The 30% percent cut, stealing money from devs

This is a pretty spicy take. Let’s consider two possibilities:

1. Game devs choose to distribute independently, and sell their game for $20. They sell 100,000 copies and make $2 million in revenue, and keep the entire $2 million.

2. Game devs choose to distribute via Steam, promote it with a 50% off sale, it goes to the Steam front page, sells 500,000 copies at only $10 each, for a total $5 million in revenue. Steam takes $1.5 million and the devs take $3.5 million.

In scenario 2 the devs make 75% more than in scenario 1. Did Valve steal from the game devs?

Is there like a word that stands for, “I can’t be perfect so I gave up trying to be better”?

Because under the hood x11 code is such a hacky mess the developers found it easier to start from scratch than add new features like HDR and VRR to x11.

If new features don’t matter to you, there’s still plenty of distros and DE’s and WM’s that ship x11 and will continue for a very long time.