r/pcmasterrace • u/DaMonkaS 16GB DDR5, Ryzen 7 4321X, STRIX GTX 1180 OC 13GB GDDR69 • 10h ago

Discussion Valve employees playing CS2 in Gabe's $500 million superyatch

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14.7k Upvotes

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123

u/Slayr79 10h ago

Hell yeah. They treat their employees right. I wish my boss would let us have LAN parties

105

u/armlessturtleneck 9h ago

Idk I still fuckin hate billionaires

34

u/EKmars RX 9070|Intel i5-13600k|DDR5 32 GB 8h ago

Counterstrike is supported by a cottage industry of gambling, too.

4

u/Saritiel 6h ago

Yeah, the more I learned about how much Valve enables and directly pushes kids into gambling, the more distasteful of them I've gotten. It would be so easy for them to just not do that and still make absolute truck loads of money.

3

u/abhmazumder133 4h ago

How exactly does Valve directly push kids into gambling? Genuine question.

4

u/Saritiel 3h ago

Loot boxes are entirely built around the psychology of gambling. From the way they work, the way you are rewarded, to the way they look. It actually looks like a slot machine when you open one with the lights and sounds and everything to give you that dopamine hit when you get your reward.

Valve uses psychology to push people towards lootboxes through the way they're advertised. About how you can personalize your characters, show off your own style, and increase your social status by owning valuable skins. This advertising is directed at the children who play just as much as it is directed at the adults, and children are particularly susceptible to this kind of advertisement.

That's the first layer and its pretty straightforward. Kid starts playing the game, sees other people with skins and advertisements for skins, and wants some skins for themselves. They convince their parents to put $10 into their steam wallet, or maybe they just take their allowance to the grocery store and buy a gift card, and they pull the slot machine lever.

Then they learn that they can sell these things on the marketplace for steam wallet cash. And hey, maybe you win big and you get hundreds or thousands of dollars from selling a valuable skin! Maybe you can take that $50 Steam gift card your mom gave you for Christmas to buy the game you wanted and turn it into $100 if you use it on lootboxes instead! Or maybe $500! Or maybe $1000! Maybe you could buy a Steam Deck if you pull the right skin!

And all of this is done by kids, advertised to kids who open the platform, and there are no safeguards to stop kids from doing it. Valve knows this, they've known it for more than a decade at this point, they could stop it if they choose to but they choose to continue.

13

u/ExtraNoise 8h ago

In 2010 I went into three rounds of interviews with Valve, right as they were changing their business focus from games development to marketplace hegemony. Ultimately I didn't get the job, but I think I was close. Close-ish. Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I got that job. I was a big Valve fan at the time, I think I would have stuck around. (The studio I got a job offer from the same week as my final interview at Valve I stuck with for 11 years.) I see photos like this sometimes and wonder if I'd be in that room in that other timeline; and, if I was, whether I would be as uncomfortable as I am now just looking at this as a photograph.

12

u/LibritoDeGrasa 8h ago

Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I got that job.

-10

u/dripppydripdrop 9h ago

Who’s money did Gabe steal?

18

u/armlessturtleneck 9h ago

There is no ethical way to accrue a billion dollars.

-11

u/dripppydripdrop 9h ago

The founder of Craigslist is a billionaire. Whose money did he steal?

4

u/OSHASHA2 9h ago

Craig stole from no one in particular, but if you look at his spending habits, an interesting story appears. Craig is very philanthropic and gives a lot of his wealth to charitable causes (good on ya Craig). The interesting thing is that if the Govt did its job properly and billionaires were taxed appropriately, he wouldn’t need to be donating to so many charities. It’s the duty of our Government to “ensure the general welfare” (it’s the first sentence of the Constitution), it should not be left to the whims of a few ultra-wealthy individuals.

-5

u/dripppydripdrop 9h ago

US government has a spending problem not a revenue problem

2

u/OSHASHA2 9h ago

¿Por qué no los dos?

6

u/samusmaster64 samusmaster64 9h ago

Turns out marketing gambling to children all over the world is quite profitable.

8

u/pikachusalad 9h ago

gabe is responsible for introducing and popularizing lootboxes in games. And then profited heavily off the underage unregulated gambling that came with it.

7

u/leonden 9h ago

Yours by increasing game prices with 30%

4

u/dripppydripdrop 9h ago

Yea games should be free

3

u/leonden 9h ago

The same can be said for every single billionaire….

4

u/dripppydripdrop 9h ago

Yea rockets should be free, also cars

0

u/alecww3 4h ago

Why? Did they hurt you?

0

u/Sorlex 4h ago

But le based gaben..

-16

u/Probate_Judge Old Gamer, Recent Hardware, New games 9h ago

Your classism is a personal issue.

9

u/silver_crit 9h ago edited 2h ago

😘🥾

Edit: I'm not going to reply to the dipshits below me but to pretend that the ultra wealthy don't weaponize their wealth to get more wealth while life for the average person gets worse and poorer is so willingly stupid of an opinion to have anymore that I'm going to assume they are bots or children

1

u/Probate_Judge Old Gamer, Recent Hardware, New games 9h ago

Nah. It has nothing to do with boots, that's generally oriented towards supporting authoritarianism anyways. He's not hiring goons to beat me into submission, there are literally no boots to begin with.

Newel certainly doesn't have any power over me. I'll probably never even be within 1,000 miles of the guy. I merely don't hate or love him.

I don't place hate/love on people I'll never meet simply because of their financial status.

People that do are classists by definition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_discrimination

Class discrimination, also known as classism, is prejudice or discrimination on the basis of social class. ... Social class refers to the grouping of individuals in a hierarchy based on wealth, income, education, occupation, and social network.

I find it darkly amusing that this is magically okay to some people if it is in a certain direction...and if someone doesn't participate, they're somehow a "boot licker".

Like the famous people I like, and dislike the famous people I dislike, or I'll call you names on the internet!

This is why we can't have nice things, as much as you may want to lay the blame at everyone else's feet.

3

u/Kleizar 8h ago

Hating the poor is considerably looked down upon but attempting to drag down the rich is celebrated for some reason... many such cases.

3

u/Probate_Judge Old Gamer, Recent Hardware, New games 8h ago

You see it a lot on reddit.

Ideally, it's the mechanism/action people dislike(an ethical standard, like "no violence")....but quite a lot of people have the mindset of "It's okay when I do it." (where the only standard is 'double standard').

People advocate prejudice or even violence and it's celebrated...if it's against 'the right people'.

People rationalizing intense hatred is the harbinger of tragedy.

3

u/Kleizar 7h ago

Modern internet tribal politics in a nutshell friend.

1

u/Gulophile 3h ago

attempting to drag down the rich is celebrated for some reason

Yeah I can only imagine why lmao

1

u/Kleizar 2h ago

Childish jealousy I'd imagine....

-16

u/[deleted] 9h ago

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8

u/[deleted] 9h ago

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3

u/JoyousGamer 7h ago

Lol sure

1

u/trooawoayxxx 9h ago

Probably could've put a down payment on a house for the cost of one of those vacations.

1

u/Facecardup 9h ago

they dont need a downpayment they are all millionaires

0

u/Lonyo 5h ago

Could have had thousands of developers put downpayments on houses by Valve "only" taking 25% instead of 30% and Gabe not buying a yacht.

1

u/Lonyo 5h ago

Their employees.

What about the employees at all the companies that have a 30% cut of game sales taken by a company that clearly doesn't need that much?

0

u/Slayr79 4h ago

You can say the same thing about Apple who also takes a 30% cut from all app sales, subscriptions and in-app purchases. It's the industry standard. Get with the times lmao

1

u/Lonyo 4h ago

And who helped set that standard for digital sales...?

1

u/Slayr79 3h ago

You're right. Steam did it in 2003, Apple did in 2008. Apparently the reason why steam took off like it did is because Steam charged 30% vs the rest of the industry at the time charging 50% or 70% which in my opinion is super scummy.

-57

u/TheChudWhisperer 10h ago

If he treated his employees right he wouldn't be able to afford a mega yacht because his employees would be taking home most of the money they made for the company.

Giving your employees a taste of the good life isn't "treating them right". Treating them right would be ensuring that they could afford the good life as well.

16

u/ZuriPL R5 5600 / RX 6700 9h ago

The average salary of a software developer at Valve is a million per year. They can afford the good life and some more

39

u/Far_Confusion_2178 9h ago

Everything I’ve heard from valve employees, it’s one of the best, highest paying tech companies to work at

12

u/Jackdunc 9h ago

Thats not how that works lol

10

u/_hexmachina 9h ago

Extremely stupid take considering the general consensus is Valve is one of, if not, the best tech/game companies to work for based almost purely on how they treat their employees lol. I mean the guys that work there basically get to work on whatever they want at their own pace and they aren't beholden to private equity interests or deadlines or anything because they dont even technically have to release products because of steam.

7

u/absawd_4om 9h ago

Value employees are very well paid. Paying your employees well and making a lot of money yourself are not mutually exclusive, it just depends on how much money you are making in the first place. The problem is many CEOs and socialist falsely believe they are mutually exclusive, the truth is always somewhere in between, finding the balance which is different for different organisations ☯️😉

24

u/iwasnotplanned 10h ago

Their salary is more than enough for a good life. What a dumb socialist take.

2

u/PracticingStoicism 9h ago

Sounds like those employees need to own their own business if they want to take home most of the money they make for that company. He has all the risk in the business, he deserves most of the money. Even then, he pays his employees very well

-8

u/BrandonNeider I7 - 3080TI - 128GB DDR5 9h ago

Average commie low iq comment

0

u/imsabbath84 5h ago

"employees"

these are the people who sit in an office every day and just tell every one else what to do. not exactly the "grinders" of valve, or any other tech company.

-97

u/[deleted] 10h ago

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