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https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1x7vamv/gabe_newell_honored_all_the_3000_people_who_built/
No, go back! Yes, take me to RedditFluff 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 (i.redd.it)
18.7k points · submitted by AgitatedFly1182 to r/Steam
Annnd here's the article I got this from. Apparently it's a tribute to how Bill Gates credited him in Windows 1.0.
He should have his next yacht completely etched in all Steam usernames.
Can’t wait for “xXPussySlayer420_69Xx”
ahem..
So what's the story with this username?
you stay AWAY from me!
Imagine giving a tour of a half-billion dollar ship and having to explain why 'Pudge Mid Or Feed' and 'xX_360NoScope_Xx' are etched into the glass.
Wow what a nice billionaire
Tbh if I were a billionaire, I'd probably buy a $500m dollar yacht too
If I was a billionaire I'd put out Half Life 3
yo hang on that's beyond even trillionaire money you're asking.
millionaire - hl 1
billionaire - hl 2
....
we just gotta give him more money
lol by god I think you’re onto something here
Nah, Gabe won't ever reach 3-llionaire status
I feel so boring, because if I was a billionaire, the last thing I would have is a personal superyacht.
Right? Build a medieval castle with a French garden and 15 waterfalls that are all also statues and all that. Another boring boat?
Stone castles suck to live in. They're cold, and you'd have people at your place 24/7 just fixing things and dealing with rodents.
You don't live in it, you live in the super yacht that sails around the moat.
EXACTLY! Why have just another boring boat when you could have a historically accurate recreation of a Ship of the Line!
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.
We can hate more than 1 billionaire, you realize this right?
Not even hating specific billionaires, the entire concept of a billionaire.
Also, his employees are fairly compensated. He didn’t become rich by exploiting others.
Maybe I’m remembering it wrong but many Valve employees make 7 figures a year.
He is one of the best people to ever get in a position of power like his. His company policies are into spending money on good people instead of trying to produce always cheaper.
Success proved him right. All their games had some quality. Even that weird Ricochet game was kinda fun as an idea.
Isn’t Steam like patient zero for the loot box gambling epidemic in gaming?
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.
Valve - not steam - got the idea for team fortress 2 loot boxes from a 2006 asian gatcha game.
He pays his employees well also
His biggest move was putting a ton of money/work into open source software. Benefiting every single person commenting here.
What's brain dead is continuing to believe in trickle-down economics
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.
Hello Tim Sweeney's alt xD
Nah fuck him too, anyone have a Sweeney version of this meme?
This is his 4th, he has a bigger fleet than most countries.
He also bought the entire shipyard that made them.
It's well studied that the mental traits common for hoarding, multimillionaire/billionaire level, wealth coincide with sociopathy.
If you were a billionaire would you care about being a sociopath? Likely not.
Not saying it's causation, but those with strong morals don't typically end up with lots of money, you gotta step on somebody to climb the ladder.
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.
Sweeney is the Salieri to his Mozart, clearly.
a couple of years ago he got super train enthusiast about knives
Also throat singing apparently...
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.
You can create trusts that do just that without you being able to just stop whenever you wanted.
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?!?!!?!!
This explains why the Dinald Trump is president.
"Extravagant spending by billionaires is disgusting... unless I like the billionaire."
I'm not the only one... this thread is out of their fucking minds. If Gabe ran for president, these people would be clamoring to make r/The_Newell
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.
Do think he's not doing that
To be clear we should be applauding billionaires actually spending their wealth like this.
HAHAHAHAHA The fact this has 100+ upvotes is fucking disgraceful.
To be clear we should be applauding billionaires actually spending their wealth like this.
Buying mega yachts that are big polluters and disrupt ocean life?
I'm curious if you read anything about Leviathan before writing this comment. Every article points out how it's worth $500m because of its eco friendly hybrid engine and it's basically a scientific lab and main vessel for his marine research Inkfish Expeditions to study ocean ecosystems, trenches, and coral reefs.
This isn't some megayacht for him to throw a party with supermodels and do drugs on. Considering the other billionaires spend their money meddling with politics and touching kids, yeah, a personal research station is applaudable
I'd donate it or build something for my community instead of hoarding it in a massive polluter.
That's why we would never be billionaires. We'd be doing shit long before we hit that level
Yeah thats the reason you’ll never be a billionaire
Yeah, I’d love to have a billionaire reward me by turning me into art. Very Jabba The Hut.
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.
wtf is wrong with people in this thread lol, this would be cool if you actually built it.
Gabe is a billionaire because he built a company that beat out the big guys- worst thing they did was loot boxes. Some billionaires have hundreds of thousands or millions of lives worth of blood on their hands.
But you're not, are you?
Your some dude on the internet who's equally performative because he's concerned about how performative something looks.
Are our names on there for helping pay for it?
16.666 million games sold at 30 dollars is the amount, and to blow it on a boat is crazy work.
It's closer to 66.7 million games sold at $30. As steam gets around 25% of sales.
Estimates put number of games sold on steam at 1 Billion or more a YEAR.
I'd bet the average price though is closer to $15 (with sales and indie games) so that boat is approximately two months of steams revenue.
Steam generated 17 billion in revenue in 2025. That boat is less than two weeks of steam revenue.
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.
Fellas, fellas! Theres plenty of megayacht to go around, lets not get snappy over the details... heheh puffs cigar etched with 50 steam usernames
You know Gabe got money money because someone spending half a B on a yacht is clearly not that concerned about spending half a B
The boat is used for science too
Is the experiment seeing how fucking much money he can have without releasing Half-life 3?
No, but it is his kink. It's why he still reads fan email. Each question about the release date is better than any porn he's ever seen
Okay, so maybe our names are written on the boat at a molecular level. Just need to bring the fancier microscope when I visit.
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
Yes but what work did you have to do to make the money to pay for the games?
only if you have a 4-digit steam id
I learned today that all those mega yacht gabe newell jokes were in fact based in reality
if I'm not mistaken, he doesn't just own mega yachts. He owns a mega yacht building company
*opens another CS:GO case*
He has a mega yacht with smaller yachts
Carrier has arrived
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.
Fun fact, his mega yatch (the newest one) is a marine research vessel as well!
And the research is open source!
As well as spending $500m on the yacht, he also bought the shipbuilding company building it. That's what you do when you really don't want people to know what's going into your yacht.
They weren't jokes.
Here's what I found:
A sec a sec a sec... Gaben is also into marine biology? 0.0
Well, certainly seems like... an ok use of money. Go do science man, and I imagine researchers will be invited, discoveries might happen... cool 🫡
For years now, Inkfish was established in 2021. Also the reason Gaben got so thin now, he swims constantly.
Holy based, you go man 🙏
It's like he really loved Subnautica so he's just spending obscene amounts of money turning the game into real life
So he doesn't just make yachts for the sake of it. They have a purpose. That's cool to know
The Summer Sales have been very good to him
Imagine having a flagship
I am not one to put ANYONE on a pedestal, especially a billionaire. But Gabe seems like he's putting it to good use, even if it's a bit excessive.
I feel like people forget that builders get paid to build
I feel like people forget that work deserves respect
I get paid to help people buy houses but they don't pay me enough to buy one of my own
I imagine mega yacht builders may get paid just a little bit more
Oceanco who built his yacht (and who he then bought while they were doing so) contracts a lot of the work out to subsidiary companies who do most of the practical work like welding, pipe fitting, electrical work etc.
The wage listings for both those subsidiaries and Oceanco themselves from public job listings are not outside of the industry average.
Most of the workforce outside of the higher ups or truly specialised trades are on €40,000 to €45,000.
Quite a lot of companies making luxury stuff don't pay that much above industry standard rates, generally the most you could hope for is working for a brand like Ferrari who offer mostly standard rates for the industry but then throw in decent yearly bonus money based on performance, or ironically for as much as the company is vilified by people, Games Workshop who make all the Warhammer stuff pays each employee a bonus every year based on a share of their profits, meaning every employee from someone working in their warehouses to the guys staffing their stores gets a decent bonus each year. I think Last Year someone on the basic wage of £27k got a £5k bonus from the profit sharing.
Their souls are now bound to the vessel; to serve for all eternity.
Deadass misread this as “bought” instead of built and thought this was some fictional transcript of a dystopian future where Gabe Newell is making massive eldritch machine monsters
Did the guy carving 3000 names into a glass wall have to carve their own name, next to a guy that like.. brought donuts for the crew?
They use engraving lasers for this.
imagine a guy, painstaikingly carving the names by hand. If he makes a mistake or the glass breaks, he has to start over.
I'd imagine they used a laser or something
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
Well thats kinda what im asking, like ... how much economic benefit does spending all your money on a yacht provide?
Like, we need the people with money to spend it until they dont have anymore lol
I prefer it when thousands of people serve thousands of other people and not one single person myself. I have a hard time seeing oligarchs as being economic benefactors
Yeah this is better than charity or funding research that doesn't require a yacht.
Every billionaire does something with their money. No billionaire has a billion dollars sitting in a checking account. That wealth is tied into assets, investments, and companies that have value, which is how it grows in the first place.
I will actually blow Gabe if he puts his money towards fighting Project 2025
The mental gymnastics going on here is impressive
truly insane ! i'm so thankful these folks are now a permanent memory in gabe's 15th yacht !
I'd rather have a cash bonus than my name on a wall in a ship I'll never be allowed in again.
So THAT'S where the 30% on all our sales go.
I wonder how the engraver felt when he got to his own name.
He didn't help build. He got another plaque that hangs on the back.
well what about the guy who mounted that second plaque into place. where's his recognition
ok thats his own name, right?
Ok listen. This is the weakest flex of all time, but I joined Steam on September 12th, 2003. My Steam account # is in the mid 4-digits.
What's the Steam account equivalent of getting my name etched on a yacht?
SELECT name FROM accounts;
Oh yeah thanks for reminding me, I have 300,000 Steam Points Shop points, can I get a used Gabe snorkel and I'm not even kidding?
Sorry, that honor is only bestowed on those account numbers in the low 4-digits
/s
rich guy does rich guy thing.
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"
Someone said the “hate for Gabe is starting to feel forced” like imagine having such a parasocial relationship with a billionaire and getting all conspiracy theorist on the fact people aren’t willing to suck his dick. This world is insane.
[deleted]
I mean, it was 3000 people just doing their jobs. They do get paid. It’s probably went like “hey, this guy wants your name on the boat?” “Sure”
Redditors can't fathom how real life actually is, let alone how blue collar interactions happen
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
Obviously Gabe felt differently when he was credited on Windows 1.0.
Is he giving the names to Cthulhu?
Billionaires bad.
WAIT NOT GABE
edit: did this really need a /s
Billionares shouldn't exist
Wow, maybe he will even have the builders of his pyramid entombed with him! What an honor!
Damn not even a pizza party?
Hey I bought some steam games, so i partly funded his mega yacht as well.
I only bought mine on sail.
The Taylor Swift of Nerds! I’m here for it
Edit: Edit: It is true
I love Valve but this is literally so true oh my god
Dude you nailed it. This is so accurate.
Respectfully, why tf should anyone have a $500 million megayacht
Because the term "Yacht" being used in the headlines is misleading and intentionally done specifically to get the reaction you're having.
Gabe's "Yacht" is a $700* Million research vessel enrolled with the Inkfish Vessel Operations ltd. fleet for deep sea research and open-ocean exploration, not a personal luxury liner, like the work "Yacht" implies.
Yes, glaze the billionaire more. God this is cringe.
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.
It's made in the Netherlands, you can be pretty sure that the workers are well treated and compensated fairly at least.
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.
He does own a yacht building company, actually. It's called "Oceanco" and he bought it in August of last year.
This is the most hilarious billionaire moment I've seen. Like a narrator in arrested development moment "He did, in fact, own a yacht company".
I mean, it's one lootbox, Michael. What could it cost? 10 dollars?
Not just "a yacht company" - the premier mega yacht company.
He bought the company that made Jeff Bezos's mega yacht among many other of the worlds richest of the richest.
Exhausting.
His yachts have nothing to do with him being a good boss or not, buts it well known that Valve employees are extremely well compensated. Besides frontier LLM engineers, their software engineers are among the best paid in the global industry.
No one was forcing them to work on it.
Isn’t valve one of the few companies in the gaming industry that pays above and beyond whilst providing secure long term employment?
Obviously nothing to do with the yacht, but Gabe isn’t exactly an asshole.
I've wasted like $20,000 opening csgo cases, where is my name?
Because there are > 3k people on earth who payed even more.
Bunch of nerds in here arguing over what kind of cheese the moon was made from
I zoomed in and I kinda see mine.
Were they entombed within the vessel? Why was I not allowed this honour?
I suppose that’s better than putting their corpses into the yacht itself like the great wall!
slightly conflicted
i have no exception to billionairs. you dont need that much money to live a good life. be more philanthropic.
on the other hand, im not surprised he became a billionaire given all the ventures and service and multiple products that people WANT and APPRECIATE. i think steam/valve is a unique company, in that regard.
... it's still a company, none the less, and we REALLY need to raise our billionaire/millionaire taxes. or society can't afford billionaires anymore.
edit: to the people saying "it's his money, he can spend it how he wants". my opinion is that it shouldn't be ALL his money. a billion dollars is a lot more than you think. a lot of it is underpaid wages to the employees who also deserve to be compensated for their work. maybe that helps makes sense? they deserve more than just their names etched into a glass panel on the boat.
So your complaint is towards the system that allows this sort of wealth accumulation, not necessarily a specific person.
yes. i like Gabe Newell, but i hate billionaires more.
money is power, and we shouldn't let any 1 person to have that much power. the people downplaying that sentiment dont understand how much a billion dollars is.
If it helps any, he is dedicating that money to oceanographic research as much as he is his own enjoyment and lifestyle. Billionaire doesn't put a lab on his boat unless his boat is doing something that requires a lab - research. He also has his own research vessels. Like he's actually pretty interested in researching and sharing information about parts of the ocean we haven't explored yet
See guys Gabe is a billionaire and bought a 500$ million boat. He spends half his paycheck on housing just like the rest of us dont act like hes got it better
This reminds me of the time when the EVE Online developers etched the in game names of everyone who was active at the time on a stone slab outside their office in Iceland.
I learned today that people will bend over backwards for billionaires that they actually like
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.
Yeah, my issue is with billionaires in general. He should not be a billionaire. But it's not personal.
there are no ethical billionaires
no matter how much they try to sway public opinion
it will always be true
Almost all dutch probably.
Apparently it's a tribute to how Bill Gates credited him in Windows 1.0.
So in other words, not through an Easter egg that would go undiscovered for nearly 35 to 40 years.
Gabe N: "Yo, who wants to do me a favor? All you have to do is make a post on some website"
Hero to a select group of ship builders, lets give him his props.
Why does it look like c’thullu symbol?
Blaketurney 2.1k points (8 children)
honoring himself
jak2125 242 points (1 child)
It’d be hilarious if it was just “Gabe Newell” over and over again.
Legendary_Bibo 17 points
And then it degraded to Gaben, like how Hold the Door turned to Hodor.
Gil_Demoono 918 points (1 child)
I guess he is technically an employee of the yacht company, since he bought the whole damn thing in order to get exactly what he wanted.
TobuscusMarkipliedx2 126 points (2 children)
I'm Gabe Newell.
All_Gun_High 41 points (1 child)
I am Gabe Newell
ArelMCII 20 points (1 child)
I am Gabe Newell
briandemodulated 61 points
In alphabetical order, no bigger than anyone else's name. Same as his games.
GrimReaapaa 22 points
CitizenHuman 36 points (2 children)
Did you know that was there, or did you zoom in and read all 3,000 names?
Geler 50 points (1 child)
Its in alphabetic order.
Sherwoodfan 14 points (1 child)
personally, i zoomed randomly and it is the first name i saw. 100% random. i got scared it was nothing but gabe newell at first.
thetoastler 4 points
That shit looks like the Terraria font lmao