alt Hacker NewsMy unpopular opinion: Valve is basically a parasite or a landlord. They've been so successful it's hard to imagine a world without them, and they say "you gotta give the parasite its due" and we believe them and comply.
It's been kept around because they treat their customers ok, but they absolutely exsanguinate their developers.
And their engineering culture is... odd. They hire senior people and then let them all fuck sound aimlessly. Their APIs are terrible, their infrastructure is all over the place, they still have patch Tuesdays. But because they are the landlord that owns every house in town, what are you going to do, not pay rent?
Gabe is out there cruising the world in a billion dollar yacht, eating thousand dollar meals. All that came off the backs of developers who actually make the games.
Replies
Eh, Steam is kind of like the liberal democratic US empire. It may be evil in a lot of ways but it could actually be a LOT worse. We may actually historically be very lucky to have had a non-shittificationmaxxing games platform for a couple decades, just like we were lowkey lucky that the world was briefly ruled by a somewhat democratic country.. Enjoy both while they last, may not be around long.
I'd question the idea that they treat developers poorly. Epic Games Store exists and Famously beats Steam (and others) over the head by charging only a 12% fee
Hell, they even buy timed exclusive access to certain games
And yet. Steam persists
Totally agreed. I'm building a Steam competitor, that's web-based (WebGPU/WASM) as well as cross-platform. Light on games atm, but the goal is to replicate over time virtually every feature Steam has to offer, as well as more. You can check out a preview of the portal here:
> It's been kept around because they treat their customers ok, but they absolutely exsanguinate their developers.
This is true, but "treat their customers ok" goes a long way. When everybody else severely abuses their customers, the one company that doesn't generates a lot of goodwill.