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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Billionaires would be cooler if their obsession was the bettering of mankind

Swallowed by the waves, occosionally. Without heirs.

Billionaires would be cooler if there were mythical creatures that don‘t exist but we tell stories about heroes who slay them.

I guess if they ever decide to go public, that would be the start of the enshittification process.

Yeah he’s a billionaire, but he at least seems to be an old school tycoon in the sense of… doing actual philanthropy, instead of fancy accounting fraud / money laundering with a non profit happy face on top.

He owns a fleet o megayachts and one of the biggest companies making these who commissioned megayachts for bezos and russian oligarchs, he's just a piece of shit like all the others. We are on the verge of a climate disaster, one of these boats consume in one hour as much you will do in your lifetime, stop wasting your time defending this idiot, he's not a scientist.

To my knowledge… he basically just has more money than he knows what to do with,

To my knowledge you don't end up with more money than you know what to do with by being a good person. Valve did a lot of shit such as promoting gambling to kids

Like imagine what you could do with that kind of cash. You don't even have to give it away, you can just run good businesses that aren't based on unsustainable greed.

Say you build decent housing and set the rents so the break-even date is 40 years from now, let your foundation own it, and kick back with a tall glass of milk. Say you build an insulin factory in Vermont and pump out pens at $7 each. Say you buy up some farmland and build proper greenhouses to grow food efficiently, allowing 90% of the land be rewilded.

Why in the fuck would you buy 3 Bugattis every year.

Or just putting the money back into the company or wages.

Why would toothpicks be useful in a gold rush?

If Epic took like 10% of the budget they use for free games and timed exclusives and put that towards making their UX not dogshit, Valve wouldn't even have a monopoly.