But they can be an adversary or friendly.
Not everything is black and white.
It's just a question when we'll eat Valve

I agree with this sentiment, but given a choice, I believe Gabe would make the right one and spend his wealth to lose billionaire status.

His supposed exploitation was not by his own design, but rather by luck - the sheer benefit of riding a privately owned and benevelontly steered surfboard on top of the waves of a collapsing capitalist society.

Basically, there's a meme about all other companies shooting themselves in the foot so Gabe always benefits, and part of that is in the way those companies fucked and manipulated their control of capital and markets. Gabe benefits just by being one of the few that can afford to participate in that system others rigged.

So he simply rigs it the least, and wins by providing the platform with the least greedy problems. Far far less than he could given his position.

IMHO, despite all controversies, Steams cut of profits from providing equal access to game visibility despite creator, nationality, background, etc, has legitimately opened the door for nearly anyone to be successful on their platform. For all the tools and services they provide, they ask for literally the smallest cut compared to any other publishing platform.

Gabe could destroy that to his benefit on a whim, and instead he over designs it to make it possible for nearly anyone to try game dev if they do the work needed to develop for them.

To hold so much capital simply for providing some form of equality to access the same in a system that overwhelming benefits others with more resources is in no way greedy imo. It's being the person with the only fire extinguisher who knows how to use it in a burning building: popular.

whats wrong with game achivments?

He is not fa... he is definitely not a dragon!

since he would have gotten rich again by the right people attracting wealth obviously

We can give him the honor of being eaten last.

Does that include the Kelley Blue Book of my boats or are we talking purely liquid (heh) assets?

He spent a billion dollars on boats.

Devs can just generate keys and sell elsewhere to avoid the 30% cut.

There's an argument to be made that it's too high of a cut, especially these days. A lot of this money has funded great improvements to the gaming ecosystem and many open source projects. The major competing storefronts/launchers do not come even slightly close to the feature set that Steam provides, but they have tried attracting users through exclusivity deals. It's very telling that some successful competitors (like itch or gog) actually offer some unique benefits and aren't attached to some incredibly controversial corporations...

Valve isn't free from criticism and their role as a monopolist should definitely be scrutinized, especially as companies often radically change for the worse in behaviour and culture, but a lot of this critical attention was instigated by Epic CEO Tim Sweeney who can frankly gargle my nuts.

I don't want to love him. I just feel like I'd never find anyone better, if I left, you know?

How does it work with someone like Taylor Swift, who According to Forbes, Swift is the first musician to reach 10-figure status solely based on songwriting and performances rather than brand deals, makeup lines, or business ventures?

You can argue they should be more charitable, but that really can't be required. You could also say taxes should be higher past a certain point, but they currently aren't and that's not any individual's fault.

Also, I'm using Taylor swift as an example, but I mean more generally a person that captures worldwide attention for their art.