rewarded handsomely," says Faliszek. "To be clear, I could retire, I worked my ass off at Valve, and I could retire today. I made more money than I'll ever make. And the money I made is dwarfed by the people who were there longer than me or before me.

    "But Valve understood that. That's how you get this thing where people cared, people worked hard, people stayed because they felt they were improving. What they were building on was something that they had agency over and owned. Like, even now, I'm excited when I see the Valve announcement about the VR stuff and everything, that makes me happy.

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  • [–] 118 points 7 months ago* (15 children)

    Valve understands that they owe their success to the skill of their employees and knows how precious having such a solid team is. You can't replace that with an expensive CEO or by throwing money at the problem later on. Valve has the best among the best and wants to keep them happy and working for them. They understand that they do best when they're not subject to corporate micromanagement, pressure or threats of layoffs. The results speak for themselves.

    Tim however did that classic business move of sacrificing everything for short term gain and on the long run they've completely ruined what used to make the company good.

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  • [–] 46 points 7 months ago (7 children)

    Valve is also a privately owned company. They don't need to make more money this quarter vs last quarter to keep shareholders happy, they can just be happy that they're making a lot of money. That requirement to always become more profitable than before leads companies to enshitify products with anti-consumer "features" and cut costs (ie layoffs).

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  • [–] 11 points 7 months ago* (4 children)

    I think the point being made is that Gabe rewards his employees first and then himself after, and yet hes still somehow made more money personally than Tim Sweeney.

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  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    "Somehow" he owns the only PC video game store that matters.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Well he knows his customers. Have you ever worked in a computer parts store? Every mistake a manufacturer makes is remembered for decades and punished. You can't make shitty stuff and sell it to this crowd. Hell, Epic is technically paying us to use it, and we still won't use it.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    "Epic is technically paying us to use it, and we still won't use it"

    I think it's because it feels like an obvious bait and switch. We've seen it so many times over the years. Services reel people in, get them hooked on their platform, then enshittify them with ads and paid subscription tiers etc. Like everything that Epic does just seems so desperate, and that makes me belive they can't be trusted. "Please bro. Please install Epic. Bro I'll give you free games. I swear bro, I won't start scraping your data and selling ads. Trust me, bro. Please"

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  • [–] 46 points 7 months ago (6 children)

    plus isn't like pretty much everyone that works at Valve a millionaire? also some of the longest term employees at any game company ever?

    Honestly Epic has been a shell of its former self ever since Cliffy B left. I used to love playing Unreal Tournament, 2k3 and 2k4. and thankfully now I can play UT2k4 again for free on linux. But Epic today is a completely different beast. a bad one at that. I mean hell their store front sucks so much that when people see what games they're giving away for free they'd rather go on Steam and pay for the game than play it for free via the epic game store because it sucks that much. and then you have Sweeny whose finger has been so far from the collective pulse of the gaming industry for decades. He doesn't get it, he'll never get it. He thinks his shit don't stink.

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  • [–] 27 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    I think once they realised they could sell skins for the price of full games, they were like "fuck it". I think the only reason this works still is that they have a critical mass of kids who have no way to compare and don't realise how much they're getting fucked over.

    But as younger generations are more and more aware earlier on, their business model is, perhaps, flailing. But of course they want to apply a business solution to the problem.

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  • [–] 16 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    My teenage nephew and I share a Gundam obsession. We also both love video games, just different kinds. He was very excited when one shooter or another had a Gundam crossover via skins. He was just waffling a bit since they cost real money. He eventually let slip that they were like $20-25 each. "But you can get them all for like $60, so it's a better deal than just getting two."

    I was stunned. Dude, you can buy a whole game with that. Multiple games. "Yeahhhh..." You can get a couple HG model kits. Or an MG. "True... but they're so cool!"

    I don't think he bought the skins. Although a few months later he was angrily reciting the general online discourse regarding Switch 2 game pricing despite not having any Nintendo hardware at all (which is par for the course). And not even two weeks later he's over the moon about Doom Eternal... which he bought new... at $70... and finished in a week or so. "I can't wait for the DLC!"

    Sigh.

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Does anyone know if he's talking about the Half Life 2 documentary? I'd like to watch whatever one he's mentioning to learn how Valve runs.

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  • [–] 73 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    I like that every article about this guy uses that same photo

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  • [–] 33 points 7 months ago

    Tim S. Weeny is gonna piss his pants throwing a little fit at this lol.

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  • [+] -1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (38 children)
  • [–] 9 points 7 months ago (37 children)

    I don't get this comment. Are you suggesting Gaben is a bad person?

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  • [–] 21 points 7 months ago (23 children)

    He's a billionaire. You can't be a billionaire and a good person at the same time.

    Don't get me wrong Steam is the best digital storefront ever created, but Gabe could be using his money to help poor people instead of buying yachts.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago* (5 children)

    Newell funds marine research, and some of the yachts that he had commissioned are research vessels.

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  • [–] -3 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    Does he fund it to the point of no longer being a billionaire? No? Then my point stands.

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  • [–] -1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

    Tell me you don't understand net worth without telling me you don't understand net worth. Do you think being a billionaire means holding a 10,000,000 $100 bills under your mattress?

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  • [–] 0 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Net worth can, and is, used as collateral for taking out large loans with little to no interest. So I would say net worth is a pretty good equivalent of cash under the mattress. It just takes one step to access that cash.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    Loans have to be repaid and I'm not talking about liquidity. If you have a billion $ in cash and use it to fund a billion $ research vessel, you have a billion $ research vessel. You're still a billionaire. Gaben owns large portion of Valve, a multi billion $ company. The only way for him to no longer be a billionaire is to either

    • Sell his stake in Valve and burn, give away or otherwise loose all the money.
    • Devalue Valve to the point that it's no longer worth billions of $.
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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (15 children)

    I think you can be a billionaire and a good person at the same time. That is not mutually exclusive, just because most are bad persons. Therefore I do not agree with your argumentation. But I accept your opinion.

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  • [–] 14 points 7 months ago (14 children)

    See the thing is, he could live very comfortably as a hundred millionaire and help thousands of people with his excess income. Instead he hoards it. Is he actively evil like some other billionaires? No, but merely hoarding that much while others starve disqualifies him from "good person" status.

    This criticism applies to every billionaire, not just Gaben.

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  • [–] 11 points 7 months ago (8 children)

    I'm not sure billionaires actually have billions of dollars just sitting in a bank account.

    It's usually assets that contribute to net worth, not actual cash

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  • [+] -6 points 7 months ago (7 children)

    Whether that is true or not is immaterial to my point.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Not really though

    When you're talking about hoarding wealth, the problem isn't just different from hoarding money, it's a deeper and more complicated problem.

    Assets in the case of these assholes is ownership. If they just held onto cash, all they could do is buy shit, which isn't really a problem.

    What they own is vast amounts of the economy, land, and the labor of people.

    They think they own the people as well as the labor and products of that labor. They do to a large extent.

    When you start whittling down a tier list of which billionaires are worse than others, and there are layers of shittiness there; it's about their impact and how they wield that wealth as power.

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  • [–] -1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    And what in all of this enables a billionaire to be a good person? Or did you miss my initial point that being a billionaire makes it impossible to be a good person? I ask because this is still immaterial to that point.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago

    Bro, are you fucking 12 or something? Your logic is based on a false statement "impossible to be a good person and be very rich". This article is literally about that topic, Tim is shit, Gabe isn't.

    Also, don't be a dumb ass and assume you know what's best to spend other people's money on. I can give countless examples of ways to spend a billion dollars that are to the betterment of humanity, but your problem is really with the shit government of the USA (I assume your from the USA, cause tour a dumb ass).

    It's the government job to help people, but the US government is doing the opposite. Look how China and other Socialist countries help their citizens and address basic human needs.

    I would maybe give you this - Your anger is better suited aimed at the US government, and your anger might be linked to how big money has captured the US government (hence your anger with Billionaires), but trust me, it's not expensive to buy these fucktard politicians, and billionaire interests are a problem - but you really need to jump off these stupid little catch phrases that are not true.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago

    Yeah, that's not how conversation works, my lemmite acquaintance. One isn't required to slavishly pound away at the initial focus of a comment. It's not only acceptable to work tangents and expand on sub-topics, it's expected to some degree or another.

    People seem to think that every interaction online is a debate. It isn't. Me? I'm just drifting along, chilling, shooting the shit with other human beings.

    In that spirit, why do you think "goodness" is either a singular thing that is the totality of a person, or that there aren't gradations of it? Not all saints are of equal goodness, nor are all villains purely evil. In terms of the human condition, nobody is so completely single faceted that it's useful to apply good/bad paradigms to the entirely of the person unless the entirety of their actions so heavily skew things that good or evil is such a large percentage that it's moot that other aspects exist.

    I think we can agree that there's difference between someone like Trump and someone like bezos. Both absolutely horrible people overall, but the degree of horror is not the same.

    As such, when you look at the bad of a given person, it has to be taken along with the good.

    Now, I think we'd also agree that billionaires as a thing is a net evil so horrid as to need abolishment. But it doesn't preclude individuals from being the same kind of mix that you and I are. See, I know I have the capacity for darkness and evil. I also know that I choose, even when darkness is lapping at the shores of my true self, to do the most good I can. I hope that the opposite is true for you, that your inner goodness is so great that only puddles of evil reside which are easily relegated to meaninglessness.

    But people are never so purely good that they're incapable of bad things. The same is true of even the most vile examples of humanity from history. In the worst cases, any good may have been accidental, but still.

    The ruling class of the ultra wealthy should indeed be abolished. But it's just silly to pretend that they aren't human, and thus a spectrum of good and bad

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    “It's immaterial to my point whether a person whom I hate has money or doesn't.”

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  • [–] -3 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    Having lots of money earned does not make a person bad. So I just disagree with your reasoning. But it's not like i'm dumb and wouldn't understand where you coming from.

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  • [–] 10 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Having lots of money earned does not make a person bad.

    They never said that. So maybe you're disagreeing with their reasoning because you don't know what it is.

    They say billionaires are bad because they have a lot of money and don't use it to help people. This isn't even talking about billionaire who engage in actually/actively morally wrong deeds to acquire money.

    If you produce a product so excellent that consumers give you 1 billion dollars ($1.000.000.000) in pure profit, there would be no problem if you kept a nest egg to ensure your livelihood and then used the rest to provide aid where it's needed. You would still be a bad person for sitting on it, instead of spreading it to help people that aren't well off. A person can live very well on $300K pretty much anywhere in the world: that means $999,700,000 is not materially improving your life and you are hoarding it for no good reason.

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  • [–] 0 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    The only thing Newell is reported to have spent money on is stuff for himself and maybe the people close to him. He withholds the billions of dollars he owns from poor people he could help but won't. What is the worth in being a leech to society?

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  • [+] 6 points 7 months ago (9 children)
  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (8 children)
  • [+] 5 points 7 months ago (7 children)
  • [–] 14 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (5 children)

    Gabes goals are twofold. Make money for himself and those under him and improve the PC game space.

    He does both both unapologetically and without secrets or shady shit. Honestly, it's not his responsibility to fix the world. It's ours collectively. He does his small part to improve what he can. He saw a need and he does his best to fill it. And at the same time he pays his workers the highest wages in the entire industry. Most people who work at valve are millionaires.

    I believe billionaires need to be taxed out of existence but this one is not the one that we need to hang first

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  • [+] 2 points 7 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago* (2 children)

    It's not his job to feed the world either. That's our goddamn government's job. He puts money where he wants. That's the system we live under and we can fix that and change it but until we do denigrating this one man out of all the evil billionaires is kind of strange.

    He also funds a Marine research facility that maps the ocean floor and gives scientists access to deep sea diving tools and submarines. He donates to charity occasionally, to the tune of hundreds of thousands to millions. What have you done other than complain on the internet?

    You need to understand the propaganda machine's in full swing. There are enemies online that pretend to be your allies and they slowly turn your opinions. You're being brainwashed.

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  • [–] -1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

    Steam basically invented gambling for kids, doesn't employ more then 300 people and takes a huge cut on every games. Why do people keep thinking he's a good guy. It's just another dirty capitalist business that only cares about one thing: money. The amount of free dick sucking they get from gamers is something I just can understand. Meanwhile, studios with thousands of employees, creative people who just want to get paid to work on games, get death threats if players don't like a game.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    How the fuck did steam invent gambling for kids? That shit started back in Facebook games.

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  • [–] -2 points 7 months ago (6 children)
  • [–] 15 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    I think Gabe has a yacht too.

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  • [–] 14 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    I took the comment to be referring to Gabe, who owns multiple billion dollar yachts.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    I'm pretty sure Valve doesn't even have 1000 employees.

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