Gabe Newell caps off Steam Machine week by taking delivery of a new $500 million superyacht with a submarine garage, on-board hospital and 15 gaming PCs
Over 2,000 people were involved in the vessel's creation, and all of their names are engraved on a glass panel in the main staircase.
Actually pretty classy.
However,
Nobody should have that much fucking money.
71
LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins [none/use name] - 4w
You want cables? This baby's got 280 miles of them, powering everything from an on-board hospital (with live-in nurse), air conditioning, satellites, cavernous garages for tenders (small boats, not chicken) and submarines, and of course entertainment systems.
Just a random paragraph
29
LeninWeave [none/use name, any] - 4w
You want cables?
Who the fuck is the target audience of this article? AM?
22
purpleworm [none/use name] - 4w
And even given that, this is a shitty use of it
16
Belly_Beanis [he/him] - 4w
Seriously if I'm building a giant fucking boat with an on-board hospital, the hospital is going to be the boat's main purpose. Imagine having a mobile hospital that can travel to any disaster in or near the ocean to provide immediate assistance.
Instead, it's going to be medical staff sitting around playing on steam decks because there's nothing to do.
12
SootySootySoot [any] - 4w
Okay, so Gabe Newell has.. too much money.
And the reason we see nothing of him anymore is that he's given up caring about games and is instead busy doing really standard rich person stuff, achieving bugger all.
51
Parzivus [any] - 4w
At least he just fucked off and didn't ruin Steam on the way out. Gonna be a sad day if they ever go public
38
Aradino [they/them, comrade/them] - 4w
Implying steam was ever good
21
Monk3brain3 [any, he/him] - 4w
Yup steam is a fucking awful monopoly. I don't know why people think Newell is anything but standard subhuman billionaire trash.
20
LeninWeave [none/use name, any] - 4w
I don't know why people think Newell is anything but standard subhuman billionaire trash.
Amerikkkans are always searching for the one good capitalist who pulled himself up by his bootstraps to become just a smol bean billionaire. Even many who should know better subconsciously still believe in the Amerikkkan Dream.
Steam does have some benefits, however, that I don't blame people for enjoying. It's more convenient that 1000 CDs with 1000 different DRM schemes. It's convenient to have a central library for managing and launching everything, though that could have been accomplished in a vendor neutral way (but wasn't because there's no profit in that).
17
robot_dog_with_gun [they/them] - 4w
have you seen the competition? all those publisher apps suck shit. steam doesn't do most of the things that make a monopoly bad and having 50 different logins with 49 extra chances for your credit card to be stolen isn't better.
11
Monk3brain3 [any, he/him] - 4w
I mean it's definitely the best of worst but people make it sound like it's actually good. It's extremely bad for developers. Basically digital rent seeking, their favored nation clauses, more or less erasing physical media and the second hand market. This is just off the top of my head. But steam is awful
9
robot_dog_with_gun [they/them] - 4w
i don't know about where you live but there was basically no second-hand market for win 9x games anyway.
5
Monk3brain3 [any, he/him] - 4w
In small towns yeah you'll never get a second hand market. But everywhere else you can. I mean even now there is a big market for second hand switch games. You can basically play any game for like $20 if you buy used (or even new) and sell when you're done.
2
Aradino [they/them, comrade/them] - 4w
Steam is one of those publisher apps. It's just the least shit one because it launched significantly earlier and people were forced to use it.
When it launched, and for solidly the first decade of it's existence, it was widely considered to be resource hogging and intrusive DRM.
7
robot_dog_with_gun [they/them] - 4w
you don't have to tell me, i held out on making an account until 2015
5
vovchik_ilich [he/him] - 4w
Steam is good for gamers. For developers, not so much, but I love being able to press a button, download on any computer a game I bought, and have my saved games on cloud storage. Epic Games, arguably their biggest competitor, has been giving out weekly free games for years because Steam is so good that people don't leave it even with games for free. Built-in mod support, good download speeds, excellent compatibility with gamepads using the Big Picture mode... It's a really good platform to play with.
Sure, it's still a capitalist business and all of that should be nationalized and made public, especially before it inevitably turns to dogshit, but it is a good platform to play on, as of now.
15
Parzivus [any] - 4w
It does basically everything I want from a game distribution service. For singleplayer games it's fine to grab an exe off of GOG/itch/some torrent, but getting friends to do multiplayer is a lot easier on Steam than going back to the Hamachi days, lol
12
BilduEnjoyer [he/him] - 4w
Oh my god, Hamachi. That word just unlocked a part of my brain that hasn't been activated since 2012, woah.
8
RedWizard [he/him, comrade/them] - 4w
Hamachi was great. We used to keep a network up with DC++ servers on it for sharing media.
2
miz [any, any] - 4w
better than digging through CD wallets and finding the special DRM wheel
9
mendiCAN [none/use name] - 4w
Well... It is.
I'm not gaben fanboy, I'm a pirate. Even so, steam cloud saves and library sharing provides enough value to me that I'll actually purchase games.
Do I usually also download the pirate version of games I own to play? Damn right, but if I want to share the games I like best with my less technical friends n fam? I get the steam versions.
4
chgxvjh [he/him, comrade/them] - 4w
I prefer the simple hedonism over nefarious philanthropy shit or investing into other industries.
2
SootySootySoot [any] - 4w
I'm more concerned with the extremely needless and harmful waste of $500 million dollars worth of goods, rather than what the rich person says its for.
Hundreds of lifetimes of work down the drain for this shit.
1
nothx [he/him] - 4w
you see tho... he's one of the good billionaires because he makes linux gaming machines.
30
Dort_Owl [they/them, any] - 4w
WHY DO YOU NEED 15 OF THEM, GABE? 15?!?! WHY?!? WHAT?!? WHY?!?
29
booty [he/him] - 4w
Even if you gave them specs so insane no game could possibly challenge them, 15 absolute max top-end ridiculous overkill gaming PCs is still less than $100k. (My estimate number for "a gaming PC so expensive you would have no reason to ever build it" is $5k btw) He would have to buy 100,000 of those hypothetical overkill PCs to match the cost of this yacht. So... 15 PCs is by far the most reasonable part of the headline.
Actually 15 PCs can make for a sick LAN party so it's not like they're just there to burn money, like a yacht is
34
KobaCumTribute [she/her] - 4w
(My estimate number for "a gaming PC so expensive you would have no reason to ever build it" is $5k btw)
I looked at builds for NVidia's current "design your dream build with a budget of $5k" contest, and it doesn't go nearly as far as you'd think now. RAM prices are absurd beyond measure now, to say nothing of how GPUs have gone. Like it breaks down to $2.5k for a 5090 and around $1k for 128GB of RAM. If you just slapped down the best consumer CPU (~$600-700) and GPU (~$2500-3000), maxed out the RAM ($1,500-2000), included a nice monitor ($500-1000), and didn't bother cutting corners on the rest (which broadly end up in the range of $100-200 each, plus or minus some) you'd probably hit $7k with how fucked PC parts are right now.
So pretty close to your guess, since the big fluctuation is fairly recent.
21
purpleworm [none/use name] - 4w
I love AI farms and I guess also crypto farms
13
LeninWeave [none/use name, any] - 4w
I think this is 100% AI, the amount of hardware involved makes crypto look minor.
11
booty [he/him] - 4w
ha ha ha
I remember when PC gaming was straight up cheap. Then crypto bullshit happened, and now AI bullshit is piling straight on top of it
10
aanes_appreciator [he/him, comrade/them] - 4w
Threadrippers are fucking hilariously priced, like £3k+ for the slower versions of the latest generation, and even then there are definitely benefits in a few games/programs that a "typical consumer" would use. Those are retail prices btw they get way more costly for the enterprise-grade chips AFAIK.
Linus Torvalds uses Apple Silicon Macs nowadays but in 2020 he had a $3500 PC and that's without a GPU on top.
1
Esoteir [he/him] - 4w
billionaire LAN parties obvs
21
30_to_50_Feral_PAWGs [she/her] - 4w
Can you imagine the ping times gaming over satellite on the open sea? You'd have to run your games over a local network.
11
Enjoyer_of_Games [comrade/them, he/him] - 4w
a LAN party on a local area network? can it be done?
21
SupFBI [comrade/them] - 4w
I prefer WAN parties. So I can call people names and not have a bottle of Bawls thrown at my head.
5
Esoteir [he/him] - 4w
still better ping than my ranked teammates
13
oscardejarjayes [comrade/them] - 4w
So he can play with others
14
LeeeroooyJeeenkiiins [none/use name] - 4w
In case 1 breaks you have 14 left duh
12
30_to_50_Feral_PAWGs [she/her] - 4w
Hexbear when Gaben yacht:
Hexbear when the yacht runs Linux:
29
Assian_Candor [comrade/them] - 4w
Under no circumstances do you gotta hand it to them
26
TheBroodian [none/use name] - 4w
On-board hospital? What the fuck?
24
barrbaric [he/him] - 4w
I feel like hospital is the wrong word given that it only has one nurse as staff. IMO it makes sense, Gabe's in his 60s and as a professional computer toucher he probably has all kinds of health problems now. Wouldn't want to risk a heart attack 1000 miles from the nearest healthcare.
38
JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them] - 4w
He's also still taking Covid seriously, last I heard. Plus, involved with some org working on an aerosol pathogen detection system.
Newell goes on to give some examples of what's currently taking up his time. "In one of the companies we're working on an aerosol pathogen detection device so you can see all the pathogens that are in the air. Brain-computer interfaces are incredibly cool and all of the associated neuroscience is incredibly cool."
I feel like that was less shocking than "submarine garage", honestly.
21
RNAi [he/him] - 4w
Why rich weirdos want yachts?
23
KobaCumTribute [she/her] - 4w
In his case, he does seem to just genuinely like the ocean and boats, and while his age and even more so health probably don't accommodate scuba diving he might be able to handle submersible trips. He has a history of funding marine ecology stuff and research submersibles and tagging along on the boats for those, so I assume it's literally that he's planning to live on the yacht at least part of the time, making it a half-billion dollar mansion with all his favorite toys on board.
No one should have that kind of money to throw around like that and the whole thing is a materially ludicrous waste of resources and labor just to cater to a rich guy just because he's retained a childlike ability to actually enjoy things despite his wealth, but it does seem to be a case of him just earnestly liking sea stuff more than the typical status symbol conspicuous consumption thing most of them are doing.
23
RNAi [he/him] - 4w
He better do a Schmidt Ocean Institute kind of vessel,
8
Hexamerous [none/use name] - 4w
A yacht is basically a floating palace with sea moat. The submarine is the escape tunnel.
19
aanes_appreciator [he/him, comrade/them] - 4w
Thinking about it, what people ascribe to Valve and its success as morally good, is actually just the market niche for mutual convenience, which Gabe Newell et al have cornered rather nicely.
It's not (inherently) morally good that Valve has chosen to build its vast hoard of wealth by implementing online software distribution on Windows, it was convenient because Windows had fuck all support for it, and Linux was still niche on desktop. For us, it was convenient to purchase games without leaving home or queueing for hours to get limited copies.
It's not (inherently) morally good that Valve has chosen to adopt Linux, fund open source projects, and provide a slither of repairability to its systems, it's convenient to leverage self-repair to reduce RMAs on hardware, and Linux was convenient because Microsoft already felt threatened by Steam's stranglehold on software distribution which was evidently a cashcow. For us, it's convenient to be able to repair shit than wait for weeks for a replacement, and Linux is convenient because its reduced bloat and free licensing reduced the up front cost for the Steamdeck.
In a different scenario, Valve could have been no different from EA, Activision, etc. and none of that is due to Gabe's ideology moreso than the fact capitalists are named after capital, not morals. Once the markets change for that equation to no longer make sense, there is nothing fundamentally different about Valve to not turn this around.
His $500million Yacht is the best reminder that capitalists have an allegience to their class, not some imagined duty to "PC Gamers"
9
psivchaz @reddthat.com - 4w
There's one thing that's a bit different: Valve isn't publicly traded and beholden to stockholders. That doesn't inherently make them good, either, but it does mean they CAN be good, while publicly traded companies really can't.
2
aanes_appreciator [he/him, comrade/them] - 4w
Maybe not beholden to shareholders external to the company, which the alienation thereof only encourages short term profit extraction, but Valve has shareholders within the company which are of course still profit-seeking. Valve's business model will continue to adapt towards that goal, regardless of moral imperatives.
I disagree on "good", I do enjoy steam and the hardware, but it's still an exploitative business with iffy ethics, just less so than Amazon. Like I said above, it simply fills the niche of the market for videogame hardware/software which wasn't exploited for a long time, if not ever. convenience for consumers is just smart business practices.
1
hello_hello [comrade/them] - 4w
Steam and valve are just as bad as Microsoft but the gamer treatlerites won't ever admit that having steam gatekeep video games through their shitty drm client is actually a bad thing, or that valve was one of the pioneers behind skinner box gambling addictions, or how much they take from developers as a middle man even though its not 2007 anymore and anyone can rent or host their own CDN.
BountifulEggnog in popularculture
Gabe Newell caps off Steam Machine week by taking delivery of a new $500 million superyacht with a submarine garage, on-board hospital and 15 gaming PCs
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/gabe-newell-caps-off-steam-machine-week-by-taking-delivery-of-a-new-usd500-million-superyacht-with-a-submarine-garage-on-board-hospital-and-15-gaming-pcs/Actually pretty classy.
However,
Nobody should have that much fucking money.
Just a random paragraph
Who the fuck is the target audience of this article? AM?
And even given that, this is a shitty use of it
Seriously if I'm building a giant fucking boat with an on-board hospital, the hospital is going to be the boat's main purpose. Imagine having a mobile hospital that can travel to any disaster in or near the ocean to provide immediate assistance.
Instead, it's going to be medical staff sitting around playing on steam decks because there's nothing to do.
Okay, so Gabe Newell has.. too much money.
And the reason we see nothing of him anymore is that he's given up caring about games and is instead busy doing really standard rich person stuff, achieving bugger all.
At least he just fucked off and didn't ruin Steam on the way out. Gonna be a sad day if they ever go public
Implying steam was ever good
Yup steam is a fucking awful monopoly. I don't know why people think Newell is anything but standard subhuman billionaire trash.
Amerikkkans are always searching for the one good capitalist who pulled himself up by his bootstraps to become just a smol bean billionaire. Even many who should know better subconsciously still believe in the Amerikkkan Dream.
Steam does have some benefits, however, that I don't blame people for enjoying. It's more convenient that 1000 CDs with 1000 different DRM schemes. It's convenient to have a central library for managing and launching everything, though that could have been accomplished in a vendor neutral way (but wasn't because there's no profit in that).
have you seen the competition? all those publisher apps suck shit. steam doesn't do most of the things that make a monopoly bad and having 50 different logins with 49 extra chances for your credit card to be stolen isn't better.
I mean it's definitely the best of worst but people make it sound like it's actually good. It's extremely bad for developers. Basically digital rent seeking, their favored nation clauses, more or less erasing physical media and the second hand market. This is just off the top of my head. But steam is awful
i don't know about where you live but there was basically no second-hand market for win 9x games anyway.
In small towns yeah you'll never get a second hand market. But everywhere else you can. I mean even now there is a big market for second hand switch games. You can basically play any game for like $20 if you buy used (or even new) and sell when you're done.
Steam is one of those publisher apps. It's just the least shit one because it launched significantly earlier and people were forced to use it.
When it launched, and for solidly the first decade of it's existence, it was widely considered to be resource hogging and intrusive DRM.
you don't have to tell me, i held out on making an account until 2015
Steam is good for gamers. For developers, not so much, but I love being able to press a button, download on any computer a game I bought, and have my saved games on cloud storage. Epic Games, arguably their biggest competitor, has been giving out weekly free games for years because Steam is so good that people don't leave it even with games for free. Built-in mod support, good download speeds, excellent compatibility with gamepads using the Big Picture mode... It's a really good platform to play with.
Sure, it's still a capitalist business and all of that should be nationalized and made public, especially before it inevitably turns to dogshit, but it is a good platform to play on, as of now.
It does basically everything I want from a game distribution service. For singleplayer games it's fine to grab an exe off of GOG/itch/some torrent, but getting friends to do multiplayer is a lot easier on Steam than going back to the Hamachi days, lol
Oh my god, Hamachi. That word just unlocked a part of my brain that hasn't been activated since 2012, woah.
Hamachi was great. We used to keep a network up with DC++ servers on it for sharing media.
better than digging through CD wallets and finding the special DRM wheel
Well... It is.
I'm not gaben fanboy, I'm a pirate. Even so, steam cloud saves and library sharing provides enough value to me that I'll actually purchase games.
Do I usually also download the pirate version of games I own to play? Damn right, but if I want to share the games I like best with my less technical friends n fam? I get the steam versions.
I prefer the simple hedonism over nefarious philanthropy shit or investing into other industries.
I'm more concerned with the extremely needless and harmful waste of $500 million dollars worth of goods, rather than what the rich person says its for.
Hundreds of lifetimes of work down the drain for this shit.
you see tho... he's one of the good billionaires because he makes linux gaming machines.
WHY DO YOU NEED 15 OF THEM, GABE? 15?!?! WHY?!? WHAT?!? WHY?!?
Even if you gave them specs so insane no game could possibly challenge them, 15 absolute max top-end ridiculous overkill gaming PCs is still less than $100k. (My estimate number for "a gaming PC so expensive you would have no reason to ever build it" is $5k btw) He would have to buy 100,000 of those hypothetical overkill PCs to match the cost of this yacht. So... 15 PCs is by far the most reasonable part of the headline.
Actually 15 PCs can make for a sick LAN party so it's not like they're just there to burn money, like a yacht is
I looked at builds for NVidia's current "design your dream build with a budget of $5k" contest, and it doesn't go nearly as far as you'd think now. RAM prices are absurd beyond measure now, to say nothing of how GPUs have gone. Like it breaks down to $2.5k for a 5090 and around $1k for 128GB of RAM. If you just slapped down the best consumer CPU (~$600-700) and GPU (~$2500-3000), maxed out the RAM ($1,500-2000), included a nice monitor ($500-1000), and didn't bother cutting corners on the rest (which broadly end up in the range of $100-200 each, plus or minus some) you'd probably hit $7k with how fucked PC parts are right now.
So pretty close to your guess, since the big fluctuation is fairly recent.
I love AI farms and I guess also crypto farms
I think this is 100% AI, the amount of hardware involved makes crypto look minor.
ha ha ha
I remember when PC gaming was straight up cheap. Then crypto bullshit happened, and now AI bullshit is piling straight on top of it
Threadrippers are fucking hilariously priced, like £3k+ for the slower versions of the latest generation, and even then there are definitely benefits in a few games/programs that a "typical consumer" would use. Those are retail prices btw they get way more costly for the enterprise-grade chips AFAIK.
Linus Torvalds uses Apple Silicon Macs nowadays but in 2020 he had a $3500 PC and that's without a GPU on top.
billionaire LAN parties obvs
Can you imagine the ping times gaming over satellite on the open sea? You'd have to run your games over a local network.
a LAN party on a local area network? can it be done?
I prefer WAN parties. So I can call people names and not have a bottle of Bawls thrown at my head.
still better ping than my ranked teammates
So he can play with others
In case 1 breaks you have 14 left duh
Hexbear when Gaben yacht:
Hexbear when the yacht runs Linux:
Under no circumstances do you gotta hand it to them
On-board hospital? What the fuck?
I feel like hospital is the wrong word given that it only has one nurse as staff. IMO it makes sense, Gabe's in his 60s and as a professional computer toucher he probably has all kinds of health problems now. Wouldn't want to risk a heart attack 1000 miles from the nearest healthcare.
He's also still taking Covid seriously, last I heard. Plus, involved with some org working on an aerosol pathogen detection system.
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/gabe-newells-daily-routine-is-get-up-work-go-scuba-diving-says-hes-been-retired-for-a-long-time-but-works-7-days-a-week-the-things-i-get-to-do-every-day-are-super-awesome/
I feel like that was less shocking than "submarine garage", honestly.
Why rich weirdos want yachts?
In his case, he does seem to just genuinely like the ocean and boats, and while his age and even more so health probably don't accommodate scuba diving he might be able to handle submersible trips. He has a history of funding marine ecology stuff and research submersibles and tagging along on the boats for those, so I assume it's literally that he's planning to live on the yacht at least part of the time, making it a half-billion dollar mansion with all his favorite toys on board.
No one should have that kind of money to throw around like that and the whole thing is a materially ludicrous waste of resources and labor just to cater to a rich guy just because he's retained a childlike ability to actually enjoy things despite his wealth, but it does seem to be a case of him just earnestly liking sea stuff more than the typical status symbol conspicuous consumption thing most of them are doing.
He better do a Schmidt Ocean Institute kind of vessel,
A yacht is basically a floating palace with sea moat. The submarine is the escape tunnel.
Thinking about it, what people ascribe to Valve and its success as morally good, is actually just the market niche for mutual convenience, which Gabe Newell et al have cornered rather nicely.
It's not (inherently) morally good that Valve has chosen to build its vast hoard of wealth by implementing online software distribution on Windows, it was convenient because Windows had fuck all support for it, and Linux was still niche on desktop. For us, it was convenient to purchase games without leaving home or queueing for hours to get limited copies.
It's not (inherently) morally good that Valve has chosen to adopt Linux, fund open source projects, and provide a slither of repairability to its systems, it's convenient to leverage self-repair to reduce RMAs on hardware, and Linux was convenient because Microsoft already felt threatened by Steam's stranglehold on software distribution which was evidently a cashcow. For us, it's convenient to be able to repair shit than wait for weeks for a replacement, and Linux is convenient because its reduced bloat and free licensing reduced the up front cost for the Steamdeck.
In a different scenario, Valve could have been no different from EA, Activision, etc. and none of that is due to Gabe's ideology moreso than the fact capitalists are named after capital, not morals. Once the markets change for that equation to no longer make sense, there is nothing fundamentally different about Valve to not turn this around.
His $500million Yacht is the best reminder that capitalists have an allegience to their class, not some imagined duty to "PC Gamers"
There's one thing that's a bit different: Valve isn't publicly traded and beholden to stockholders. That doesn't inherently make them good, either, but it does mean they CAN be good, while publicly traded companies really can't.
Maybe not beholden to shareholders external to the company, which the alienation thereof only encourages short term profit extraction, but Valve has shareholders within the company which are of course still profit-seeking. Valve's business model will continue to adapt towards that goal, regardless of moral imperatives.
I disagree on "good", I do enjoy steam and the hardware, but it's still an exploitative business with iffy ethics, just less so than Amazon. Like I said above, it simply fills the niche of the market for videogame hardware/software which wasn't exploited for a long time, if not ever. convenience for consumers is just smart business practices.
Steam and valve are just as bad as Microsoft but the gamer treatlerites won't ever admit that having steam gatekeep video games through their shitty drm client is actually a bad thing, or that valve was one of the pioneers behind skinner box gambling addictions, or how much they take from developers as a middle man even though its not 2007 anymore and anyone can rent or host their own CDN.
Entering his L Ron Hubbard arc