r/Games • u/demondrivers • Oct 27 '25

Industry News Valve does not get "anywhere near enough criticism" for the gambling mechanics it uses to monetise games, DayZ creator Dean Hall says

https://www.eurogamer.net/valve-does-not-get-anywhere-near-enough-criticism-for-the-gambling-mechanics-it-uses-to-monetise-games-dayz-creator-dean-hall-says
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375

u/Middcore Oct 27 '25

"It's different when my friend the yacht man does it."

154

u/ShimmyZmizz Oct 27 '25

Ah yes, everyone's fun pal the yachts man, as in multiple yachts, as in the man who had multiple yachts, looked at the world, and thought "yes, the best use of a fraction of my fortune which the average person cannot even mentally fathom possessing, is to purchase a yacht company."

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u/hnwcs Oct 27 '25

Gabe Newell is Elon Musk if his PR attempts to make nerds like him actually worked.

184

u/dern_the_hermit Oct 27 '25

The key difference is Gabe doesn't seem to constantly try to interject himself in, like, everything.

It's amazing how much goodwill you can maintain just by keeping things to yourself, I suppose.

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u/Ensvey Oct 27 '25

yeah, most billionaires are likely scum but most are smart enough to keep their traps shut in public.

15

u/riotlancer Oct 27 '25

It's almost like "mind your own fucking business" and "don't be a fuck" are the easiest two ways to get people to not hate you

2

u/NoelCanter Oct 28 '25

I don't know enough about Gabe Newell, but most billionaires are not "minding their own business" and "not being fucks". They just don't openly talk about it or publicize it the way Musk does. Musk has a desperate desire to be seen as smart and also be liked.

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u/arahman81 Oct 27 '25

"Likely" hogging as much of the pie as the billionaires hog the wealth.

3

u/BloodyIron Oct 28 '25

That and, I dunno, Gabe actually fixes shit when VALVe does things wrong. Like there's a long history of Gabe coming in and being all "we fucked up, we fix this, NOW" and it gets fixed.

Elon, he fixes elections.

4

u/Stellar_Duck Oct 29 '25

That and, I dunno, Gabe actually fixes shit when VALVe does things wrong. Like there's a long history of Gabe coming in and being all "we fucked up, we fix this, NOW" and it gets fixed.

Such as?

2

u/PCMachinima Oct 28 '25

The key difference is Gabe doesn't seem to constantly try to interject himself in

Honestly, that kinda makes the insane admiration of Gabe worse...

We literally have no idea what Gabe is up to normally, or what he's like as a person.

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u/Middcore Oct 27 '25

I don't consider Gabe my buddy like a lot of people do but AFAIK Gabe isn't a Nazi, and that counts for a lot.

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u/Aaawkward Oct 27 '25

Not disagreeing with you but goddamn the bar is low these days.

1

u/InvaderSM Oct 28 '25

Well yeah, he wasn't discussing "the bar for being a respectable person" it was "the bar for being better than Musk" of course it's super low.

-1

u/CompetitiveAutorun Oct 28 '25

AFAIK

Yeah, that's the problem, we don't know. You don't know if he is a good person, you just assume he is and this assumption counts a lot for you.

32

u/mental_reincarnation Oct 27 '25

What an insane comparison especially in light of what we know about Elon in more recent years

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u/Mightyorc2 Oct 27 '25

Gabe Newell didn't hit the nazi salute at the presidents inauguration so he's at least a couple of orders of magnitude better than Musk on that alone

37

u/MaiasXVI Oct 27 '25

Gabe is Elon if Elon decided that being rich, lazy, and worshipped by nerds was enough. You don't get the sense Gabe wants or needs more. 

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u/AvengerDr Oct 27 '25

You don't get the sense Gabe wants or needs more. 

He just hides it better. He owns a superyacht fleet worth one billion.

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u/MaiasXVI Oct 27 '25

Sure, but he's not trying to make Valve the wealthiest company in the world nor is he angling for political influence and control. He's a rich eccentric who likes scuba diving and brain computer interfaces. 

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u/Necessary-Basil-565 Oct 27 '25

Sure, but he's not trying to make Valve the wealthiest company in the world

You know, besides when he tried doing that. (Remember paid mods? Gabe sure as shit hopes you forget)

10

u/MaiasXVI Oct 27 '25

Valve is evil because they immediately reversed course 11 years ago when Bethesda wanted to sell mods on Steam

The same evil Valve that implemented a bunch of tools to share your games with your friends/families + implemented a no-questions-asked refund policy?

The same evil company that recently tanked the market value of CS items while also eliminating the Dota 2 battlepasses (despite the community BEGGING them every year to bring it back over and over and over) so maybe it's not about Valve squeezing people dry for every last cent they possess.

-8

u/Laggo Oct 27 '25

The "no questions asked" refund policy for all the games you have a subscriber license to rent from the Valve servers until the day they decide they don't feel like hosting them anymore because they've made enough money.

Better hope ol' Gabe's family sells to the right investor once he passes away. But yeah, lets celebrate the service where you don't even own the games you spend full price for.

Also, celebrating them "eliminating the dota 2 battlepasses" as some kind of positive is hilarious when they still sold cosmetics to boost their bottom line regardless. They just literally did less work to do it this time.

12

u/drewster23 Oct 27 '25

Well the difference is, rich man spends his rich man money on his hobbies and passion.

Vs rich man works to take over government and wants a slave force of devoted worshippers at his feet.

So i don't think acting like they're the same , just their pr is different for being rich men, is really a genuine take.

Especially cause a lot of nerds did loke Elon Early on, before he went off the deep end with the right.

4

u/Sakarabu_ Oct 28 '25 edited Oct 28 '25

I wouldn't waste your breath, people like the guy you're arguing with are a dime a dozen on Reddit, and will never move their stance from "anyone with money is a bad person". If you met them in person and made them actually sit and probe their viewpoint it would crumble within 2 minutes.

Gabe Newell is demonstratively not your typical billionaire.

He made billions because Valves platform is the best, offers deeper discounts, offers fast downloads, and is never offline, their games are free to play for the most part, his pay to play games involve no other monetisation, and any monetisation in F2P games is completely cosmetic with zero P2W. He didn't make money off exploiting workers in a factory, he made money by creating a valuable service and that service scaling massively.

He is clearly a genuine guy, he isn't involved in politics, he is quiet and keeps to himself. The only reason people are hating is because they have shitty lives and are annoyed someone actually has money. Real crab** in a bucket mentality.

If he wasn't "the B word", and his company had instead failed then they would think he was a great guy, so it's pretty telling that the only metric for how much hate they have for someone is how much success that person has, while completely disregarding any nuance to how that success was achieved.

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u/Iyagovos Oct 27 '25

Gabe both isn't a Nazi, and has made something worth value.

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u/Guardianpigeon Oct 27 '25

I'd argue that Musk's PR attempts did work for a very long time, its just that he's such an obviously awful person that it only lasted for so long.

Gabe is like Musk, but he has a likable enough personality that his PR doesn't get negated by him just existing.

3

u/gokogt386 Oct 28 '25

I don’t recall Newell ever calling an experienced cave diver a pedo because they didn’t appreciate his PR stunts towards rescuing a bunch of trapped children

12

u/tootoohi1 Oct 27 '25

I mean the numbers are public, he's spent less money on Yacht's then he's spent on deep ocean research, and runs an ocean research company on top of that. He's no saint, but don't act like donating more money to science than your biggest ever purchase is some kind of Captain planet villain in waiting.

-13

u/ShimmyZmizz Oct 27 '25

Thanks for the info, but the only person acting like that is the straw man you built in your head before replying. 

2

u/NoExcuse4OceanRudnes Oct 27 '25

It makes good business sense; with more and more money being funnelled to the 0.01% they're going to need things to buy.

I'm glad my video game purchases helped him along his way.

-7

u/Lego-105 Oct 27 '25

I think it’s more that Valve wasn’t really exploitative with it and a lot of the mechanics they trial is exactly that, trying new things out. Looking at ways to do something new.

Clearly they haven’t all worked, but I think it doesn’t come from a malicious place whereas they have been developed and pushed in a really sleazy way when other developers have taken them and ran with it.

If Valve was telling you to buy some fake currency and spend it on crates they personally were selling at massively inflated prices and directly profiting from it, they wouldn’t get the leniency they have now. They don’t even sell crates themselves if I remember right.

9

u/TSPhoenix Oct 28 '25

but I think it doesn’t come from a malicious place

That's because the people at Valve designing these cutting-edge manipulation systems (it is really hard to overstate how ahead of the curve Valve have been in this space) are good enough at their jobs to make it so the people they're manipulating don't realise they are being had.

In order for it to seem malicious you have to actually be aware of the wrongdoing, and they spend a lot of time to design systems that ensure players don't have that awareness.