Today I Learned

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.

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.

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

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.

Within faulty power structures, we should make the sober decision to support the ones we seem are best fit for us!

Steam is a good service compared to the alternatives, but corpos will always be corpos

This. I was telling friends back when Google's motto was "Don't be evil" because the rule is never trust a corporation.

Then again, I grew up around the home of WalMart so I guess I may have been used to shitty tactics with the veneer of "helping the community"

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

It'll happen when Gabe dies and gets replaced

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

Swallowed by the waves, occosionally. Without heirs.

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.

I thought his yachts were specifically designed as ocean research vessels no? Like the whole reason to buy the company out was to use their resources to make custom order research vessels (with submarine and medical bays) cheaper.

Not to say there aren't better causes, there absolutely are, but if he's out there pushing our scientific knowledge forward, I'm here for it.

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.