this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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Can think about Steam tax whatever you want, but they provide a hell of a lot more than just a half-assed store and some exposure for your games like Epic does. Don't get me wrong, I do gratefully take the free games and I do appreciate the competition, what I want to say is that Steam doesn't just pocket that money. They provide forums; frameworks for stuff like modding and achievements; a much better client useful beyond games they sell; subsidized hardware and support for Linux as an alternative to Windows. All of this also benefits game developers one way or another and costs money to develop and maintain. (Software) engineers are anything but cheap.
Epic does have its steamworks alternative called epic online services which provide more or less the same functionality (achievements, p2p networking, anti cheat...) but it's also completely free, cross store, and cross engine
https://dev.epicgames.com/en-US/services-games
I agree partially. They are competent rather than just able to do whatever cause money.
Now if they invested their profits into workers salaries and made a bid for management salaries to only double per rank, we would be going somewhere.
Does Valve officially have managers now? Last I checked, they had this extremely flat structure of everyone being basically equal and people self-determining what they're working on and how
Thats what I heard as well, doesn’t change the fact that management gets paid 10-100 times of an engineer and profits go to the owner/s not the workers.
Are you talking about Valve, or generally? Because as I said, I don't think there is such a thing as a generic manager role at Valve, much less one that gets paid so much more than other roles. How much of the profit goes to Gabe directly vs the employees or reinvested into the company I don't know, but if you want to complain about compensation gaps, I'm very sure that Valve is absolutely not the company to start with.
although valve is by no means the worst offender, they’re no angel either. Between raking in billions of dollars and taking no small cut from game developers (plus the fact that they take 100 $ just to put games on steam, even for free from what I read) they arent our savior by a long shot.
FOSS is. We‘re seeing massive effort of people to democratize software development and it is glorious. So while I get that valve isnt an example for the worst of the worst, they still fit in „billionaire bad“.