Fluff
Gabe Newell honored all the 3,000 people who built his $500 million megayacht Leviathan by having their names etched on a massive glass wall in the main staircase
Using this meme to respond to a reasonable take is a pretty brain dead move.
That said, Gabe Newell has done little to warrant any hate. He gave us arguably the best digital gaming storefront in existence, and he actively uses his wealth to try to aid scientific advancement, among other things.
If you want to hate billionaires, there are plenty of targets to choose from, and those targets definitely deserve any hate hurled at them. Hating Gabe Newell simply because he’s a billionaire, which it seems like you’re doing given the original comment in this thread and the meme you sent, is lazy at best.
Edit: Everyone is coming out the woodworks with their reasons why Gabe Newell is apparently a reprehensible human being, and now I hate him as well. /s
But seriously, I’ve edited the comment so it no longer states that he’s done nothing wrong, because that just isn’t true. Still, there are countless other billionaires who deserve hate over Gabe Newell.
Not even just arguably the best digital gaming storefront honestly. Pretty objectively the best out there. There’s a reason they have essentially a monopoly. I don’t know a single PC gamer that doesn’t primarily use Steam lol.
Not to piss on the parade but where does "best digital gaming storefront" rank on "contributions to humanity by one of the wealthiest people to have lived"? Below covid vaccine sure; but above... what?
It popularized it in the West. Gacha already existed in the East, and at the least Maple Story had already brought it over. But it was Valve that really put a spotlight on it and got other Western publishers to try it out.
The concept has always existed. No one we could actually point to invented it.
It's hard to blame one specific person for making it popular. It was there, someone was eventually going to figure out it could be used and monetized in video games. Someone probably did decades ago, but there was no way to implement it with the tech they had.
I try to take an organic stance here. It was inevitable. It fucking sucks, but if Steam hadn't done it, EA would have. Or Ubisoft. We'd be in exactly the same boat.
It wasn't inevitable. People made the choices that allowed it to propagate. Dont rob people of their agency because they used theirs for something that has encouraged childhood gambling.
Edit: Valve makes $1B a year off loot boxes. They chose to do that. How much of that money was from children?
Exactly. Trickle-down economics stops making sense when you realize that the cup above continues to grow faster than the chance for the economy to “trickle down” to you.
It’s just tiresome to see such idiotic takes against Gaben when there are so many others, such as Bezos and Musk, who are so much more deserving of receiving that hate.
Gaben isn’t perfect by any means, but getting all worked up because someone made a post about a glass wall on his yacht is so dumb.
To be clear we should be applauding billionaires actually spending their wealth like this. It’s what employs people and recirculates money into economies.
The act of simply hoarding and/or investing their wealth in the stock market is what should be criticized for providing zero net benefit to society.
Jesus Christ! Raise your fucking standards! A good billionaire is one who spends hundreds of millions on senseless vanity projects? We should be fucking applauding the billionaires?!?!!?!!
Temporary except the massive staff technicians and endless repairs? Billionaires don't need defending but idk what to say about this constant anti-intellectualism.
Yes exactly. Lmao as someone who grew up on boats, working on them, crewing them etc. nothing is funnier than when people think of a boat as an investment.
A boat will easily be the biggest hole in your pocket that you will ever own. A $500 million dollar yacht is going to cost you around $50 million a year to maintain, between maintenance, upgrades, crew, slip, insurance, etc. and if you have to sell it, you will sell it for significantly less than you bought it for. If someone buys a $500 million dollar yacht and they expect to keep it for 20 years, you can expect that by the end of it they'll have nearly $2 billion down the hole.
So basically like a car, if cars could only be fixed by expensive specialized mechanics, and if you fail to keep up with maintenance it just noclips into the ground.
And if you had to pay for a chauffeur and a pit crew to follow you along lol. Crew costs are always going to throw in a few million each year out of the $50 million I threw out. That's a low ball too tbqh. A lot depends on how you use the boat.
My folks spent $500k and 3 years to build their dream home in the mountains. It was only worth $300k on the market, because people want to build their dream home there too more than buying someone elses. Same with Yachts. Thankfully dad insured it for much more than build cost because a fire took it and 150 other houses 10 years later.
Dad had it insured very well, we all have houses in Florida now, they have a 3 room condo with a view of intercoastal. They gave me and my brother a big down payment on homes of our own, the mountain house was supposed to be part of the inheritance. So they decided just give to us now since was such a big payout. I was living in Denver, so drove down a long back way because fire had closed the highway. The insurance guy came to their house first, was nothing but foundation left and amazingly some corningware my mom had in the kitchen and would have dropped down to the basement, guess that stuff can handle the heat, damn Jeep melted but not those bowls. Insurance guy said you are lucky, some people have a house 40% destroyed, will only get the rebuild cost, there is nothing to argue about this lot, it is all gone. Insurance paid $500 per tree, he said I don't have time to even count them, $50,000 is max for trees so you get that. And the garage added more, all in all it was a million payout because dad knew to insure more and insurance company was very good about it. They couldn't have lived there much longer anyways, was 2 hour round trip to store or doctors. They did love it and wanted to leave it to us. They got 10 good years out of it.
They already have the money, so them putting it to use is better than actually hoarding, which is to shove it into a offshore bank account never to be seen again.
Velocity of Money is a very important economic metric. Billionaires using their money is the least bad option for the system we have. If you want to complain, go complain to the government who allows billionaires to have this money.
I'm anti-billionaire myself, in fact, I want there to be a 100% marginal tax rate for wealth over a certain amount. But I also know who to focus my anger on.
Dude you have no idea the overhead on a boat like this.
He's paying multiple tens of millions a year in salaries, berthing, maintenance and other costs.
People shit on superyachts and it is conspicuous consumption. But in terms of velocity of money and positive economic impact, this is probably at the top of what the superwealthy can spend money on.
Newell is a fluke. He was set up comfortably with that early Microsoft money and he could have comfortably walked. Instead, he decided he wanted to make the games he wanted to see in the market. Not because he wanted to be adored (Valve didn't have titles at the beginning), or make loads of cash (he could have sold Valve or made it public at any point), just apparently just because he was genuinely passionate about his hobbies and intensely despised the shareholder-driven work environment of Microsoft. It's yachts today, but a couple of years ago he got super train enthusiast about knives.
He is not immune to spite - Vivendi tried to fuck him over with their publishing deal and Steam was probably created in large part to fend them off - but by all accounts he just seems to drift from passion to passion with a largely zen-like disregard for the opinions of other people.
Yeah, which is why in this case i think Gabe may have just had the magic sauce at the right time. I could be wrong but having the first big and best storefront helped boost him to this wealth status without him having to step on 1000 children and social-engineer his way to the top like most other billionaire hopefuls have to do.
The only difference I think between nice people and him at this point might be that nice people would give away a lot more of their money to help others. The nicest people wouldn't be billionaires for long; though how much of a mark against Gabe depends on how strongly you hold those ideals.
If I was a billionaire philanthropist, I would certainly do my best to stay a billionaire. Having lots of capital that returns continuous profits allows me to spend more money on philanthropy over my lifetime than if I just gave everything away immediately.
That is a completely different yacht than the megayacht he lives on (which is not a research vessel, just a good ol' fashioned luxury megayacht polluting 24/7 because he literally lives on it)
It wouldn't be polluting 24/7. Pretty much all boats above a certain size can accept shore power, and you very much do not want to be running the engines all the time. To be clear I'm not defending the decision, just pointing out that that specific criticism isn't accurate.
Gabe has a second ship that is hundreds of feet long tailing the his main yacht to provide fuel and for staff to use so they don't crowd his main yacht.
You think billionaires can't have a giant yacht and also do these things? They just choose to not do these things because they're pieces of trash. When you have that level of wealth, you will passively make more money than you know what to do with, just by sitting in the market. Plus, all those donations are tax write offs.
Gonna be honest here, if I were one of those people this would feel more like mocking than gratitude. I know Gabe means well and it's good to acknowledge the work of others... But this just feels wrong. Maybe if getting your name on there came with a bonus it wouldn't feel so performative. I highly doubt Gabe meant it that way but that's what I'm getting.
A friend of mine worked in fitting Yachts and I can tell you, he did earn very, very, very well at that job. Most often including gifts and bonuses. In his case it was mostly some saudi sheiks, but I don't think that it's a different case here.
Yeah, invite them all out on a vacation, he has 4 now, could do it in a few trips. He owns the company that made it, so he can pay for their trip. Name near a staircase that you step all over everyday?
I can see where this comes from but I can also see myself doing it not really as a direct message to the builders that this is my "honoring" of them, but perhaps just for me to remember the people that built this boat every time I go up and down that staircase.
Earlier today I was thinking about how easily these guys could bankroll open source software projects that could be used by millions of people for decades to come, but instead they all need yachts.
Gross revenue yes, but that's NOT what they make and it is NOT the number of COPIES of games sold. Gross revenue is all money made before they pay developers their cut.
Also not all the revenue was from games sold, a chunk of it was from their own games, DLC (their own and othres) and microtransactions.
So let's call it 12 billion (gross) is direct game sales (Valves own games made ~2 Billion, and I think only 3 billion in DLC/MTX is a low-ball estimate).
That's ~4 Billion in NET revenue from game sales. Or 300M a month, so I wasn't far out.
To be fair, me pressing the buy button on steam a few times is definitely less work than what the engineers, carpenters and whatever other role has had a part in building a goddamn ship
He owns six yachts and bought the company to service them after he bought his last mega yacht and really liked the quality of the work done on it. The guy can't lose a dollar on Valve hardware for those who made him rich, but he can throw away billions on yachts for himself.
It's hilarious how people are such dick sucks for Gabe. Everyone hates the rich, except for Gabe. Apparently it's fine for him to be a multi-billionaire and own a mega yacht.
I mean, he does make his money from a company that pays they’re employees exorbitantly good wages and that just so happens to operate in a market where it’s one of the highest earning companies per employee.
The only argument to made for steam earning less is by lowering the % they take from sales so more would go to developers. And for indie devs sure, triple A companies? They’d just pocket it.
Is the way of humans, just modern kings really. Laws cant really touch them, they can basically get away with almost anything - or bury it in so much litigation it wont come back up in their lifetimes.
The average pay of a Valve employee is $1m. I’m sure they get a bonus on top. Even if they don’t. That’s a great pay.
Gabe knows that it’s about customer satisfaction, so I’m sure he’s smart enough that employee satisfaction is what makes it become customer satisfaction.
The people building these ship were not Valve employees. Valve is not a shipbuilding company nor does it have a division doing that. These people work(ed) for another company and did a project for Gaben and probably havent had any communication besides maybe surface level stuff or maintenance with him since
This is probably going to be unpopular because yachts are seen as a massive dick measuring contest between billionaires but ... Yachts are also one of the biggest fucking wastes of money in the world. Part of the reason is that they need a LOT of staff. Anyone have the numbers on how many jobs this single ship creates?
I also want to mention that Gabe does own the premier deep sea diving vessel DSV Limiting Factor and I dont think hes ever used it himself, it is only used by qualified scientists doing real research. He also owns some kind of ocean research company. He's like heavily involved in several things that may actually benefit humanity here and its possible the yacht could be used for these goals as well?
Also is gabe actively engaged in lobbying political groups to fuck over everyone else?
People can change, nobody should probably have that much power through their wealth but I do think there might be some stark differences.
i mean even if they are a waste of money gabe is fuckyou rich so it doesnt really matter, its better for the economy if gabe does something with that money and employs people than he just has it stored
I look at it this way. Gabe is making billions and then turning around and spending that billions on stuff that gives people very high paying jobs and those people pay tax on that wealth and buy things in their economy and pay for work to be done on their houses which helps the trades, etc, etc. Whereas other billionaires are creating shit jobs for shit pay and then giving that wealth to like a handful of people that are just high ranking politicians that pass laws that continue to fuck the working class over and none of it actually trickles down like a Gabe Billionaire. I prefer the Gabe Billionaires.
You're right that megayachts are extraordinarily wasteful, and there are meaningful differences between billionaires. Newell deserves credit for funding legitimate scientific research, and Leviathan has genuine research capabilities. But there's a difference between supporting valuable research and demonstrating that an estimated $500 million private luxury yacht is a justified use of resources. Even if it eventually contributes to important discoveries, that doesn't mean its extravagant amenities were necessary or that those resources couldn't have been used more productively.
And certainly, there's a difference between billionaires who use their wealth to undermine the public interest and those who don't. But refraining from harmful political lobbying doesn't justify possessing such extraordinary economic power.
Your acknowledgement that nobody should have that much wealth and power gets to the fundamental issue. Fortunes of this magnitude depend on the collective work of employees, publicly funded research, infrastructure, and society itself. Yet the resulting economic power is concentrated in the hands of a tiny number of individuals, largely beyond democratic accountability.
Newell may be more socially responsible than other billionaires, and those differences matter. But being better than other billionaires doesn't make the concentration of wealth and power legitimate. We shouldn't have to depend on the generosity of wealthy individuals to determine which scientific research gets funded or which social needs are addressed. Workers and communities should have a meaningful democratic say in the economic institutions that shape their lives.
The issue isn't whether some billionaires are better than others. It's why we should accept a system that gives anyone such extraordinary private power in the first place.
and why should him to begin with? i mean they get paid is not like they were getting hit with a whip lmao. this seems kinda holy er than thou from his part tbh
You know, all this spontaneous anti-gabe hate is really starting to feel forced. Ever since his lawsuit wins against the rothschilds, it really makes you wonder
Look I don't like any billionaires but Steam helps keep me semi sane and he isn't even in the top 10,000 people who need to be "banned from the server" so any of my complaints about him are small potatoes compared to the likes of Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon.
I get this argument of he's not the worst billionaire but this rings to the same tone of environmentalist swifties.
No one person deserves a massive boat with a crew when there's a housing and food crisis for a majority of the population.
This glass etched monument probably cost Gabe about 30k which would be approximately 9 minutes and 49.8 seconds of his (8hr) work day to pay for. So, he spent the equivalent of a Starbucks coffee for that.
Millionaires and billionaires should be held accountable for wreckless pursuits such as owning yachts and personal air craft.
Buuuut did he pay them fair wages? Gestures like that are nice and dandy, but it's more important, that he pays the workers well than commemorating their names.
I also do not want to insinuate that he does not. I have literally no Idea if Gabe is a good boss or not.
Unless I’m out of the loop, Gabe does not own a yacht building company. That means he would have to order one from a yacht builder. He is just a customer who agrees to a design plan and a price. The yacht builder is the one that would control what they paid the workers.
I would also bet that this yacht builder does not have 100% of the skilled workers necessary to build a yacht in-house, and therefore subcontracted some of the work. Now they become customers to another company, and the owners of those companies in turn decide what to pay their workers.
So, was everyone paid fairly? Maybe. Maybe not. Whatever they were paid, Gabe would have had zero say in it. He would have just agreed to the price of the yacht, not on the salaries or wages of the people building it.
This post is so funny, having the worker's name on a pane in his extravagantly wasteful megayacht is hardly an honor for the labor, what is this biased news. We made him rich, where's our tiny honor lol. We need fair taxes on the billionaires and the 1%!
Can we please, PLEASE, have some sort of restriction on Gabe posts in this sub? I’m serious, I’m trying to find good games and good sales and I’m going to have to unsubscribe from this circlejerk
the snark from everyone when you say this really doesnt help either lol. cant this sub be about like the platform and games and stuff instead of "my favorite billionaire is rich :3"
These 'yachts' are marine research vessels with laboratories and submarine bays and it's weird that people are talking about them without mentioning that.
Extremely overlooked fact in all this. Of course building a mega-yacht is an expensive venture but how much of that $500m is spent on all the lab/research equipment and facilities. Building a $500m building for sciences doesn't get nearly as much hate but because it's called a mega-yacht it gets hate very quickly.
Idk man is it weird that I don't really care how people spend their money? I get that this is reddit so all wealthy people are evil and the worst people on earth but I just cannot even pretend to care that Gabe bought a boat.
Calling it buying a boat is disingenuous. It's not a boat. Its a fucking mega yacht.
Some one buying a 500 million dollar toy when there are countless people who are struggling is just... Shity. If you have the money to single-handedly change the world for the better and you choose to buy toys with it, it's a huge dick move.
Now think about how a person gets that kind of money in the first place? Its not by doing good things. Not by being charitable. Not by paying their employees what they are worth.
So he did shitty things to become massively wealthy, and then spent his massive wealth on toys. Not unexpected but just... Shity
Should you lose sleep over one rich old dude doing something shity? No. Because it's a drop in the bucket of all the shitty things being done by the rich. A tiny drop.
Es tan absurdo que hayan escogido justo que el billón de dolares es la línea que define a alguien bueno de alguien malo... Nadie ha ganado su fortuna jugando limpio
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u/Blaketurney 2h ago
honoring himself