Yes, the Steam Deck is great, and Steam is definitely one of the best games platforms there is. And Valve has done great work supporting Linux and open source development, and forcing more transparency for sellers on Steam.
But I feel like people sometimes just love valve for everything they do. GabeN is still a billionaire, buying super-yachts and stuff. Valve makes a ton of their money from gambling on loot crates in CS2 and TF2, and have not done enough (imo) to stop even more predatory third party item gambling sites. And whenever I bring stuff like that up people keep defending Valve.
We should be able to praise their great games and hardware, at the same time as criticising other parts of the company.
Is he really doing a lot of shady things? Maybe he just become a billionaire and adapted. For better or worse is the question, then compare him to the other billionaires. Having that amount of wealth changes people just like it would you or me and every other person here.
“We can’t really judge Hitler! Being a dictator just changes people. Was he better or worse than other dictators? Having that amount of power changes people just like it would you or me and every other person here.”
Comparing Gabe to Hitler is rather retarded. Gabe became a billionaire because people like steam. Hitler became a dictator because he was an evil bastard.
I was comparing your argument to one you could make about Hitler. If we agree your argument is reasonable, then we can also agree that the argument I made can be made for Hitler.
It isn’t reasonable. My point was not comparing Gabe to Hitler, because the entire argument is absurd. It was a proof by contradiction that we must not use arguments like this to justify evil actions, or we end up in a situation of being able to justify evil actions like what Hitler did. You agree that my argument is absurd, but it followed the same reasoning as yours, so yours is invalid as well. Gabe is not saved because being wealthy made him a greedy asshole. Your wealth is not an excuse for your actions or behavior.
You think Gabe is a greedy asshole and does evil actions. I just dont see that, i could just be ignorant or you could be over reacting.
I dont think taking a heavy hand sometimes in the environment of a billionaire CEO of a tech company in some way is always wrong. My original point was he jumped up a lot and is now dealing with other even worse billionaires. Yeah he could play nice to make people like you happy and go out of business or be bought out by someone worse. But what do you honestly expect from him?
He promotes gambling, with the knowledge that children are involved. He has facilitated using Steam’s market dominance to persue anti-competitive practices, like not allowing games to be sold at a lower price anywhere else. There’s more too. Yeah, he’s not exactly good.
I give zero fucks that he could be worse. If that’s your only argument, your ethics are horrible. Someone being worse does nothing to make your actions better.
Oh yeah, one of the most profitable companies per employee in the world is surely going to go out of business if they don’t persue anti-consumer practices! Think of the poor billionaires! If they don’t do these things, they will have slightly less money!
What I expect from him is to stop leveraging their market dominance to do monopolistic actions. I expect them to compete fairly, not abuse their position to create barriers to competition. I expect them to take a look at their practice of promoting gambling and change to something less manipulative, particularly if they know children are involved (but adults too). These are the bare fucking minimum of what we should be asking for. What do you expect? You expect to be taken advantage of and abused?
Saddly no big company follows good ethics. If he had, im sure valve would’ve been bought a while ago. Maybe that’s what you want speaking like you do.
But ill say another controversial statement, parents should be in control of what their kids do and are responsible for being exposed to tge gambling aspect you say steam promotes. Thats true for so many things now adays. Arguments like that is what is leading to a nation wide surveillance program.
Lol. It’s a private company. How could someone buy it? That’s not how this works.
Oh well yeah i didn’t even think of that. My bad.
You just seem like a bad actor in support of the things you claim to be against, or you just dont think to much further past on how things should be.