What do you imagine would replace Steam/Valve? The Magical Post-Capitalist Game Fairy, who distributes games for free, for no reason?
Do you remember who used to distribute games? Walmart. And Best Buy. And CompUSA. And Circuit City. And Target. And GameStop. And Electronic Boutique. Ya know, retailers.
I deliberately peppered that list with names that most people hate AND names that many people associate with good feelings of nostalgia, or mixed feelings at least. But that’s the reality of retail. Capitalism sucks. It literally sucks. It sucks money out of everyone, for itself.
Steam was and is the disruption that you’re talking about. Steam disrupted a broken and destructive brick-and-mortar sales mode. If the catalog of products available on Steam had to be sold in physical stores, only about the top 2-5 percent of the currently available catalog would be physically able to be sold. THAT WAS, AND REMAINS, THE MASSIVE DISRUPTION TO THE OLD SYSTEM.
You’re talking about disrupting the disruption. Maybe you’re talking about some kind of nonsense universe, where everyone distributes open source games for free, maaaaan. Or maybe you think the developers should still get money, but the distribution system should be run as…a charity, I guess? Just, because someone feels like spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a bulletproof, entirely secure, worldwide system of game distribution and sales…for free?
Like I said, that would be some kind of Magical Post-Capitalist Game Fairy. If anyone tells you they are willing to do that shit, I guarantee there is a catch. They’ll be getting something that they want, somehow. If they’re taking a 30 percent cut of the money, I know that’s the catch. If they’re supposedly doing everything for free, out of the goodness of their own charitable hearts, I don’t know what their angle is, but I know it can’t be good.
At least you’re advocating that someone should get paid. Most open-source/free-software zealots don’t bother to do that.
Motherfuckers just stand on the notion that people with the equivalent of (or actually possessing) postgraduate engineering degrees should just…work for free. Like, literally work at Walmart as a nine-to-five gig, then come home to their hovel with five roommates, and slave away, doing engineering work on free software projects that could be sold for tens of millions.
When I support a company like Valve, I’m looking at their past behavior (supporting open industry standards, for things like controllers and VR, plowing money back into developing blue-sky R&D, in both hardware and software) and the fact that they’re an entirely private holding, as opposed to a public company that has to answer to shareholders. Shareholders, of course, would demand that they stop funding anything that won’t specifically generate a maximum return on investment, in a short or medium timeframe.
Because Valve doesn’t have to worry about that crap, they can build a system that is not inherently brittle. I believe them, when they say they have contingency plans, to make sure that we won’t ever have to worry about losing access to software we purchased licenses to use on their systems. And if they ever did become insolvent, there is apparently a contingency-contingency plan, to allow people to download fully non-DRM versions of as much of those libraries as possible.
But to the open-source/free-software zealot, none of that matters. The perfect is always the enemy of the good. Valve = proprietary, so they’re bad, according to you.
Transactions = more money for Steam
Disrupt this incentive loop (somehow) and then we can all have nice things.
What do you imagine would replace Steam/Valve? The Magical Post-Capitalist Game Fairy, who distributes games for free, for no reason?
Do you remember who used to distribute games? Walmart. And Best Buy. And CompUSA. And Circuit City. And Target. And GameStop. And Electronic Boutique. Ya know, retailers.
I deliberately peppered that list with names that most people hate AND names that many people associate with good feelings of nostalgia, or mixed feelings at least. But that’s the reality of retail. Capitalism sucks. It literally sucks. It sucks money out of everyone, for itself.
Steam was and is the disruption that you’re talking about. Steam disrupted a broken and destructive brick-and-mortar sales mode. If the catalog of products available on Steam had to be sold in physical stores, only about the top 2-5 percent of the currently available catalog would be physically able to be sold. THAT WAS, AND REMAINS, THE MASSIVE DISRUPTION TO THE OLD SYSTEM.
You’re talking about disrupting the disruption. Maybe you’re talking about some kind of nonsense universe, where everyone distributes open source games for free, maaaaan. Or maybe you think the developers should still get money, but the distribution system should be run as…a charity, I guess? Just, because someone feels like spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a bulletproof, entirely secure, worldwide system of game distribution and sales…for free?
Like I said, that would be some kind of Magical Post-Capitalist Game Fairy. If anyone tells you they are willing to do that shit, I guarantee there is a catch. They’ll be getting something that they want, somehow. If they’re taking a 30 percent cut of the money, I know that’s the catch. If they’re supposedly doing everything for free, out of the goodness of their own charitable hearts, I don’t know what their angle is, but I know it can’t be good.
At least you’re advocating that someone should get paid. Most open-source/free-software zealots don’t bother to do that.
Motherfuckers just stand on the notion that people with the equivalent of (or actually possessing) postgraduate engineering degrees should just…work for free. Like, literally work at Walmart as a nine-to-five gig, then come home to their hovel with five roommates, and slave away, doing engineering work on free software projects that could be sold for tens of millions.
When I support a company like Valve, I’m looking at their past behavior (supporting open industry standards, for things like controllers and VR, plowing money back into developing blue-sky R&D, in both hardware and software) and the fact that they’re an entirely private holding, as opposed to a public company that has to answer to shareholders. Shareholders, of course, would demand that they stop funding anything that won’t specifically generate a maximum return on investment, in a short or medium timeframe.
Because Valve doesn’t have to worry about that crap, they can build a system that is not inherently brittle. I believe them, when they say they have contingency plans, to make sure that we won’t ever have to worry about losing access to software we purchased licenses to use on their systems. And if they ever did become insolvent, there is apparently a contingency-contingency plan, to allow people to download fully non-DRM versions of as much of those libraries as possible.
But to the open-source/free-software zealot, none of that matters. The perfect is always the enemy of the good. Valve = proprietary, so they’re bad, according to you.
Whatever. Narrowmindedness is what it is.