3mo ago

Elmo fanboys

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I've never seen a billionaire get defended like Gaben.
He literally owns a billion dollars worth of yatchs yet I've seen people compare him to Jesus, lmao.
- Because his billions were earned from offering an actually decent service beholden to the customers rather than the shareholders, something not many other billionaires seem capable of. Yeah, nobody needs a billion dollars but literally everyone else in the gaming industry would rather shoot themselves in the foot to make a penny now rather than... Just simply not do that and make a dollar later.
  
  Yeah, if valve started taking step towards enshittification people would turn on Gabe too.
  
  Homeboy ran a casino targeting gamers for at least a billion.
  
  Every other game company does that, too, ON TOP of all the other shit they do.
  
  literally everyone else in the gaming industry would rather shoot themselves in the foot to make a penny now rather than... Just simply not do that and make a dollar later.
  Ah, the shortsighted joy of publicly traded companies.
  
  You cannot possibly earn a billion dollars. That money is the excess labor value of Valve workers. In the context of how our society is currently structured Gaben certainly isn't the worst of them, but he's still a member of the parasite class.
  
  Isn't valve considered an amazing place to work at in the gaming industry?
  
  Hmm it was at some point, and then there were reports it's not that amazing if you're not part of the "in" crowd.
  
  I've heard that, yes, but that doesn't change the fact that the relationship Gaben has with Valve workers is inherently parasitic. He may be a "good boss," but he's still their boss, has ownership of all their work, and could fire them at will.
  
  Also worth noting that most of Gabe's (and Valve's) value is not based on anyone at Valve's work, but instead based on taking a cut from every dev that sells on Steam. Valve is effectively a landlord renting out digital real estate. The fact that they're able to make obscene amounts of money suggests to me that maybe rents are too damn high.
  
  That's a good point, it's an interesting social phenomenon that people tend to be fond of Valve in spite of this because they're seen as good stewards of the space. It's like having a landlord that takes good care of the property and makes regular improvements. The property relations are still exploitative, but they're doing better than most others would within that exploitative framework.
  
  Also has to do with most of their competitors trying to come in immediately with anti-consumer practices or being a company already known for them.
  Like as soon as I saw epic was paying game companies for exclusive access, I decided to skip whatever games actually went for it.
  I don't trust a publically traded company to not enshitify by focusing on "more money" rather than setting up a sustainable business.
  That's why I don't have issues with valve, even if their 30% cut is a bit high. Steam has been dominating its market for like 20 years now and the worst they've done that I know of is display some ads for games when you start up. But even that IMO could be used as an example of how to do ads right because a) they are relevant to the thing you're doing, b) don't rely on sharing of data between steam and who knows who else (not that I have any certainty there isn't any data sharing going on), c) the window can just be closed and doesn't try to fight for your attention. And I can't even recall seeing it much recently.
  Plus I'd say that they provide value by dominating that space and being the standard that any new players need to compete with.
  
  Most of Valve's money comes from taking a 30% cut of all sales through the Steam store, which is a lot of money. They're not abusing their market position as much as they could (e.g. if you buy a Steam key from anywhere else, like a key in a physical box at a physical store, or another online key retailer like Humble Bundle, Valve gets no money, as the publisher can generate as many Steam keys as they want for free), but it's the surplus value of the labour of employees of other companies that Gabe Newell accumulates.
- You are apparently unaware of the literal tens of thousands of youtube/twitter/media people who basically did/do nothing other than promote Elon and everything he does.
  Elon Musk Can Multitask Better Than You.
  Elon's new Hyperloop will revolutionize transit in America!
  Tesla's stock price will be $42,690 per share in 5 years, here's why.
  ...
  Its about a million times more obnoxious than people pointing out that Gabe actually knows what he's talking about.
  ...
  You can go outside and strike up a conversation with any random person, and they will almost certainly know who Elon is, and most people will still think he is some kind of genius real life Tony Stark.
  You can go outside and strike up a random convo with any random person about Gabe, and chances are 98% of people will have no idea who you are talking about, unless you are at some kind of nerd/geek type outing like a video game convention, and even then, people under 20 - 25 are not likely to know who he is.
  EDIT: Yeah, I am actually fairly confident that for you to make a statement like that, you probably, unironically, need to touch grass.
  I fail to see any way you could have that opinion other than that basically all you do is argue on video game forums / discords / twitch / whatever, and that you just have almost 0 contact with real life human beings, or online spaces that do not revolve around video games.
  
  You perhaps need to talk to people if you think people now have a high opinion of Elon Musk. His reputation has crashed since he bought Twitter
  Now perhaps you'll still hear space fans singing his praise, but the general position holds no respect for him
- He's one of the good ones, a real credit to his kind.
  
  Yepp, CS:GO loot boxes are good. They’ve never destroyed lives or anything. They aren’t gambling.
  Fuckin’ simps, man.

32 comments