Valve’s unique approach to corporate governance is probably the reason why it’s such an efficient company.
I mean, it doesn’t exactly take much to run Steam…
They make a few games, but it’s less making new games and supporting a handful that have been around decades by now.
The reason they have such market dominance, is Gabe isn’t insanely greedy. He has more than he’ll ever spend, and I’d love to see him do more with the massive wealth he has.
But it’s not like he’s fucking over users to squeeze what would be an unnoticeable amount more. So people hang around.!
I’d hate to guess the number of people who have dropped over a grand through Steam
They could definitely lower their 30% cut for indie devs. Even just making the first 50k free would be huge (epic takes no cut for the first million).
Going to take a metric fuckton of work to vet.
Better: Tiered system like unreal or whatever:
- Below a certain threshold no %
- After the next mark 5%
- Next go to 10% . . . Repeat up to 30%. Sony will cough up immediately. Smaller devs may never get hit or may get hit pretty easily for a while.
They’d have to start doing vetting for that…
All the slop games are “indie” or at least would start to be structured that way to lower their barrier of entry.
Yea, ton of things marketed as indie don’t fit the bill.
Maybe having a minimum where the sales don’t take a cut? That way slop that doesn’t sale much doesn’t benefit, but when a good indie comes along that sales well it would make a difference.
Whatever limit you try to set, that’s what the AI slop will aim to meet.
It’s just something that can’t be automated, at the end of the day every online market needs a human to whitelist new products and review bait and switches, or the market will flood with junk.
But no one wants to pay for that human level review.
And I know, it may cause delays, but most Indie game do not only beta but alpha builds to fund development. I bought BG3 like 2 years before release because it made Act 1 immediately playable, it’s not even just an Indie dev thing.
So even if it takes a full year, real developers would just register early in the process. The slop tho won’t stay topical because they’re not being pumped out in an afternoon.
My boss makes a billion while I make a million.
This why I 🖕 on company time.
If they succeed with the frame and machine, the greedy & lazy competition will be even more rabid.
Instead of working and competing, they will sue until there’s no tomorrow.
Instead of working and competing, they will sue until there’s no tomorrow.
why? Valve obviously have more money than them. EA and etc have shitloads of cash. Do they have “majority of PC game sales” cash? No. They have “generic sports game annual release” cash. while that is a lot, it’s not the same ballpark.
with this shit it just becomes “throw money at lawyers until you win” and Valve have more money.
EDIT : Contrarians out here taking statements as challenges instead of thinking on the first word I posted. :
WHY.
What is the motivation? “because they want fast money and don’t want to compete” is not enough of a motive, since suing the shit out of someone like valve will have big consequences and costs, and will need a solid reasoning as to the reason and the way (how) they are going to do it.
At least for EA they just got bought out by the Saudis who do have magnitudes more cash then valve along with the ear of a president known to help out his buddies in the legal realm.
OK, but the Saudis bought EA to gameswash their horrendous political image, not to tarnish it further and throw their money away.
Does Microsoft have less money than Valve?
Microsoft are looking to exit the console space, and trying to latch onto other hardware systems.
There’s no motive for anyone to sue valve over this.
They might as well sue fucking dell.EA, Ubisoft , Rockstar all tried their own distrobution platforms and people only use them when they’re forced, like Epic store for fortnite.
All this shit is is a mini PC running linux. You could have set up your own “steam machine” for fucking ever, maybe without valve OS, but something similar.The only ones that might be getting mad at it is facebook, because the frame might compete with the oculus whatever.
You won’t hear from Valve mass cutting employers for Ai replacement. And because its a private company, they don’t have to do trash to calm down the investors.
They’ve cut whole divisions with no notice multiple times in the past. Not yet for AI, but they’re not innocent of this type of thing.
Almoynone of them get remotely that much. Just the management that works in a completely different building from the normal developers. Valve claims to have a flat hierarchy…but that’s only true below the upper management.
