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All those Gabe lovers will tell you otherwise.
Edit: see. There they are.
The thing with having a billion dollars is that you don't earn it, you divert part of the economy of a given sector into your wallet. I don't know whether Gabe did this dishonestly, but clearly part of the whole gaming industry lands in his bank account... In his case, maybe the biggest gap is a gap of taxation...
Gabe made his billions by violating the First Sale Doctrine which was ruled by the Supreme Court and passed into law over a hundred years ago.
He was one of the original tech bros: Let's do something illegal and add "on a computer" to the process to claim the law doesn't apply.
I use Steam, but I'm well aware that I used to be able to buy old video games at a huge discount before Steam sidestepped the law with "it's not a game it's a steam key".
I'd rather GabeN has the money than Musk. Ideally neither would.
I can't take Gabe lovers seriously, either.
They're not as bad as Taylor Swift fans when you point out she is a billionaire.
I'm not a fan exactly, but I often see people use her wealth to make other criticisms about her like, "She's not an artist, she's a product." It's a criticism I never hear people make about male artists, and of all wealthy pop stars, she deserves SOME credit. She pays her stage crew well and takes time at every show to recognize them. She has writing credits on all her songs. She endorses Democrats for president (yes, at the last minute, but it's more than most celebrities do.)
See, you're already defending the billionaire. I will say she is an extremely talented artist. Like you said she writes her stuff and for others. She 100% deserves the fame, the accolades, and wealth, but nobody should have that much wealth. Nobody. I always hear the same things about her paying her stage hands and performers well, as well as giving them generous bonuses. Meanwhile she still was able to become a billionaire, she's abusing someone. A lot of it is her abusing her fans. Her latest album had something like 27 different versions on launch. If you wanted the complete album you had to repurchase it several times and from different stores. That's straight up predatory capitalist behavior. Not to mention the cost of a ticket to a performance...
Contrast that with someone like Bad Bunny. He stayed in residency in Puerto Rico making much less money than he could have if he toured. He reserved a certain number of tickets per performance for locals. He did these things specifically to allow his Puerto Rican fans to afford and have the opportunity to see him.
I'm going to guess the fediverse has more Gabe fans than Swifties.
See, I tried to start something on purpose and then that happened! It's these other evil people who are the problem!
Who the fuck is Gabe?
The owner of Valve and therefore Steam. Steam is a typical middle man business taking 30% (unsuccessful games) to 20% (extremely successful games) from the overwhelming majority of all PC game purchases. Not selling on Steam is basically financial suicide for game devs because Steam is a quasi monopoly. Most PC gamers only buy there (rather than on a dev's own site, GOG, Itch or anywhere else). So game devs pay the Gabe toll - just like almost all phone app devs pay the Apple and Google tolls.
He owns a little known gaming platform called Steam
Eh, gotta be pragmatic.
Is it wrong for people to have that much wealth? Yes. Is it inevitable for it to happen in the current world? Yes.
At that point I'd rather GabeN have control over the PC Games market than say, Microsoft, because we can see the result of their work.
Centralized money and power in one person is ALWAYS a bad thing, even if they are smart, benevolent, and generous. Even if the results in this one instance are ok, they are part of the same system that allows for all of the other oligarchs and capitalists to have obscene unitary power over people. We shouldn't ever allow the values and whims of one person have sway over millions. Period.
And Gabe is a human being. He will age and retire. Or he will die. His views may change. Then what happens? Being ok now is not a guarantee of the future. Better to get rid of the system than to prop up the occasional good guy of the system as an example of it working.
Yeah sure, that has nothing to with what I wrote tho.
Want to stop allowing "the values and whims of one person have sway over millions.", get rid of Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Microsof-CEO-du-jour. Can't? Well then the guy selling games and loot boxes isn't really a good consolation prize, especially when the consequence of removing him is reducing support for alternative operating systems and limiting the freedom of millions, to replace it with an unknown.
I agree some billionaires are worse than others. Also, it's the accumulated wealth that is wrong, not the accumulator. We don't have to send them to the guillotines — though by all means convict them and punish them for crimes their wealth has made them immune to.
That would leave GabeN in charge of stuff, just with less money to throw around, while others might need a head basket — metaphorically speaking. I'm not down with the death penalty, though I shout louder in some cases than others.