I mean I get what you're saying, but Valve is actually one of the few large tech companies that are providing an actually good service (Steam). People should be allowed to make money by providing value to their customers because that's the motivation of building such services and products in the first place.

The hatred should go towards the companies abusing their position and violating customers and then just cashing excessive amounts of money for a crap product/service that has no real competition. If Valve had started making their competitors lives harder, by generating lots of nonsense lawsuits for example, they should absolutely be blasted down to hell by everybody. As long as they are just earning lots of bucks by providing a service people want to use without restricting using other services and playing with healthy rules otherwise as well, it's all fine and everyone working on the great service SHOULD earn more than average.

[+] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works -28 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Why do you think they're able to make that much money? Not by using their position as the store where the majority of people buys games from?

There's no good guys when profits are the goal. They might provide good service, the only reason they're doing so is because they see potential profit.

There's a major difference between making more than average and being a billionaire. You know what's the difference between making 500k a year and making a billion a year? About a billion.

[–] Nilz@sopuli.xyz 26 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Steam didn't get to where it is because of market abuse but because of providing a good service, or at least a service that was better than anything else at the time by far. Valve are reaping the rewards now, but are also still providing an arguably better service than it's competitors. It's a bit odd that you want to punish a company just for being successful.

Valve isn't perfect and they're profit driven, but they're privately owned and the goals isn't maximizing profit, which isn't something you can say about most of their competitors.

[+] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works -15 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I'm all in for punishing all billionaires and you're very naive if you think their goal isn't too maximize profit. If it wasn't there's no reason why they would accumulate enough surplus for Gaben to own six yacht, they would instead reduce their 30% cut and pass the savings to everyone and we would have cheaper games.

[–] Nilz@sopuli.xyz 14 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yes, the profit is excessive, but it's because they have a good product where the competition has not really been putting in much effort and letting Valve get away with it for so long.

Valve's goal isn't to maximize profit because they don't have shareholders that demand it. If they really wanted to maximize profits then there's a whole lot more to squeeze out of Steam and the games they made. And yes I agree Valve can lower their cut and still make bucket loads of money, but I highly doubt that if they did reduce their cut it would actually lead to cheaper games except for a maybe a few. Because just like Valve, the devs and publishers are profit driven and why would they turn down a potentially bigger profit?

[–] stardust@lemmy.ca 15 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I guess steam could have avoided making billions if they had never improved their launcher since Half Life 2. Not improving products and keeping it as crappy as possible so people stay away from it is one business strategy of ensuring people are deterred from using it.

Shame they kept improving and made something people want to use.

[–] RandomException@sopuli.xyz 13 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I mean Valve has a game store called Steam, but what's the actual position they have? There are competing game stores - both digital and physical - and Valve isn't trying to run their competition out of business with shady business tactics? Just by being good at something and therefore running a successful business shouldn't be illegal or hated by itself - it's the way the business is being conducted that actually matters. Gaben is free to have yacht or two as long as his company is being run with a healthy mindset, their employees are being paid a fair salary (which I guess is another discussion in it's own who decides that) and they are not screwing their competition nor their customers up.

[+] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works -16 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Six yachts.

They don't need to actively run out their competition because they already have enough of the market that they're the default option. Just like Microsoft doesn't need to try and actively stop MacOS or Linux from existing.

[–] RandomException@sopuli.xyz 14 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I don't care how many yachts Gaben owns, he's free to do whatever he wishes as long as he provides me a great service that I'm willing to use money towards.

And Microsoft did try really hard back in the day to make Linux go away. Luckily OSS community was already large enough that they were able to fight the legal cases and the whole thing didn't dry up. Nowadays Microsoft endorses Linux because they decided they can squeeze value out of other people's free work for themselves (and because pretty much the entire server industry runs on Linux anyways).