The unusual though possibly wrong thing that differentiates steam is they don’t appear to engage in all that much anti competitive behavior. Possibly some, but not really that much. Ultimately if it’s better for the consumer but worse for ‘the economy’ who’s really losing out? By what metric?
For now, at least. But the secret to valves success here doesn’t appear to be very closed source. A fairly flat internal structure, moderately functional store and community reputation building, mostly keeping promises and having which reputation that when they don’t they can weather the storm. Nothing there seems unachievable unless your design philosophy is so cut throat and monetized that you just build a bad product.
Just because monopolies can have a fanbase, doesn’t mean they don’t negatively impact society.
The cult behind Steam doesn’t understand the problem that will arrive once Gabe retires. The amount of power they gave this single entity will come to.bite them in the ass.
If your proposal is some sort of grant program to make that infrastructure easier to come by then that could be neat. Nothing about steams actual technology is unique though.
A federated indie store could also be neat, though like other federated systems with money involved especially you’ll need to be extra careful about how it’s all set up to make sure the result is any good.
The point is, steam competitors don’t do badly because they lack the man hours of steams Dev team. They do badly because of terrible company vision and incentives. Open sourcing a tech doesn’t solve a problem that doesn’t exist. I don’t even think open sourcing steam really does… Anything, for developers. Philosophically cool, practically useless, everything that steam is exists in piecewise form already. Turning steam into a federated service is not meaningfully faster because you make steam open source.
Gog is the closest and does fine. The technology is about on par with steam, the philosophy of the service better, and they are doing fine. Not overwhelming steam no, but fine.
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The unusual though possibly wrong thing that differentiates steam is they don’t appear to engage in all that much anti competitive behavior. Possibly some, but not really that much. Ultimately if it’s better for the consumer but worse for ‘the economy’ who’s really losing out? By what metric?
For now, at least. But the secret to valves success here doesn’t appear to be very closed source. A fairly flat internal structure, moderately functional store and community reputation building, mostly keeping promises and having which reputation that when they don’t they can weather the storm. Nothing there seems unachievable unless your design philosophy is so cut throat and monetized that you just build a bad product.
Monopoly’s themselves are not necessarily bad. Its when they use the monopoly to spread into other areas where it becomes the problem.
Just because monopolies can have a fanbase, doesn’t mean they don’t negatively impact society.
The cult behind Steam doesn’t understand the problem that will arrive once Gabe retires. The amount of power they gave this single entity will come to.bite them in the ass.
Removed by mod
If your proposal is some sort of grant program to make that infrastructure easier to come by then that could be neat. Nothing about steams actual technology is unique though.
A federated indie store could also be neat, though like other federated systems with money involved especially you’ll need to be extra careful about how it’s all set up to make sure the result is any good.
Removed by mod
The point is, steam competitors don’t do badly because they lack the man hours of steams Dev team. They do badly because of terrible company vision and incentives. Open sourcing a tech doesn’t solve a problem that doesn’t exist. I don’t even think open sourcing steam really does… Anything, for developers. Philosophically cool, practically useless, everything that steam is exists in piecewise form already. Turning steam into a federated service is not meaningfully faster because you make steam open source.
Gog is the closest and does fine. The technology is about on par with steam, the philosophy of the service better, and they are doing fine. Not overwhelming steam no, but fine.
Removed by mod