meheleventyone
Joined 11 years ago
Joined 11 years ago
Valve takes a 30% cut of all sales through their platform which is responsible for the majority of their revenue. This is dependent on it being a mutually beneficial relationship for developers and a near monopoly on PC customers eyeballs.
Fantastical examples aside Valve is still dependent on developer good will. The balance of that to the near monopoly is a much more valid point about how far Steam can strain that relationship.
Even if you don’t like the concept of co-ops it’s fairly easy to ask yourself if you would you be more or less motivated if you shared more in the success of a company rather than it being sucked up by shareholders?
You might be mistaking the sheer variety of games and that some are really quite simple for all games being easier to make.
These are not the fun details but they are details none the less and whilst LLMs will probably be more useful here the insights that drive their actions are the taste humans provide.
In particular I'd say right now it's really hard to look at any given game that has commerical potential and spot the winners across any size category. There is a glut of supply that tends to exentuate the hit driven nature of making games as gamers latch onto the next viral success whilst at the same time making it hard to have multiple hits. Back in the day competition was less and money could buy a scope and technology advantage. Both of which are ideas that no longer really apply.
There was a guy on here the other day trying to argue that Brave New World wasn't a dystopian novel. There are some absolutely wiiild world views out there.
Then layer in some incredibly bad bets like Game Pass for XBox and audience tastes shifting away from splashy big budget releases making them an “inevitable” success. It’s left middle aged execs heads in a twist.
In a broader view discoverability is the big problem for everyone. People are hoping in the short term that reducing budgets and scope will save things but all that will do is make the discoverability problem worse. So everyone’s hot under the collar for codev, offshoring, “the Hollywood model*” and so on without looking at the downstream effects of everyone doing that.
AI has largely impacted games by sucking all the available money away and the discoverability problem has made what little is left extremely conservative.
* - This has been a thing for at least three decades now in games despite the obvious collapse of this model and Hollywood.
Inverting it would destroy any open contribution system. See open source projects blanket rejecting AI generated PRs as an example. Basically trying to restore sanity when contribution suddenly has very small cost.