this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
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Don't need that many employees to run a store, programmers/IT and marketing and you're good to go. Employees wouldn't count contractors either so they probably have a lot more "employees" than that.
Not only that, Valve has done a TON of work to outsource as much of the process of running Steam off to the users and developers. Self-publishing, a minimum of manual moderation, automated greenlight processes, automated ratings, database tags, controller configs...
Their entire business model is to make money with as little effort as possible. I've been saying for ages that people vastly underestimate how ruthlessly profitable their business is. We didn't have the numbers, but we roughly knew this is what was going on.
Gabe owns six yachts, people should always keep that in mind when praising him, he's not the friend of the average Joe, he just realized there's profit to be made by not pissing people off, but he's still making enough profit from us to be a billionaire while the majority of people live paycheck to paycheck.
It's weird that I'm nostalgic for the good old days when the ultra rich understood that
I'm okay with this. Same deal with Costco's founders and CEOs. It'd be nice if billionaires didn't exist, but they do, and most of them made their profits while pissing everyone off.
I'll praise the ones that at least try to do some "good" for people. Even if their "good" is "Let's make obscene amounts of money by charging affordable prices and being the 'good guy' in the industry".
I'm not okay with this because it incentivizes companies and influencers to work together to lower people's standards.
People are proud to accept garbage these days.
I ask genuinely -- what alternative do we have?
I mean, in this case, yarrrr. but in other cases, i think, probably also yarrrr. but like, physically.
Steam won our over piracy, as did Netflix when it first came around. And even Uber -- people stopped downloading cars for years when Uber was in its heyday!
Holy shit Gabe Newell is a billionaire (it's just at the second paragraph). This does change my view of him and steam. So uncool.
The dude's the CEO of the most successful online gaming platform ever. Yeah, he's gonna be a billionaire.
What did you expect? He owns Valve who has the place to buy video games on PC with Steam.
But you'll be hard pressed to find a store front that is not owned by a billionaire or some publicly traded corporation.
cough GoG cough
I'm agreeing with you, btw.
CD Projekt is a publicly traded corporation.
Exactly. Even with their DRM-free practices and such and how people want to advertise so much for them here on Lemmy, they're still a publicly traded multibillion dollar company.
I expected him to be cool, I guess
Could use a few to develop a new linux distribution for entirely new markets and use cases, design and manufacture innovative cutting edge consumer hardware, and count to three.
I'm surprised they didn't really try to make Steam OS a real distro for regular PCs, but at the same time there's no real money to be made...
They tried that first, it didn't go so well.
Yeah, that's why I said they didn't really tried, the distro isn't even distributed anymore
Honestly it would probably be worth it as a flagship project to keep their staff engineers excited about something.
I know they earn piles and piles of money, but some people just quit when they've got enough cash, so you need an other sort of carrot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_distribution https://distrowatch.com/search.php?status=All
There are almost one thousand distros. What's one more?
Exactly, proton was much more usefull