I don’t know man. We’ve seen how bad enshitification takes hold once a big corporation takes over. Honestly, in a lot of cases, I would rather have them fade and get forked vs relying on the enshitificated version to amble along, like git hub, source forge, all of the game development studios in the past decade.
In practice it does. There’s a big, entrenched competitor out there already, so that puts a damper on any motivation. If the site just closed down, that wouldn’t be the case.
Even if SteamDB is gradually enshittified, there will still be that competitor that does a “good enough” job for a lot of people, meaning the bar for a new player to come along is higher.
They’re a very common and well demonstrated pattern that plays out with this sort of site; e.g. it’s taken almost a decade for many gaming wikis to get off fandom after they were locked in. There’s a finite pool of user attention and contribution that these projects can pull from, and splitting that pool worsens the commons.
If the choice is between consolidation and the current owner simply abandoning it, I’ll take the lesser of two evils.
I don’t know man. We’ve seen how bad enshitification takes hold once a big corporation takes over. Honestly, in a lot of cases, I would rather have them fade and get forked vs relying on the enshitificated version to amble along, like git hub, source forge, all of the game development studios in the past decade.
This site being bought does nothing to prevent another from being started.
In practice it does. There’s a big, entrenched competitor out there already, so that puts a damper on any motivation. If the site just closed down, that wouldn’t be the case.
Even if SteamDB is gradually enshittified, there will still be that competitor that does a “good enough” job for a lot of people, meaning the bar for a new player to come along is higher.
Why would network externalities not apply here?
They’re a very common and well demonstrated pattern that plays out with this sort of site; e.g. it’s taken almost a decade for many gaming wikis to get off fandom after they were locked in. There’s a finite pool of user attention and contribution that these projects can pull from, and splitting that pool worsens the commons.
There’s also selling it to another party that isn’t a vampiric parasite as an option. I doubt they were the only potential buyer.