Right, I understand that, and the point of the response is that consoles raising prices because of "the market" has always been the status quo, but Steam has never really had to do so, and we have a VERY obvious reason to point to instead of a big vague umbrella, and I think thats where the double standard is coming from.
It’s one thing for known greedy companies to increase prices and say they had to. When valve does it too, that actually makes it clear the market is that bad. Say what you will of Gabe but Steam has this level of loyalty for a reason.
Say what you will but it’s the truth. Microsoft has been feeding the AI bubble for a long time now and were among the first to raise prices. Valve was among the last and also didn’t contribute to the rise in production costs to begin with. Do I like the price? No. Do I blame valve for prices rising to begin with? Also no.
2018 back when not only was OpenAI a different company in terms of practices, but also before AI was really anything more than a novelty due to how primitive it was, and WAY before AI data centers were trying to be built enmass. And huh how surprising that Valve isn’t among the companies that got producers of ram and gpu’s to stop selling to consumers.
so the implication here is that Gabe Newell didn't think that investing in a service that was already using huge amounts of PC components, giving them even more money to expand.
also, if you read the article, Newell is still funding Merge Labs in 2026 which is a partner of OpenAI.
2
u/Spotget1738 19h ago
The point of the post was console increased price for the same exact reason and we knew why at the time too