Valve is profitable because of the reputation they’ve built up over many years as being an incredibly consumer friendly storefront. Avoiding corporate bloat, and focusing their attention on the core aspects of their business consumers care about has allowed them to thrive where many others failed. Valve created and maintained a fantastic product. So yes.
They’re making their machine more and more efficient, storage and bandwidth just gets cheaper with time… Yet, they still need their 30% cut to make billions in profit.
If they make billions in profit and Gaben is a billionaire while 80% of the population of his country lives paycheck to paycheck then there’s a fucking issue. The same logic applies to all businesses.
Why are they not allowed to create a good service and profit?
Why are the competition unable to take marketshare with lower fees?
It feels as if you have this number, >billion, makes a company evil. Why?
I agree with you that no single person needs a billion, but having earned it doesn’t make them bad. They innovate and move everything forwards. I’d much rather see my money with Valve than with EA, Activision Blizzard or any of the other faceless giants out there.
Multimillionaires, billionaires, they’re all part of the problem.
They’re allowed to make a good product and profit, there’s no reason why we allow them to profit so fucking much, if they do it’s because we’re paying more for their product than they actually need to charge us, the fact that they consider it ok makes them bad people.
Stop defending the people profiting from you, you’re the cattle defending the butcher.
Right, but there’s nothing immoral about it either.
I live in a place where the rich pay their fair dues to the benefit of the less fortunate. That’s where I think you need to focus on getting, not slandering every successful company out of envy.
Thanks for the chat. You were nothing but respectful. Have a great weekend.
Yes there’s something immoral about it, it’s a choice they they consciously make to make us spend more than necessary on the products they have to sell so they can accumulate more wealth and we can accumulate less wealth.
The funniest thing is, there are billionaires out there that agree tax laws are messed up and think they should be paying more taxes. For them it’s just a stressful hassle to work out which charities should take their money.
I agree with you that there’s a problem, but I think you’re targeting the wrong villian here. I shop local whenever I can but there are a few things that are just… big. Video games are worldwide and getting them off the internet is nice. There’s no such thing as a local video game distributor. There’s local indie game development which I do support, but Steam is a product I like which does its job very well.
The problem here is scale, not necessarily who individuals are buying from. Take major league sports as an example. Salaries for indivudual players are in the millions because of the amount of eyeballs attached to wallets that are interested in watching those players. Less eyeballs, less money, and the players would probably be doing the same thing but not be making as much money. Same thing with music. It’s very hard for an artist to make a good living with music, but once they hit global awareness suddenly money will come rollin in from all over the place. This isn’t a problem with the people doing the jobs (although it could be said that major league sports should charge less, they are trying to maximize their profit) but is the result of the amount of people who are willing to pay.
The probelm you’re having is that a company is allowed to suck up so much money and keep it. That’s a problem for governments to handle. Individuals can choose who to give their money to, but sometimes there aren’t any other good choices.
It’s their choice to take a cut big enough that they’re making that kind of profit, no one is forcing them, it’s all greed, stop acting like they wouldn’t be able to lower it.
So he should get the address of every single person in the country and divide his money equally among every single person and have no money for himself? Maybe only keep the same amount for himself that each other person is getting? That’s ~342 million people. Give them $3 each and no more billionaire. Worth $10B? $30 for each person.
Elon Musk is the wealthiest person in the USA and is worth $251B. $750/person would help for rent for one month. You could take money away from babies and maybe get a full month, maybe two.
Jeff Bezos is next at $161B. That’s about $480/person.
Of course, this means that their money is gone. No golden goose. Do you think that they should subsidize every person in the country?
Or simply say "I guess 30% is more than we need, let’s cut that to 10% and see how that goes.
If billionaires didn’t exist we wouldn’t need to subsidize anyone, the majority of the world’s issues are related to the fact that a minority keeps a majority of wealth to themselves and just try to acquire more and more.
Perhaps 10%. Taxes at one point went up to 90%. Some companies do need more, especially small businesses. As for not needing to subsidize anyone, when the pandemic struck and the checks went out a lot of people paid bills (I managed to get rid of my student loan debt, with help) but many went on spending sprees and some of those still couldn’t pay rent. Wealth distribution isn’t as great as it sounds and I’m on SSDI.
“when the pandemic struck”… The pandemic that was caused by poor people hunting wild animals to sell their meat to make a living? Gosh darn, I wonder what we could have done to make it so these people wouldn’t have to resort to that to make a living… Oh well 🤷
The pandemic that was caused by poor people hunting wild animals to sell their meat to make a living? Gosh darn, I wonder what we could have done to make it so these people wouldn’t have to resort to that to make a living.
What the poor people were doing happened in another country and therefore there was nothing that we could have done to change their way of life. We can’t dictate to China how they treat their citizens.
You’ve got the proverbial “patience of a saint.” Shame about all’ the bootlickers around here, though. I’d thought/hoped better of Lemmy but still people’s brains turn off when they’ve chosen a team :(
Incredible how you look at the comment history of all these people and all of them have comments about not having enough money or being angry at rich people, but all critical thinking goes out the window when it’s for a hobby they like, suddenly whatever they’re told to spend is perfectly OK!
Tell that to people defending micro transactions in dragons dogma. “But you can earn it in game for free!” except it takes hours to get enough in game currency to customize 1 character (you have 2) unless your second character gets hired, which is unreliable. That same currency is also needed to unlock cosmetics like being able to use the red color in the character creator.
BTW, nioh 2 you unlock customising your character after the first mission and it costs nothing in game, you can do it as many times as you want.
But what are his thoughts about over promising a game and releasing it in an absolutely laughable state and then sell a dlc after almost fixing said game years later?
Gaben has the best PR of any billionaire. People think he and his company aren’t just as shitty as any other multi yacht owning billionaire and profit machine company out there.
Apart from exploiting gambling addicts and you not really owning most games, Valve are rather consumer friendly. Or at least they appear to be because their competitors are even worse.
Given human nature I find it hard to blame rich people for using their money on themselves. We need laws to change (aka much, much higher taxes)
Someone’s perspective on what’s an appropriate standard of living changes with what they’re used to. That’s just how the human brain works. I constantly hear people that make the same or more than me, that live in the same country as me in an area with similar cost of living, complain about how little money they have, while I feel like I have all I really need and more. They just consider different things as “necessary”.
Is it incredibly disconnected to consider owning even one yacht as anything close to necessary? Absolutely. But anything you want, your brain will take it for granted once you get it and make you want even more.
I don’t thinks that is greed actually, Gabe gaining more and more money is greed but spend that wealth in random shit is just like people do, if you have billions the random shit you can buy is more pricy.
Is that not greed? He holds on to his money and puts them in places that can’t be taxed. Speaking of taxes, he doesn’t pay his fair share by far. Are these not examples of greed? People are poor. Social systems are failing. These billionaires, even the ones people seem to like such as Gaben and Taylor Swift, are just holding wealth. They’re like dragons lording over piles of gold.
Billionares creating politics and buying politicians so they can continue to be rich is greed totally, but unless yatch is a scheme to avoid taxes that I don’t know they buying it is like me buying toys to put on my desk in a large scale.
Sounds cool and all but I heavily doubt they would do the work to implement it like that. Replay value doesn’t add market value in the view of the producers. So there is not much money to be made from the large amount of work this requires.
Of course if they ever do it, feel free to correct me, people from the future
The patent shows that the save states stream through an API, it’s likely this isn’t for local save but for people streaming games. It will open streaming possibilities like letting audiences pick up exactly where the person they’re watching is, or other audient interactions like “beat this section quicker than I did.”
In that case there is little difference to just sharing a save file, which everybody can already do. If this is everything that the patent covers, then I’m against them having a patent for it. That idea is so generic and nothing somebody should be allowed to have control over
Marathon was a bit before my time, but I definitely agree, the art style on the trailer for the new marathon looks really cool. But between cod dmz, marauders, the cycle frontier; I’m just a bit skeptical that anyone can properly replicate what makes Tarkov such an interesting and addicting game style.
That being said, definitely hoping for some proper competition to Tarkov as it has some serious issues that I don’t see getting fixed anytime soon.
“After five rounds of bargaining, it has become abundantly clear that the video game companies aren’t willing to meaningfully engage on the critical issues: compensation undercut by inflation, unregulated use of AI and safety,” said Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA national executive director and chief negotiator, in a statement. “I remain hopeful that we will be able to reach an agreement that meets members’ needs, but our members are done being exploited, and if these corporations aren’t willing to offer a fair deal, our next stop will be the picket lines.”
The signatory companies stated
“We will continue to negotiate in good faith to reach an agreement that reflects the important contributions of SAG-AFTRA-represented performers in video games. We have reached tentative agreements on over half of the proposals and are optimistic we can find a resolution at the bargaining table.”
I think we’ve all learned our collective lesson at this point (or at least, we should have) not to over-hype games, nor to pre-order them.
I’m going to have to temporarily move in with my dad in October potentially for a few months, should be some decent reviews in by then so I’m looking forward to killing time with this game!
Thanks. I think I had GP a while back just to play AC: Valhalla, so I won’t get a cheeky deal… I’ll probably buy it on GOG, as it seems like it’s not going to be the sort of game I complete within a month or two, I prefer to ‘own’ a game than rent it once I’m satisfied it’s for me.
It will be a few years before it’s on GOG, so it really depends how patient you are. Fallout 4 only appeared on there a week or two ago to give you a frame of reference.
The people who have “learned” “the lesson” are a loud minority. The vast majority of consumers will put money wherever they feel like it, philosophy be damned.
They probably forgot to slap a season pass and lootboxes on it. Bet half of the team is hard at work putting in annoying mechanics that can be skipped by money and carving out content for DLCs.
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