outside of making money for your yacht collection

Interesting tidbit I just learned: apparently he's really into marine biology and most of those are research vessels

Well, at the risk of repeating the obvious, what do you pay a legal expert for? As in, what did you hire them to do?

If you hired them to do research on current laws and regulations to see what you must abide by / can get away with, then you've paid them for information, even if its information you don't want to hear.

If you hired them to represent your interests, to argue your case in court for you as their client, then yeah you can't really have a lawyer that's wishy washy on your position. As stupid as they sound, that's what Trump's DOJ is doing at great risk to their own careers. Which is why more and more of them are resigning.

To be fair, their job is also to recommend the course of action least likely to get Valve sued.

Dont be too hard on this lawyer, though, as his advice has saved Valve big time in the past.

(If you're not familiar, there is a small amount of info about it in the article.)

A big part of legally protecting a company is being proactive about things that will get you sued. The lawyers were correctly operating in our bad criminal Justice system.

Have you seen what Steam's forums look like? They NEED better moderation. They need to put an end to all the racism and other hateful shit on there. It's a fucking disaster.

He should at least have a proper American given name like Bront or Firehose.

So what are you doing about steam?

1. Are you contributing to wine? Probably not
2. Are you helping develop good gaming hardware.. nope
3. Are you writing an alternative store? Nope
4. Are you providing gaming libraries.. Nope
5. Are you lobbying to defend gamers rights? Nope
6. Are you testing games for Wine to maintain the AppDB? Probably nope
7. Are you making it easy to distribute games on multiple platforms? Nope

The reality is, Linux mainly at this time on the desktop is only succeeding still thanks to steam. If any other store were in charge (including GOG), we'd be still stuck in windows, or worse (a console like nintendo). If Steam wasn't available, I wouldn't feel comfortable using Linux for my main desktop (even though, I play all my games on a rog ally X)

Those of us who played games on Linux before Steam was available will tell you how painful it was. Steam changed things completely, and offered an experience that just works (tm). Steam will also no doubt be one of the single biggest driving forces to get ARM on Linux up to snuff (thanks to Steam Frame) with X86 compatibility, in particular performance

Even for those who have been on steam for a decade or longer, old games are STILL working, because they've maintained runtime libraries and such to assist with that.

Gabe didn't get to where he was by dodgy tactics. He got there by providing a service gamers want, and by running a tight ship. He also stays out of politics and from my understanding, is actually known for being a good guy too and is transparent (other than about HL3). Unlike other billionaires, he's also not booking out whole islands intrusively either for a wedding, to flaunt their money.

He's a billionaire sure.. but, the average pay at Steam is also far above average, so its not like he's exploiting labor. And unlike companies like Oracle, the working conditions seem to be far better too. And unlike modern Apple, Steam is about creating products which are good, not simply seem good (which I respect a lot).

Something I want Valve to work on is a “blocklist” feature like Bluesky.

Valve themselves are libertarian and don’t want to quash any voices they don’t need to, including negative ones. However, community members could decide “We are tired of anti-woke trolls whining about inclusion, and creating their own enemies for rage farming”; and then write a blocklist of said trolls, that many players choose to subscribe to, making those posts invisible.

Could even configure a blocklist to remove any players with a Steam level of 1, just to remove factory-made bot accounts.

The forums are moderated (or in many cases not moderated) by the game publisher, not Steam. If they don't want to moderate they could technically close the forum for their game but very few publishers do so.

This isn't about this type of moderation, it's about NSFW censorship from payment processors.

Don't get me wrong, I definitely agree with you, but Steam is not the only place with this problem and Steam isn't the only one with lackluster moderation for it. We literally wouldn't be in the global political situations were in right now if it wasn't for propaganda flooding every facet of the internet. Gamers are a minority internationally and most actual gamers think the steam forums are not even worth looking at.

I'm just saying don't blame only blame Steam. There's an issue with this type of shit literally everywhere and nobody in charge gives a shit.

Because it is. It's social engineering.

This kind of "moderation" (read: censoring adult content) is something he doesn't want.