Tim S. Weeny is gonna piss his pants throwing a little fit at this lol.
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.
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).
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!
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.
“Go sit in the corner and think about what you’ve done, Tim.”
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.
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.
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.
Fuck you Tim Sweeney for making Gabe Newell appear even remotely good by comparison
I don’t get this comment. Are you suggesting Gaben is a bad person?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
So how much did he pay you to simp him? Hope they raised their simping wages above $0.
I can play that game too.
How much did Tim pay you for asking people how much Gaben payed to simp him?
Having an opposing opinion is off course impossible and people. People who have a different opinion are only paid actors.
Are you Valve simps duplicating now? I’m sorry you earn less than minimum wage.
Whut
Also no, I hate the Epic fucker just as equally as I do the Valve fucker. Funny how Epic does the exact thing the other people did and somehow they’re derided for it, though.
Funny how Epic does the exact thing the other people did and somehow they’re derided for it, though.
Valve did not lay off 1000 people. Other companies doing this get the same shit as Epic does. So what exactly do you mean with this statement?
let’s just say my yacht park is drastically larger than it was yesterday:)
Jokes aside, Valve did allow lots of talented people to find and express themselves, be it via steam greenlight or steam workshop. And Valve still are the pioneers on linux gaming among other corpos. Gaben surely isn’t Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds, but he certainly did some respect-worthy things, especially when you compare him to practically any other CEO.
Forking Wine and invoking XKCD #927 with Linux does not a hero create. Especially when said “”“hero”“” has fucked over game ownership and introduced the wider world to the original lootbox, the Mann Co. Crate that can only be opened with $4.99 keys. Funny how nobody mentions that, when it is even more useless and predatory than the Oblivion horse armor that people keep bringing up to this day (which I wouldn’t have forked over $2.5 but somehow even that low bar had more value to it). Gee whiz, no wonder we got The Crew’s shutdown and tons of in-game economies.
Stop simping for a fucking billionaire. Treat them all equally.
calling proton a “wine fork” is akin to calling a linux distro a “kernel fork”. Proton does a lot of things that are simply out of scope for wine. Referring to it as yet another unnecessary standard is quite unfair, considering the impact it made.
Especially when said “”“hero”“” has fucked over game ownership
First, I never called Valve, or Gaben in particular, heroes.
Second, Valve never “fucked over game ownership”, because it was fucked over long before them. Lawmakers struggled with such concepts as “intellectual property” since the inception of the term. It’s hard to sell something that can be infinitely copied, because the value of a good that is present in infinite abundance is zero. Licensing is an attempt to force IP behave same as material goods do.
introduced the wider world to the original lootbox, the Mann Co. Crate that can only be opened with $4.99 keys.
Yeah, not only that, they invented battle passes too. Does that mean that without Valve there’d be no crates? I highly doubt that.
Also, unlike literally any other loot boxes in any other game, items for Valve games Always were primarily community-made. Each crate opened, each skin traded is a profit that is guaranteed to reach the original creator. The horse armor analogy is inadequate due to that, and the fact that oblivion is a single-player game.
Also, trading is still a thing, unlike in any other games. Back in the day i myself managed to get the cosmetics i liked without investing any money, purely by exchanging items with other players.
no wonder we got The Crew’s shutdown and tons of in-game economies.
Now that’s absurd. Both somehow accusing Valve in The Crew shutdown incident, and calling omnipreset in-game purchases “an economy”. The only games with economy systems i can think of are those of Valve, EVE online, and some MMORPGs. You can’t sell your Overwatch skins without selling the whole account, for instance. In other words, in most games, an in-game purchase is money forever lost.
You want to blame someone for the shit we’re in right now? Blame mindless consumers that to this day mindlessly pre-order games based on how shiny they look in the trailer. Blame our modern culture for endorsing the anti-piracy agenda. Blame yourself for not lecturing your fellow neighbor why consumerism should be conscious. As long as people won’t learn, there always will be bad actors exploiting all of the above. Valve is one of the few rare exceptions that don’t try to exploit their consumers, that make pro-consumer decisions not based off peer pressure, but rather because it makes the world a slightly better place.
Stop simping for a fucking billionaire. Treat them all equally.
I do. I judge people based off their actions. If the man managed to become a billionaire while making or supporting the development of some legendary games, developing a platform that becomes a de-facto monopolist purely by the virtue of being that good, using all of that power to instill pro-consumer policies; then by allowing artists to profit off something they made for the games they love; by providing a huge platform for indie devs; by supporting fan-made works based off Valve’s IPs; by soloing the whole spectrum of problems regarding gaming on linux; by sponsoring and promoting FOSS… i’d rather let him keep the money, because my issue with most of the billionaires is not that they have more money than me, it’s that they stripped off their humanity, ripping other people off to become billionaires in the first place. Gabe, on the other hand, doesn’t fit the stereotype. If every corporate CEO was more like him, i think the world would be a better place.
Now try to turn on your head and oppose me without trying to demean anything i say in your head by calling me a simp, because newsflash, reality isn’t black and white, trying to treat it like it is — is the definition of bigotry.
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
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)
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.
Ah yes, the second paragon of virtue: Nintendo. This is the bootlicking I’m talking about.
I’ve kept hearing these scare stories for years. Sorry, they’re shallow as shit. I’m not settling for Valve just because scawy EA is worse. To hell with them both. Anti-consuner is anti-consumer. A billionaire is a billionaire, and all of them are delicious.
Very lemming of you.
“Perfect is the enemy of good”.
Same people who wouldnt vote at all in the US Because “Biden might do a bad thing” well guess what, Drump rapes and kills children and kidnaps innocent people, while starting wars.
You know there’s more than two game companies, right? You know that unlike the presidency in the United States of Fascism, there can be more than one game distribution platform, and those can be run by multiple companies, yes? While you’re at it, buying games from Steam means your tax dollars go to the Trump Administration.
Oh ya i know. But no one actually uses anything but steam. Related, If you know normies, they only use Spotify (even though they support ICE and stolen llm slop audio). People dont buy CDs or records or use discogs or bandcamp etc. Same thing.
Lemmings are .000001% of the population.
Gaben gave us DRM and games you don’t actually own.
THANK YOU for saying this. Their launcher based DRM scheme and its direct attack on ownership, physical and used games has been a scourge. Don’t forget their popularizing the F2P economy model and lootboxes, leading to more US-grown harm.
THANK YOU for saying this. Their launcher based DRM scheme and its direct attack on ownership
FYI Steam only applies a very weak DRM to stop people from copying games, but you can easily bypass it using Goldberg. Just copy/paste a few files into the game folder and you can play it outside of Steam.
I know it is weak, I have cracked the games I used to have there myself before just giving up the account. It doesn’t change the facts it harmed games forever, that it is the poster child of “you will own nothing and you will be happy.”
You say this like Steam created DRM… DRM already existed back in the day, and in way more intrusive ways. Having CD keys, games that would activate only once by connecting to the servers, etc…
Steam is the poster child of making digital games popular. That’s it. It’s not that deep.
Iirc, half life 2 was the first major game, having DRM and needing validation through steam, even with a hardcopy. After that, all the other companies jumped aboard with using DRM with steam.
I feel like people think cd keys are the bar and if you are slightly better (online activation) them you get flying marks. Same with comparing to Xbox and epic.
They all fail, including steam. It’s crazy to see people defending any of them but Gaben always gets defended. Steam deserves the critique as much as the rest.
Just because there was bad (CD keys), doesn’t mean we must settle for worse (phoning home to servers owned and run by a private company based in the fucking United States to play a fucking single player game). But if you’re happy owning nothing… Well, I’m not.
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…
Steam is like if you had to open the Walmart app to use some shit you bought there.
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.
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.
Fucking yacht owner.
I think Gabe has a yacht too.
I took the comment to be referring to Gabe, who owns multiple billion dollar yachts.
Ah, my mistake. Nobody should have that much money.
Agreed.
As long as people giveth, it shalt be received.
Gamers are the real scourge on gaming.
So this is how I learn that the Tim asshole ALSO has yachts. TIL. Thank you.
Also the fucking yacht owner owns multiple of these, for your information.
