No, they're still overcharging us if they make enough profit that the boss could become a billionaire while the employees make more than the industry average.

I don't know what goes though people's mind to get them to defend for profit private companies, they're not there to be your friend, they're there to get you to take the money you earned and spend it while gaslighting you into believing that you get your money's worth.

[–] RandomException@sopuli.xyz 39 points 5 months ago (14 children)

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 -29 points 5 months ago (13 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.

[–] RandomException@sopuli.xyz 13 points 5 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 -17 points 5 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 5 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).

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