Valve conquered PC gaming. What comes next?
Valve conquered PC gaming. What comes next?
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People are underestimating how much money valve has put into proton, Mesa and Linux development over the years to make the steam deck work. they had 100+ developers on payroll for years to do that.
Yes. But let's be honest: every store that has arrived to pc to "kill steam" has done what to actually kill steam?
It's like every time someone thinks of creating a steam competitor the process goes like this:
"Hey, let's see what is Steam doing well, what do users love about the store... And do the complete opposite to it in hopes that users ditch steam for us!"
totally with you on that.
Sometimes a market you don't even know exists opens up when you do something, so I get the logic of trying to open a competitor... But what did Origin or UPlay even do? Epic has freebies and a better profit share for publishers, GoG has their commitment to support old games, itch.io has the best profit share, indie focus, and I believe free listing? You need to do something to stand out from the monster that is Steam, or you might as well just stop.
The Linux development is about maintaining a viable option for a store if Windows went walled garden.
I totally give them credit for that, but Steam was also a behemoth before all of that. They've been massive for over a decade at this point, maybe two. Everyone that's tried to be a competitor has come in clearly not understanding the basics of Steam's business model.
How much money did Valve put in? Where do those 100+ devs come from?
Improperly redacted documents from the initial Wolfire case — later hidden — indicated that Valve had only 336 staff in 2021, with just 79 of them working on Steam. We’ve remade it using data reported contemporaneously:
these were external developers. https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20221219-steam-valve-support-proton-mesa
You made it sound like they had 100+ full time employees specifically („payroll”) but it could also mean they paid €1 bounties to 101 people. I know they subcontracted Proton to CodeWeavers (~50 people) who have been working on Wine for ~20 years by then.