Monopolies are usually deemed illegal by what they do with that position and not how they got there. It’s things like leveraging your monopoly to gain undue advantage preventing competition to arise in the first place.

One should also consider if services and goods provided by a „natural” monopoly (like over a limited resource) wouldn’t be better handled by either a state monopoly or a regulated industry consortium.

I’m happy that Gabe Newell won a lottery and was awarded billions of dollars along with it, good on him since that was his second lottery win after being an OG Microsoft employee with stock options. Does it mean he has to be awarded billions of dollars forever in perpetuity? Maybe more of the 30% cut should go to the people that actually make games today?

Do you distrust Blur Busters too? They also claim it’s the second coming of Jesus.

The thing about older browsers is that they don’t support new cryptography which is required by pretty much all modern websites. For some reason Google kept this legacy version of their Search going (probably forgot it existed) but now the only alternative are search engine frontends tailored specifically to obsolete hardware (which thankfully exist thanks to retro community).

I thought that’s too gruesome but then I saw it was Divinity and that’s about appropriate amount of violence for the series. I’m not sure if it’s the best way to market the game however.

They paid salary of a single developer. FEX isn’t developed by a single person. Kind of expected with how little credit is given to Wine when they talk about Proton.

It would make sense to sell every IP they can piecemeal to get some return on this investment.

If I had to guess then Saudi (or MBS) wanted EA FC which can now return to being EA FIFA now with extra Ronaldo. Saudi have enough influence over FIFA via PIF to make this happen.

YouGov and ESA conducted a 5-minute online survey in the U.S. from September 26-30, 2025 among 1,912 respondents ages 5-65 recruited from YouGov’s proprietary online panel. Data is weighted to be representative of the overall U.S. population in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, education and census region. Respondents ages 5 to 17 were asked to complete the survey under the supervision of a parent.

If you want to know proprietary information that provides competitive advantage like weights applied then you might be out of luck, however publishing garbage would destroy YouGov reputation quick and so they don’t have that much incentive to fudge numbers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratified_sampling

With the power of math you don’t have to. I’m a data analyst by trade so I take offence to this question every time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_size_determination

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Gabe Newell is a CEO of a very small company, staff-wise, can’t feign ignorance.

That company runs multiple games with lootboxes and doesn’t make any attempt at restricting gambling from underage customers. They were restricted from doing so in some jurisdictions, can’t feign ignorance.

If you go even deeper there is evidence of Valve being perfectly aware (and amused!) that their item marketplace is used to facilitate offsite gambling on esports events.

Gabe Newell runs multiple online casinos.

Are you one of those people that think Uber is a tech company and not a taxi company because they have an app?

Please enlighten me how did they move. Let’s have a laugh.

Lootboxes are gambling. Courts in multiple jurisdictions like Netherlands, Belgium or Austria off top of my head agree. I realise it’s normalised in some countries and some people don’t want to admit they have a problem, but that doesn’t mean people have to accept it.

You’re not the best at googling I guess.

Why did various EU regulators had to tell Valve that their gambling business is illegal? It remains legal in some and so he continues to run them there.

Isn’t he CEO of Valve, a company with famously lean amount of staff?

Thanks, I scanned article if it was properly sourced but not that in depth. I’ll take this down.

Pretty sure 99.99% of his wealth at this point comes from Steam taking 30% cut and lootboxes in CS.

Man can’t be responsible for all the nice things in Steam but absolved of creating a lootbox/gambling empire.

If only Valve was a public company and we could get a real look in their finances. I think many people would have a very different opinion of them. My little conspiracy theory is that this lack of transparency is why they’re flying under the radar of EU Digital Markets Act as they sure look like a gatekeeper.

If Valve starts utilising Intel ME to do what I’m warning everyone about is it on Valve or Intel?

Nvidia (and everyone else) sells their GPUs/NPUs to the highest bidders they can legally sell them to. Not sure how that’s relevant to this discussion.