The actual quote that the tagline paraphrases:
“And so Tim has gone from making games to making one game, spending all his time doing that and trying to make as much money as possible,” says Faliszek. “And I guess well, hey, Tim, Gabe’s better at that than you. I don’t know what to tell you, man, because you stopped caring about making things.”
Other good quote:
Faliszek says it infuriates him to see “lazy dev” complaints when companies like Epic “just cut them off at the knees, man.” He suggests looking at the documentary about Half-Life and Valve: “And how many people still work there after all those years?”
And it turns out the salary was good. Very good. “They care so much about what they’re making that they’re still there and they’re all rewarded handsomely,” says Faliszek. "To be clear, I could retire, I worked my ass off at Valve, and I could retire today. I made more money than I’ll ever make. And the money I made is dwarfed by the people who were there longer than me or before me.
"But Valve understood that. That’s how you get this thing where people cared, people worked hard, people stayed because they felt they were improving. What they were building on was something that they had agency over and owned. Like, even now, I’m excited when I see the Valve announcement about the VR stuff and everything, that makes me happy.
Valve understands that they owe their success to the skill of their employees and knows how precious having such a solid team is. You can’t replace that with an expensive CEO or by throwing money at the problem later on. Valve has the best among the best and wants to keep them happy and working for them. They understand that they do best when they’re not subject to corporate micromanagement, pressure or threats of layoffs. The results speak for themselves.
Tim however did that classic business move of sacrificing everything for short term gain and on the long run they’ve completely ruined what used to make the company good.
Valve is also a privately owned company. They don’t need to make more money this quarter vs last quarter to keep shareholders happy, they can just be happy that they’re making a lot of money. That requirement to always become more profitable than before leads companies to enshitify products with anti-consumer “features” and cut costs (ie layoffs).
I think the point being made is that Gabe rewards his employees first and then himself after, and yet hes still somehow made more money personally than Tim Sweeney.
“Somehow” he owns the only PC video game store that matters.
Well he knows his customers. Have you ever worked in a computer parts store? Every mistake a manufacturer makes is remembered for decades and punished. You can’t make shitty stuff and sell it to this crowd. Hell, Epic is technically paying us to use it, and we still won’t use it.
“Epic is technically paying us to use it, and we still won’t use it”
I think it’s because it feels like an obvious bait and switch. We’ve seen it so many times over the years. Services reel people in, get them hooked on their platform, then enshittify them with ads and paid subscription tiers etc. Like everything that Epic does just seems so desperate, and that makes me belive they can’t be trusted. “Please bro. Please install Epic. Bro I’ll give you free games. I swear bro, I won’t start scraping your data and selling ads. Trust me, bro. Please”
Seriously. The local drug dealer giving out testers.
Epic is also privately owned…
Yes, that’s exactly the point being made. Tim is basically the movie villain version of a greedy CEO
plus isn’t like pretty much everyone that works at Valve a millionaire? also some of the longest term employees at any game company ever?
Honestly Epic has been a shell of its former self ever since Cliffy B left. I used to love playing Unreal Tournament, 2k3 and 2k4. and thankfully now I can play UT2k4 again for free on linux. But Epic today is a completely different beast. a bad one at that. I mean hell their store front sucks so much that when people see what games they’re giving away for free they’d rather go on Steam and pay for the game than play it for free via the epic game store because it sucks that much. and then you have Sweeny whose finger has been so far from the collective pulse of the gaming industry for decades. He doesn’t get it, he’ll never get it. He thinks his shit don’t stink.
I think once they realised they could sell skins for the price of full games, they were like “fuck it”. I think the only reason this works still is that they have a critical mass of kids who have no way to compare and don’t realise how much they’re getting fucked over.
But as younger generations are more and more aware earlier on, their business model is, perhaps, flailing. But of course they want to apply a business solution to the problem.
My teenage nephew and I share a Gundam obsession. We also both love video games, just different kinds. He was very excited when one shooter or another had a Gundam crossover via skins. He was just waffling a bit since they cost real money. He eventually let slip that they were like $20-25 each. “But you can get them all for like $60, so it’s a better deal than just getting two.”
I was stunned. Dude, you can buy a whole game with that. Multiple games. “Yeahhhh…” You can get a couple HG model kits. Or an MG. “True… but they’re so cool!”
I don’t think he bought the skins. Although a few months later he was angrily reciting the general online discourse regarding Switch 2 game pricing despite not having any Nintendo hardware at all (which is par for the course). And not even two weeks later he’s over the moon about Doom Eternal… which he bought new… at $70… and finished in a week or so. “I can’t wait for the DLC!”
Sigh.
Presumably that nephew isn’t having to budget what to spend on, or maybe isn’t even really spending their own earned cash? Hard to know the value of money when you’ve never had to value it!
sounded like teenage is looking for the next shiny new toy that came along.
Epic died when they dropped the “Mega” from their name.
its like the costco version of video game/developing company, every employee is mostly happy.
“Go sit in the corner and think about what you’ve done, Tim.”
This guy sounds like The Dude, man!
Does anyone know if he’s talking about the Half Life 2 documentary? I’d like to watch whatever one he’s mentioning to learn how Valve runs.
Your question shall be answered and your quest fulfilled, once you seek the source of truth and abandon the reliance on aberrant and capricious winds that carry whispers to you.
Stealing this.
I’m not even sure Valve has 1000 employees. They’re notoriously small with a weird structure, iirc something like 300ish people who are free to just take on projects and are well paid.
If anyone is curious on how Valve is structured, there’s this Youtube video that explains it very well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo
and there’s also this plant ☘️ affected to the development of TF2
The janitor and the pot plant occasionally coding is all we’ve got for tf2
I like that every article about this guy uses that same photo
Rich guy on a super yacht with his yacht gaming handheld. That’s the real reason he built the console. Prob the yacht too.
We will spare gaben. Like the ducks.
Tim S. Weeny is gonna piss his pants throwing a little fit at this lol.
I’m pretty sure Valve doesn’t even have 1000 employees.
Fuck you Tim Sweeney for making Gabe Newell appear even remotely good by comparison
edit: I’m muting this thread, so much sealioning and astroturfing in here
I don’t get this comment. Are you suggesting Gaben is a bad person?
He’s a billionaire. You can’t be a billionaire and a good person at the same time.
Don’t get me wrong Steam is the best digital storefront ever created, but Gabe could be using his money to help poor people instead of buying yachts.
Newell funds marine research, and some of the yachts that he had commissioned are research vessels.
Does he fund it to the point of no longer being a billionaire? No? Then my point stands.
You want Newell to sell Valve to some retirement investment fund? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard in a while.
Tell me you don’t understand net worth without telling me you don’t understand net worth. Do you think being a billionaire means holding a 10,000,000 $100 bills under your mattress?
Net worth can, and is, used as collateral for taking out large loans with little to no interest. So I would say net worth is a pretty good equivalent of cash under the mattress. It just takes one step to access that cash.
Loans have to be repaid and I’m not talking about liquidity. If you have a billion $ in cash and use it to fund a billion $ research vessel, you have a billion $ research vessel. You’re still a billionaire. Gaben owns large portion of Valve, a multi billion $ company. The only way for him to no longer be a billionaire is to either
- Sell his stake in Valve and burn, give away or otherwise loose all the money.
- Devalue Valve to the point that it’s no longer worth billions of $.
Get off that stupid high horse that you can’t be a good Billionaire. It’s for sure true in most cases, but not all cases. Give me concrete examples of evil Gabe has done, George Lucas has done, etc
I think you can be a billionaire and a good person at the same time. That is not mutually exclusive, just because most are bad persons. Therefore I do not agree with your argumentation. But I accept your opinion.
See the thing is, he could live very comfortably as a hundred millionaire and help thousands of people with his excess income. Instead he hoards it. Is he actively evil like some other billionaires? No, but merely hoarding that much while others starve disqualifies him from “good person” status.
This criticism applies to every billionaire, not just Gaben.
I’m not sure billionaires actually have billions of dollars just sitting in a bank account.
It’s usually assets that contribute to net worth, not actual cash
Whether that is true or not is immaterial to my point.
Not really though
When you’re talking about hoarding wealth, the problem isn’t just different from hoarding money, it’s a deeper and more complicated problem.
Assets in the case of these assholes is ownership. If they just held onto cash, all they could do is buy shit, which isn’t really a problem.
What they own is vast amounts of the economy, land, and the labor of people.
They think they own the people as well as the labor and products of that labor. They do to a large extent.
When you start whittling down a tier list of which billionaires are worse than others, and there are layers of shittiness there; it’s about their impact and how they wield that wealth as power.
“It’s immaterial to my point whether a person whom I hate has money or doesn’t.”
Having lots of money earned does not make a person bad. So I just disagree with your reasoning. But it’s not like i’m dumb and wouldn’t understand where you coming from.
Having lots of money earned does not make a person bad.
They never said that. So maybe you’re disagreeing with their reasoning because you don’t know what it is.
They say billionaires are bad because they have a lot of money and don’t use it to help people. This isn’t even talking about billionaire who engage in actually/actively morally wrong deeds to acquire money.
If you produce a product so excellent that consumers give you 1 billion dollars ($1.000.000.000) in pure profit, there would be no problem if you kept a nest egg to ensure your livelihood and then used the rest to provide aid where it’s needed. You would still be a bad person for sitting on it, instead of spreading it to help people that aren’t well off. A person can live very well on $300K pretty much anywhere in the world: that means $999,700,000 is not materially improving your life and you are hoarding it for no good reason.
You phrased that better than I did.
The only thing Newell is reported to have spent money on is stuff for himself and maybe the people close to him. He withholds the billions of dollars he owns from poor people he could help but won’t. What is the worth in being a leech to society?
Please elaborate on whether marine research falls under ‘stuff for himself’ or ‘the people close to him’.
Oh no, I’m not suggesting it.
I’m outright saying it.
But why?
Normalising digital restrictions management and renting games rather than owning them. He didn’t start it. But he sure as hell normalised it.
Holding a near-monopolistic position in PC gaming and taking a one-third cut of most PC games sold, and an up-front fee to be allowed to sell your game in the first place.
And then spending that eye-popping sum of money on multiple yachts rather than, I don’t know, maybe improving the world even a little?
Gabes goals are twofold. Make money for himself and those under him and improve the PC game space.
He does both both unapologetically and without secrets or shady shit. Honestly, it’s not his responsibility to fix the world. It’s ours collectively. He does his small part to improve what he can. He saw a need and he does his best to fill it. And at the same time he pays his workers the highest wages in the entire industry. Most people who work at valve are millionaires.
I believe billionaires need to be taxed out of existence but this one is not the one that we need to hang first
Honestly, it’s not his responsibility to fix the world.
Yes it fucking is. What the hell am I supposed to do other than occasionally turn a blind eye while grannies shoplift 65p packets of biscuits? Which, if my boss is reading this, I obviously would never ever do. He has the means to actually do it.
its the politicians that are enabling this to happen they are supposed to do that, and to keep billionaires in check.
It’s not his job to feed the world either. That’s our goddamn government’s job. He puts money where he wants. That’s the system we live under and we can fix that and change it but until we do denigrating this one man out of all the evil billionaires is kind of strange.
He also funds a Marine research facility that maps the ocean floor and gives scientists access to deep sea diving tools and submarines. He donates to charity occasionally, to the tune of hundreds of thousands to millions. What have you done other than complain on the internet?
You need to understand the propaganda machine’s in full swing. There are enemies online that pretend to be your allies and they slowly turn your opinions. You’re being brainwashed.
Newell funds marine research, and some of the yachts that he had commissioned are research vessels. Are you saying that marine research doesn’t improve the world?
Steam basically invented gambling for kids, doesn’t employ more then 300 people and takes a huge cut on every games. Why do people keep thinking he’s a good guy. It’s just another dirty capitalist business that only cares about one thing: money. The amount of free dick sucking they get from gamers is something I just can understand. Meanwhile, studios with thousands of employees, creative people who just want to get paid to work on games, get death threats if players don’t like a game.
How the fuck did steam invent gambling for kids? That shit started back in Facebook games.
I know you won’t do it but you should watch the coffeezilla video about steam and gambling. BTW you don’t own your games on steam.
Here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y
If valve laid off 1000 people, there wouldn’t be anyone left. The company has like 200 employees and gaben and maybe 3 other people make almost all the money. Gabens yatch fleet is worth a cool billion, or was before he added an other one a few months ago.
People simping for billionaires disgust me.
Gabens is worst than Tim. At least Epic developed Unreal Studio. Gaben gave us DRM and games you don’t actually own. Steam being nice to use doesn’t magic away the highway robbery, all games stores are shit (gog and itch not included).
FYI you have never owned a game. It’s always been a license. Even when it was physical. It’s the same for GoG too sep you get an installer for later. It’s still only a license.
Also Steam did not give us DRM. DRM has existed for decades before steam was made.
Yes, if we want to get technical, we don’t legally own those games, obviously. However, so long as they are DRM free, we can always install them on whatever hardware we choose, as long as its supported. Thats why people say DRM takes away a player’s ability to “own” their games.
if steam prohibited DRMs in the first place, we’d have a reality, where steam is either pretty small, or entirely dead, and its niche is separated between small anti-consumer marketplaces such as UPlay and battle.net, where the publishers can stuff anything up your ass, not only DRMs, to their greedy hearts’ content.
Piracy and independent game preservation initiatives still exist despite DRMs tho
For a lot of games, Steam is just an installer. They start fine on their own if you copy the folder.
Yeah, I have a few games like that. That means they’re DRM free. The issue with Steam is not that it forces all games on it to have DRM, but that is doesn’t make games that DON’T have DRM easy to identify.
FYI you have never owned a game
The software licensing we know today for everything software related only started in like '82 or '83. What about games from the 70s? (Granted the person you responded to may still have never owned a game if they weren’t even alive in the 70s; I sure as hell wasn’t)
People simp for gaben because unlike any modern game studio CEO, he isn’t a mindless cashgrab off for all the money in the world.
Valve actively invests into FOSS, which also helps with their public image. It’s thanks to Valve that gaming on linux thrives nowadays, after all.
At least Epic developed Unreal Studio.
And Valve had developed Source and Steam audio, as well as sponsored the development of proton, Fex (which they financially supported since its inception, according to the FEX maintainer).
Let’s also ignore the fact that Valve had pioneered the very concept of a modern game storefront such as Steam, pioneered indie publishing with its Steam Greenlight.
To this day Steam remains to be the most feature-complete service of that sort, while both not imposing on publishers, and retaining its pro-consumer stance. Basically, the perfect middle-ground.
Gaben gave us DRM and games you don’t actually own.
Valve has nothing to do with DRM inception or development, as well as they don’t enforce drm onto anyone publishing their game on steam. If you want to blame someone for drm in your game, blame the publishing studio.
Artificial prohibition of DRMs on a game storefront only leads to its avoidance by the majority of gamedevs and publishers, as well as promotes the development of pocket storefronts such as Battle.net, UPlay and Origin where publishers allow themselves to be as anti-consumer as they want. EGS is a great example of what would’ve been if Steam wasn’t sitting in its niche.
Steam being nice to use doesn’t magic away the highway robbery, all games stores are shit (gog and itch not included).
You sound full of shallow teenage maximalism, striving for a utopian version of reality without trying to understand how and why everything works as it currently does.
Let the old man have his yachts, he, unlike many, deserved them.
Xbox with online needed is just the same as DRM; Since you can’t play unless you have a connection to their server.
Ya, that’s why I said all stores. Xbox and Valve are the same coin, just a different face. Valve did popularize DRM though, before Xbox and the rest got in on it. Xbox is overall worst though.
If Valve fired 1000 people, that means they somehow managed to fire like 700 people from a different company. Gabe is that powerful. 🤣
I mean, imagine all the AI slop game companies that would go out of business cause they couldn’t sell on Steam anymore…
Yeah he’s a billionaire. But he’s the least bad one . we can appreciate that. Valve is (basically) single handedly keeping all pc gaming from becoming instant shit. Imagine if ea bought valve. Scary thought. Instantly you’d have a 20 dollar a month subscription and a limit of 2 game installs/downloads a month. And your drivers license/id would be scanned.
Yes its a closed Eco system which isnt great but we still have gog. And steam games unless noted do not have DRM. They are playable without the steam client.
No such thing as a good billionaire. Least bad doesn’t cut it.
I think we have many, many more billionaires to worry about than attacking valves employees. As far as I know, valve employees aren’t donating to fascism and death camps, rigging elections, and promoting disinformation bots. Or denying healthcare.
Gabens isn’t the employee, he is the owner. When I talk shit about Amazon and Bezos, I’m not attacking the employees.
Sure. But it makes more sense to direct the rage at the actual evil billionaires. I don’t really care if Joe that got rich off wood lag screws made a billion and fucked off to his own land never to be heard from again. I do care about the ones meddling in elections and raping children.
Its like the incel Nintendo rage. No one cares.
Removed by mod
Have you ever looked at the steam forums? Valve absolutely promotes fascism and bigotry by not monitoring the content on their platform. They have more than enough money to do it or to just close the forums because mothing good ever came from there anyways, but because Newell is a libertarian fuckwad his platform promotes hatespeech.
all games stores are shit (gog and itch not included)
Lemmy commenter can’t hold a coherent idea in their head for three seconds. Remarkable.
Yeah, glasses houses and such it’s odd for Valve to comment on this.
Not that odd. Valve doesn’t have mass layoffs because they don’t over-hire. Beyond that, it’s salt in the wound towards Sweeney’s inability to compete.
Valve runs such a lean ship that Gaben was able to buy a boat with a fully functional hospital aboard.
Every other company that greedily sucks away profit from their consumers to the point of creating billionaires is criticised but steam gets a pass because they don’t have any employees to lay off. Jfc.
They don’t hire at all because it’s a money making machine sucking wealth out of gamers and devs alike. It needs zero manpower, it literally just prints money.
And yet they still push innovation, both in software and hardware.
Theyre certainly not angels, but they’re far closer than just about anyone else at their level.
You’re conflating. While I don’t disagree that Valve is soaking up money, and when it fleet-of-yachts money, it’s just as sickening as when any-and-everyone else does it. Where there’s a difference is in the ‘How’. While I have my problems with Steam, generally speaking, they offer a good service. They provide servers and bandwidth while selling games far cheaper than their closest competitors, by one means or another.
There’s also how they’re using that money as a company. Right now, I can think of three different lawsuits Valve is involved in just off the top of my head, all of which are fighting to worsen the hobby for gamers and Valve is opposing. Obviously, it’s in Valve’s interest as a game’s marketplace to keep gamers throwing money at them, but the ‘Why’ matters a lot less in this circumstance that the ‘What’. Even if it’s not the express purpose, Valve is the only company I know of that’s putting in any amount of effort to defend consumer rights in the gaming space. Everyone else with money comparable to what Valve has are too busy trying to exploit the market or diminish Valve’s share while providing nothing as close to as good as Steam.
News that has come out since your comment involving Valve includes an agreement with Facepunch Studios to make Source 2 available to public without any licensing fee under the name of s&box. While it’s obviously in Valve’s interest to increase the possible amount of games that will be sold on their platform, and Facepunch have done a significant amount of heavy lifting in making Source 2 both available and useful to the masses, that’s still Valve doing their part to make the gaming community a better place and provide an alternative to the (in some people’s opinions) over-used Unreal and (horribly untrustworthy) Unity.
As Zorque has said before me, Valve aren’t angles, but I truly believe Valve is bringing a net positive to the market, unlike any other company with comparable bank balances.
Probably because Valve didn’t, some guy who used to work for Valve did.
Nothing odd about wanting to put Tim’s nose in his shit. The man is beyond oblivious.
Steam has sub 300 employees and takes a biggest cut on each game. Stop sucking this billionaire’s ass, he’s no better than Epic.
OK but I look at them as the most ethical billionaires I know. They brought us linux gaming in many ways. A wicked open hand held gaming console. Many other awesome pieces of hardware. And in the case of the steam deck, they sell it so close to cost just so you use steam and you don’t even have to. It’s not even required! You can install Windows on it if you want.
Valve VS other corps: they are not the same.
Lol, the most “ethical billionaires”.
I know you won’t watch it but here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y
Maybe if you sent some articles. I ain’t got no time to watch 3 YouTube videos
Called it.
Just one should be enough. If you need articles just look around, I’m not your private teacher Also not my problem if you’re to busy to care about educating yourself.
Can we please start reading the articles before commenting, and stop commenting things that didn’t happen? This article is about Chet who barely mentions Gabe once.
The title of the post literally says “hey Tim, Gabe’s better at that then you”. But ok.
That’s not what I imagine when I hear “sucking a billionaire’s ass”, but ok.
Just try ANY form of criticism of steam, and watch the army of gamers rise up while Gabe laugh is way to the bank.
I know you won’t watch it but here you go:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y
I’m not sure what your point is.
Blablabla steam is good, epic and ubisoft bad.
There, I adapted to your IQ. Now you can go play your games, good boy.
You don’t even know me. Lol
They take the same cut sony and xbox do stfu
Epic takes 12% so, yeah, taking you money is something Steam is indead better at than Epic.
Please don’t watch these videos because you obviously dont need to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y
I watched all 3 of these close to when they came out.
Those are completely irrelevant to how steam is a better platform and storefront than the epic games store. You also have nothing to say about how almost every other big gaming storefront takes the same cut that steam does.
I watched all 3 of these Either it’s false, or you’re just a selfish braindead capitalist loser. Both way you’re useless, go play something, good doggy.
completely irrelevant to how steam is a better platform and storefront than the epic games
The fact that Trump rapes kids is also completely irrelevant to the way he manage his country. That’s the kind of logic you’re using.
You also have nothing to say about how almost every other big gaming storefront takes the same cut that steam does.
Lol. Epic takes 12%, steam 30% you dumbass - Imagine employing hundreds of people for years, renting huge spaces, buying a ton of hardware, just so that at the end, a storefront (basically some server space) makes more profit than you on the game you spent years developing.
I know you dont care about any of this. I just want you to remember you don’t own any of your games, and you’re fighting for a billionaire who sold you mom’s anal dildo if he believed he could make more money than games, you loser.
They’ve done considerably more for gaming than epic have ever done. It’s not sucking up to admit that. Stop being angry at people for just being successful, that’s dumb.
Be angry at them for the things they’ve actually done that harm you, not just because.
I know you won’t watch it but here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y
Alternative link for people who prefer to read:
https://www.barrons.com/articles/counter-strike-skin-gambling-addiction-72078828
Oh what a controversial take that no one else has ever had before. Yeah I know about that and I don’t care. I don’t interact with that part of the system so it doesn’t bother me.
And it’s still nowhere close to the damage that Tim Sweeney is done or any of the other executives of any of the other gaming companies.
I know about that and I don’t care. I don’t interact with that part of the system so it doesn’t bother me.
Let’s all just hope you never have children.
But I’m not surprise at all, that’s the average level of selfishness of the average braindead capitalist loser. Just remember, as hard as you keep licking their ass, steam will only care about you money. Btw you don’t own any of your games lol.
yeah, but he’s a GoOd BiLlIoNaIrE.
I mean, he bought a 500M yacht while the rest of us starve to death. Surely he’s a good billionaire?!
Relative to other billionaires… yes…
Relative to the average person who doesn’t run a casino… not so much.
