[worldfoodgood]

Valve makes a significant amount of their money from the gambling they've attached to their games, and profits immensely from the culture of farming loot boxes to gamble on for skins and such.

They also take an absurd cut of developer income and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want. (Selling on Steam? Valve takes 30% and forces you to moderate the forums on your listing page that you cannot opt out of.)

They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.

Valve has done some cool stuff, but let's not lionize them too much. They are probably better than an average company, for sure, but it's important to remember that they are also sketchy in some very gross ways as well.

[xhrpost]

If you were a dev selling a game years ago when physical distribution was the only method, you'd likely end up with a lot less than 70% after both the publisher and retailer take their cut.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/company-town-blog/sto...

[kwanbix]

The difference is that the company had to risk manufacturing cartridges, distributing them, etc. If the game didn't sell, you ended up with lots of money lost.

Steam is much much easier for Valve.

I am not saying it has a value, but 30% seems a lot.

Of course, in the end that 30% we end up paying it ourselves.

[throwuxiytayq]

It clearly isn’t easy, given that nobody else is doing it their way. Maintaining the company culture might be the toughest challenge of them all. The other game storefronts simply can’t resist muddying the water for the consumer, making the shopping experience hostile for some stupid ass monetization reasons. Shopping on Steam is a breeze, and it always feels like the store is on your side trying to help, instead of trying to get in the way. The developer-side publishing experience is much similar.

[kwanbix]

I shop on Epic Store and GOG and it is a breeze also.

I never had issues with GOG or Epic (where I buy less to be honest), but that might be me.

But Steam has the network effect. They launched first. Of were the first that successfully did it.

[throwuxiytayq]

I’m going to assume that while shopping on Epic you alt-tab to Steam to read reviews and to find out what the game is actually like.

[kwanbix]

No, I just look for video reviews.

Actually, something I always complain about Steam is that the videos of the games are not about the gameplay.

They are most of the time about the trailer, like if it was a movie. I want to see the game playing!

[Yoric]

I certainly do.

[worldfoodgood]

I look at neither for reviews. Steam Reviews are often bombed to hell for things like, "Game has woman. Woke." or "Game has racism." or other culture war nonsense. Or the very common, "Creator I follow on Youtube liked/disliked this game, so I left a similar review" or "Creator I dislike liked/disliked this game, so I left the opposite review". Or, the worst of all, "Game uses Unity/Unreal/Godot/Something Else, automatic dislike".

Ultimately, reviews of games tend to be pretty useless because people who play games have very little understanding of a) what makes games fun, and b) the complexity involved in making the games.

I have creators I follow whose tastes are closest to my own, and I watch their content for reviews, then go to the store that makes the best offer.

[dmix]

I use steam for the community as well. Just look at how bad reviews are on Xbox store, they are more like app store reviews... mostly complaining about a version update.

Steam also has a solid update/beta pipeline. Game companies post blog posts about new game updates so you keep up to date with development. They also did an amazing job with SteamOS which feels rock solid.

[kcplate]

> I am not saying it has a value, but 30% seems a lot.

I’d suggest that it’s cheap, at least historically compared to just about any other product that’s been sold. If I had a popular marketplace platform that basically sold my product without much need for human intervention on the transaction, that has real value. Honestly 30% seems like a bargain to me.

In marketing and sales of the product, any human that touches the process ultimately is getting a piece of that transaction. We may not have physical media, but that was actually probably the least of the expense associated with software products back in the day. Consider the army of people needed just to wholesale to retail, coordinate distribution, distribute…

My recollection from those days is that if the dev got 10% royalties of a purchase price they would have been ecstatic. If you offered them 70%? They probably would have thought “what’s the catch?”

[mrguyorama]

No, when you asked Nintendo to manufacture you a run of cartridges, you paid for them whether they sold or not. You took that risk. Nintendo took zero risks per game, they took the risk in the physical hardware. Legacy game distribution also never took the risk. Retailers were able to return unsold inventory. There were court cases about this when companies tried to go around Nintendo's cartridge building services to save money. Those companies largely won their court cases, so then we made the DMCA to say "No, get fucked"

The up front risk you take on Steam is $100. It still ends up being a meaningful risk because the numbers show almost nobody makes that back, because developers are so interested in selling their game on steam that the market is outright supersaturated.

>Of course, in the end that 30% we end up paying it ourselves.

I used to buy video games at walmart. Unlike games I bought at walmart, Valve has done things that retroactively add value to games I bought decades ago, like remote play together, adding internet multiplayer to games that never even thought about it, and a controller system that allows pretty much anything you can think of. Games that had zero controller support for a decade just do now, no extra download, and the required configuration is often the single button press to select whatever configuration someone else made. Valve created an entirely new software platform for games that makes it so even games that are utterly broken on modern systems can work again, and it's just built in. If I buy a game today, I'm pretty confident I can play it in 20 years. An actual system for sharing digital games with other accounts, with large caveats.

Refunds, despite Valve only offering them because it's the law in several countries and they were losing court cases, are not a thing for physical game purchases here in the US. Once you take off the shrink wrap, you are fucked.

Steam has built in support for Beta branches and old game versions that the game dev can enable. Steam has built in support for DLC, and market systems for trading and selling digital "goods", not that I really think that's a good thing but some people seem to. Steam has fully built in support for cloud saves.

Steam has a fully integrated "friends" system, and that system is convenient for the end user and includes features like screen sharing and voice chat and gifting people games.

Steam offers fully integrated mod management for at least a large subset of all possible mods for any game.

Like I cannot stress enough how even if video games were 30% more expensive in steam (they aren't, devs distributing through steam are making a larger portion of the profit than they used to), retroactively adding functionality to games I bought a decade ago and producing a system that makes it very likely I can play these same games in 20 years is so worth it. Everything else is just a bonus. Their hardware also shows great value per dollar, so the "They are overcharging" narrative just doesn't track.

Meanwhile, steam avoids problems that plague other digital storefronts. Easy returns (again, forced on them), their launcher mostly respects my resources and doesn't destroy my computer every time there's an update, the way Valve negotiates terms they have a much better setup: Even if a publisher or developer pulls their game, as long as you bought it before then you can always install it and play it. Transformers Devastation was pulled from the store years ago and cannot be purchased by anyone I think anywhere, but I can still download and play it on a new machine because that's the contract Valve got Activision to sign. The game literally doesn't have a store page anymore.

Fuck Valve's child gambling profits and invention of loot boxes, but their distribution business is unambiguously the most respectful of the consumer and developer. Only GOG with their work towards preservation and lack of DRM comes close.

I own 4000 games on steam. That's about 3900 more than I would have ever bought in a world without Steam. Their wishlist system is a direct driver of sales that wouldn't happen otherwise. When the Epic Store launched, it didn't even have a damn shopping cart.

[paulryanrogers]

Steam can also take away things from games you "bought", like GTA getting replaced with a lower quality remaster and different sound track.

[russelg]

I think it's a bit disingenuous to blame Steam for a decision Rockstar made. The final decision lies with the publisher as to what game actually ships. If they want to remove their old listings and replace them with a worse offering, that's on them.

[paulryanrogers]

GOG can't do this because (nearly all) of the hosted games have stand-alone installers that users can archive themselves. AFAIU that's not possible with Steam.

[kwanbix]

> No, when you asked Nintendo to manufacture you a run of cartridges, you paid for them whether they sold or not. You took that risk.

That was exactly my point. Distributors like EA or Activision will charge you because they took that risk. It wasn't Nintendo or SEGA.

Valve is like Activision, not like Nintendo.

Nintendo charged you because they lost money on the consoles. Valve looses no money.

[Yoric]

As someone who sold a few pieces of (non-gaming) software I (co-)wrote in a box in the 90s, I seem to recall that just the retailer kept ~70%. With the remaining 30%, you had to pay for the physical aspects (the box, the discs, the manual, etc.), the publisher and the developers.

[umvi]

I'm happier to pay Valve's 30% than Apple's. With Valve you could always switch to Itch or something if you didn't want to pay, but with Apple you have no alternative. Valve gives you access to a huge player base and lots of useful marketing tools and such.

[ThrowawayR2]

You are happy now and will probably be for as long as Gabe Newell is in charge of Valve. (He's 63, by the way; not quite elderly but not young either.) After he retires, well, Valve, as the dominant gatekeeper for PC gaming, has a lot of opportunities for cranking up monetization that investors would just love to get their hands on.

[scheeseman486]

So it's either choosing to buy from a company that might become public after the owner dies which then succumbs to the rot that you admit is inevitable with public companies. Or choosing the companies that are already public that is already exploitative and only interested in short term gains?

That's actually a very easy choice to make.

[pseudalopex]

Investors did not imply public. Enshittification is not limited to public companies. They did not say it was inevitable. Are GOG exploitative and only interested in short term gains?

[knollimar]

Don't they have a disgusting most favored nations clause that prohibits you from pricing anywhere else lower (e.g. you can't raise price X by 42% and sell on your site for X)?

I think they're being sued over delisting someone for this last I checked, even if their public policy might not interpret their MFN that way

[0xbadcafebee]

> Valve gives you access to a huge player base and lots of useful marketing tools and such.

So does Apple. Despite this, they are both engaged in rent-seeking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking), which has a harmful effect on everyone but them.

Imagine if roads weren't public, but were built by a single private company. You have a business that moves goods by truck. You can use the private company's roads, but only if you pay 30% of the profit of your goods to the company that owns the roads. It only takes 2% of the profit to maintain the roads; the other 28% is profit (rent) for the road-owning company.

You could choose not to use the roads. But then the only way to deliver the goods is by parachute (which may be possible, but isn't practical). So you use the roads. But this means you have to jack up your prices to make any profit for yourself. Competing is much harder (tighter margins), and your customers are paying more than necessary. Everyone's life is harder, except for the road company.

[mjr00]

Except in this example, there is nothing preventing other companies from building new roads. And in fact other companies have attempted to build new roads, competing by lowering the 30% fee to 10%, and even paying trucking companies to start using their roads. Except their roads are so poorly maintained that trucking companies choose to continue using the existing roads despite the higher fee. Also EA made some roads that went directly into the ocean for some reason.

This doesn't match with the definition of rent-seeking at all, as described in your wikipedia link:

> Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth.

To my knowledge, Valve has not manipulated public policy or economic conditions to maintain Steam's dominance. Steam hasn't pushed for legislation to prevent competitors, it hasn't prevented developers from selling their games on other platforms, and it doesn't even prevent you from installing non-Steam games on Valve's own proprietary hardware and operating system.

[roggenilsson]

>Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth

Would the PC video game market be bigger or smaller without steam?

[Loughla]

I think it would be smaller.

While I hate always connected DRM, and lamented the death of physical media when steam got huge (and also refused to get a steam account for years for that reason), we would have multiple shitty stores if steam didn't exist, I think.

Look at epic and all the other distributors. Their stores are terrible and that's with the inherent competition of going against steam. Imagine if they were the only game in town. . .

[Ekaros]

Also looking at history. Download stores run by game stores. Or some startup. Some random extra DRM involved. Shut down in a few years without recourse... Just imagine that repeating every few years. Maybe fine for Linux and Mac users who expect no longevity from their purchases. But as PC user, no not acceptable.

[worldfoodgood]

Ok!

Happier is a fine place to be. They are both still too high. Not everything has to be binary -- I can think Valve is offering some utility and also think that Valve is charging too much for that utility.

The fact that Gabe has a billion dollars worth of yachts probably suggests that maybe, just maaaaaybe, that 30% could be lower and Steam could still provide you the same level of marketing support and player base.

[daedrdev]

You can just not sell your game on steam if you dont agree.

The sales you will miss are what steam brings to the table

[Whoppertime]

The only reason EpicGameStore was able to rise as a competitor to Steam was because of the Billions Fortnite was earning.

[mathgeek]

Pretty much. If it weren’t for free games and exclusives there would be no Epic Store to speak of.

[Whoppertime]

It's like being a first party for a Video Game Console. Gabe Newell having a billion in Yachts, Bill Gates might have a billion dollars tied up in Real Estate. It has less to say about the personal greed of Gabe Newell and more to say about the relative size of the market.

[keyringlight]

I think while PC is a good example of epic struggling to compete with someone who took full advantage of being first mover, the apple appstore/google play mobile stores are also where they've put in significant financial/legal effort trying to create a more lucrative openings in that market as well.

[worldfoodgood]

I don't understand. You think Steam exists without Half Life and Counterstrike?

[DaSHacka]

Nowadays? Yes

[mathgeek]

I don’t believe what you are asking, nor do I claim to. Claiming one thing does not automatically exclude all other causes.

[galkk]

That’s weird argument. How about letting man to enjoy the fruits of his work?

[worldfoodgood]

That's a weird structuring of the concern. How about letting all developers enjoy the fruits of their work?

[gretch]

they are free to do that - simply don't sell your game on steam

[sumedh]

> The fact that Gabe has a billion dollars worth of yachts probably suggests that maybe

That is not a good argument though. Try building your own distribution and take some of those billions.

[jhatemyjob]

I think Gabe is doing a great job. If he wants to have a billion dollars worth of yachts, that's fine by me.

[klipklop]

Gabe made his initial fortune working at Microsoft. He almost lost it all putting it into Valve/Steam. At one point they were close to not even being able to make payroll. He bet everything on the company.

You are welcome to start your own progressive game market place for PC. Go undercut him and charge 5% fees. You literally just need to dump game files on a CDN right? How hard can it be? /s

I do find it odd that this account is new and the type of posts it leaves. Seems almost like an LLM...

[bigyabai]

> They are both still too high.

You don't get to decide that. Apple's price is not set by free market competition, Valve's is.

[rcxdude]

Valve's price is still very strongly predicated on network effects which make it very hard to avoid.

[jsheard]

Indeed, when big publishers like EA and Ubisoft started leaving Steam they introduced a tiered pricing system which progressively reduces the cut to 25% or 20% after tens of millions of dollars in revenue, to lure those AAA juggernauts back. The price is now indirectly based on how much leverage you have over Valve - Ubisoft can get away with not releasing their games on Steam, so they pay 20%, while small-to-medium studios effectively have no choice, so they pay 30%.

It's especially backwards when you consider that those AAA games put far more strain on Steams infrastructure with their >150GB install sizes.

[Shacklz]

They absolutely earn it though. Steam just works.

Heck, I've not bought games because they were not on Steam or required another launcher. Ubisoft and Rockstar are so bad that I held off on buying some games I really wanted to play; they're just that awful. EA's Origin was also pretty bad last time I checked.

I guess it's an actually hard problem to make a somewhat decent launcher in big companies with too many PMs playing turfwars, but still, almost everyone except Valve is shitting the bed so hard that as a consumer I'd happily pay quite the markup if it would allow me to avoid other launchers. They're that bad.

[DaSHacka]

Almost like they make the best game distribution platform around for customers, and thus customers flock to it.

[mrguyorama]

What? What network effects?

There are even games you can buy on one service and play multiplayer with people who buy it on steam! I chose to buy MSFS2020 through steam for example because the steam platform is dramatically better than the absurd way the Windows Store does anything, but we fly in the same skies!

There's no lock in or exclusivity. You can literally buy the same exact executable from multiple places, and the only change is the feature the store program supports. Buying a game through the Epic Store for example won't let you use steam input, but you can even then play it on the steam deck with some effort! I think you can even use Proton on executables you don't get through steam!

A dev can even make it so that, if you buy their game on steam, you do not have to have steam running or installed to play it. They have that freedom. They also have the freedom to mark a version of the game such that steam allows you to access that old version forever

If you are a dev who releases a game on steam, you can mint a bulk quantity of steam keys and sell or distribute those outside of steam!. Probably if you abused it, Valve would tighten it up or ban you, but why would you bite the hand that feeds you? It's how, for example, Humble Bundle initially worked.

That's right, you don't even need to buy your game from Valve to use all their features! A substantial portion of my library paid money to Amazon instead, through humble bundle.

People use Steam because it has 20 years of established trustworthiness in an industry otherwise made up entirely of assholes who hate you.

Meanwhile, in the place that Steam does poorly: Old games, GOG has much more of the market.

People actually are willing to pay for trust and care. Steam has repeatedly and regularly improved how their storefront displays information and informs consumers, because their primary problem is discoverability and wading through the mountains of games from people desperate to collect some of the money waterfall that Valve enables.

When you put a game on Steam, the contract ensures that anyone who purchases it cannot lose access without it being Valve's decision. Developers or publishers who do stupid things or pull games five years down the line cannot prevent you from playing a game you buy on steam if it isn't dependent on some server somewhere. None of the other storefronts have ANYTHING like this, mostly because they are run by the exact companies who WANT to be able to prevent you from ever playing an old game again, so they can sell the same thing to you in a new box.

Compare that to Apple's 30%, which similarly has lots of features their platform enables including unlocking significant consumer spending, but they do not give you any alternative. If you want even a single dollar from someone on an iPhone, you HAVE to pay apple 30%, and at least for a while they wanted that even to cover netflix subscriptions for example.

If you as a developer do not want to pay valve 30%, you are free to do like Notch did for Minecraft and distribute it yourself, and you are free to run into the same problem it had where my friend was unable to purchase minecraft for decades because his bank refused to send money to the Scandinavian bank involved, whereas even a literal child without a debit card can use birthday money to buy a steam gift card and purchase your game with no adult involvement. (maybe that's not a good thing for society, but it's great for game dev business).

Valve does not have a moat other than simply consumer trust. Minecraft sold a hundred million copies through a dude's website. There has literally never been a moat in computer game distribution. An entire industry of British children existed writing games and selling them in local stores. A moat has never been possible, because Valve cannot make your computer not run other software.

[ceejayoz]

Apple's price definitely gets affected by competition.

https://9to5mac.com/2025/05/19/apple-may-lower-app-store-com...

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-announces-app-s...

[bigyabai]

I didn't say "affected" though, I said set. Valve plays by common rules, Apple does not.

[ceejayoz]

This is an odd attempt at a gotcha. Neither Valve nor Apple has their cut “set” by the market. Both are “affected” by market influences.

[vkou]

Valve charges 30% for access to their marketplace, and allows you to sell Steam keys for your game at whatever price you want through your own sales channels, without paying Valve a cent.

I'm not sure how any of that is sketchy or gross. As far as marketplaces and platforms go, this is quite reasonable, and there are many successful games which are either not on Steam, or are cross-listed on multiple platforms, or are cross-listed on both Steam and the developer's own distribution channel.

I'll give you lootboxes, they are pretty shitty.

[kotaKat]

> They also take an absurd cut of developer income and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want.

Fun fact: Nintendo's revenue split on WiiWare was 60/40, and required minimum downloads to even get your revenue out of Big N.

[xinayder]

> They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.

Source?

[tyg13]

No, that's the game engine.

[worldfoodgood]

A couple sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9aCwCKgkLo

https://medium.com/dunia-media/the-nightmare-of-valves-self-...

[jimbokun]

Not going to spend an hour watching a video.

The medium link says nothing about women and minorities specifically. It's a critique of flat management structures in general.

[doright]

Another source from 6 years ago: https://youtu.be/41XgkLKYuic

It seems like the flat management structure allowed an ad-hoc hierarchy of cliques to form in the office anyway, pitting entrenched teams of old-timers against new hires, but implicitly. When you think of the lack of support for TF2 over the years, this is illuminating.

It's astounding that Valve/Steam are still as successful as they are in spite of this culture.

[o11c]

The second link is paywalled, but from the various sources I looked at, the diversity problems with Valve seem limited to "Valve refuses to spend company time/effort to support my cause". I have not seen any concrete claims of misbehavior, in direct contrast to some other video game companies.

Additionally, when I actually look into the alleged statistics of claims that "Valve is primarily white and male", the numbers ... don't actually look that bad? We shouldn't expect any company to fit national demographics exactly.

[worldfoodgood]

Additional allegations of discrimination: https://discriminationandsexualharassmentlawyers.com/valve-c...

Allegations of unpaid labor: https://web.archive.org/web/20160209211205/https://www.reddi...

[jimbokun]

Did the plaintiff win that suit? (A quick Google didn't find the outcome.)

As for the second, I'm confused as to why anyone would provide unpaid labor to a large, profitable corporation.

[xinayder]

I was a member of STS and I can say crowdsourced translations were a million times better than the now-paid translation teams Valve hires.

And yes, while it was mostly "unpaid", during my time there (2016-2020), we had a year-end rally every year which the "fastest" teams to complete translations would receive Steam wallet codes for their effort. I received up to $350 the first year of rally.

The next year they gave us Artifact keys...

and then the one Valve employee managing the server left Valve, and STS was slowly being replaced by Crowdin

they essentially killed crowdsourcing starting with Artifact. We (the STS members) had no access to new strings, then came Underlords, the new client... Only TF2 translations are crowdsourced to this day. The rest are done by their external teams.

[josefx]

Going by the short update on this page, no: https://kotaku.com/former-valve-employee-sues-for-3-1-millio...

[xinayder]

Allegations of unpaid labor are for crowdsourced translations and have nothing to do with Valve as a workplace.

This controversy is known and there are a few translators on Steam/Valve that came from the community, but nowadays it is mostly outsourced, and they do a terrible job (they replaced gamers with people who can't even bother to download the game to check the context a string is applied to).

[Bombthecat]

How much money do they make through counter strike loot boxes and selling games etc?

[throw10920]

The only thing absurd is this comment.

> They also take an absurd cut of developer income

30%-20% is by no means "absurd", given the incredible value that Steam provides to developers: content delivery, payment processing, cloud saves, ratings, game tags, social integration, wishlisting and sale notification, search indexing, game discovery, a bunch of incredibly useful APIs including networking and input, Linux compatibility, and many, many other things.

In fact, 30% of revenue is well under what it would cost me to implement all of the features that I want from Steam as a developer, unless I somehow won the jackpot and ended up selling millions of copies (in which case I would end up only paying 20% of revenue anyway).

> and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want. (Selling on Steam? Valve takes 30%

Which you already mentioned, while somehow conveniently omitting the fact that the cut decreases to 20% if your revenue is high enough.

> and forces you to moderate the forums on your listing page that you cannot opt out of

This is the single possibly objectionable thing here.

> They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.

~~Allegations~~ mean nothing. Are there successful lawsuits?

> Valve has done some cool stuff, but let's not lionize them too much.

Valve is incomparably better than every other major game distribution platform, which is the comparison that we're making. You are very intentionally making manipulative and dishonest points to try to paint Valve as worst than it is. Which makes sense, because you're a throwaway account.

[eckmLJE]

I appreciate what you've posted here. Valve fanboyism is widespread (I'm guilty of it too) and while they are shoulders above the alternatives, it's a good reminder that no one's perfect and I'll be sure to take a closer look at the company in the future.

[worldfoodgood]

That's all I was saying. Valve is way ahead of most of the rest of everyone else. But they are still shady.

We should be ok with pointing at the shady parts of things we like and going, "It would be better if it were not so shady."

Valve is good in many ways! Valve would be better if it didn't profit from getting kids to gamble on skins!

[Forgeties79]

10% if it’s a Linux copy ;)

[sugarpimpdorsey]

> They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.

If they don't like the culture, then they should work elsewhere.

I hear Google is hiring.

Nothing worse than joining a company you contributed zero to building from the ground up, then unilaterally deciding the culture needs to change according to your whims, right now.

You might feel uncomfortable working in a black barber shop. Or a cat cafe with pet allergies. You've contributed nothing to their business, they shouldn't have to change for you.

[worldfoodgood]

What nonsense. A decision about workplace should be a combination of factors -- workplace culture, products you can work on, compensation, skill fit, alignment with your interests, etc.

You should feel empowered to have a voice in the products of your labor. And you should feel empowered to have a voice in the culture that produces those products.

[sugarpimpdorsey]

They're a game company. They're not feeding the poor.

Your employment is "at will".

You are not entitled to any item in your list of demands.

You are, however, free to leave at any time for something more suited to your tastes.

[KittenInABox]

I think employees are actually entitled to some of those things, like not being made uncomfortable purely because they are a minority or a female. I would find the opposite position to be an exceptionally strange take: that it is entitled to not want to work at a place that puts you in uncomfortable positions for your sex or your race.

I don't have an opinion on Valve or allegations Valve is doing that. I just find it very strange to say it's entitled for a black to want to be treated as equally as a white.

[sugarpimpdorsey]

Being uncomfortable has no equivalence to racism, which you are trying to assert.

Assume a white guy voluntarily takes a job working in a wig shop that only sells black women's hair care products. He's going to be uncomfortable at some point. Does he have a right to not be uncomfortable? Should the company culture change, should they stop selling wigs and ditch their customers until he becomes comfortable?

No. The easiest solution is he should work elsewhere. He took the job knowing exactly what was involved. So no, you are not entitled to not be culturally uncomfortable.

[KittenInABox]

What kind of "uncomfortable for women and minorities" if not racism or sexism?

Also wait does this mean Valve is white males-oriented culture and that minorities/women should expect to be made uncomfortable by lieu of being hired there? I think that's an even weirder take!

[throw10920]

It's kinda wild how part of the modern zeitgeist is entitlement to be comfortable, and how irrationally people will defend that entitlement, including to the point of being literally racist and sexist.

[worldfoodgood]

> You are not entitled to any item in your list of demands.

Can you point to the word entitled in my posts? Or are you putting words in my mouth?

Can you point to any demands? Or are you arguing against something I didn't say?

[thereisnospork]

You seem to be misunderstanding how language works? Can you please explain why you think the literal word entitled had to be said by you here?

You listed a bunch of things which should be, an opinion, he says your not entitled to those things, a probable fact relevant to the likelihood of attaining your professed desires, and he then offers a solution if you are unhappy with not having the things you professed 'should' be afforded.

[worldfoodgood]

I don't think you understand how discourse works?

I made no demands and I made no assertions about entitlements. That reply to me was a strawman.

I made two statements: 1) I suggested people have multiple criteria for selecting a workplace, not just culture. 2) I suggested people should have the ability to voice their input over their work. (Note, that's a weaker claim than "people should have input over their work". Just that they should feel like they are able to voice their input.)

Neither of those two things are demands nor entitlements, and the latter I would assume would be pretty non-controversial unless you believe that bosses should have absolute and complete control over every facet of a worker's job. (I guess I work in tech, where it's pretty widely accepted that people have autonomy to make some decisions on their own about how and what work is achieved.)

[abtinf]

> but it's important to remember that ... as well

Hello LLM.