We are excited to announce that Arch Linux is entering into a direct collaboration with Valve. Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on our distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave. By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.
This opportunity allows us to address some of the biggest outstanding challenges we have been facing for a while. The collaboration will speed-up the progress that would otherwise take much longer for us to achieve, and will ultimately unblock us from finally pursuing some of our planned endeavors. We are incredibly grateful for Valve to make this possible and for their explicit commitment to help and support Arch Linux.
These projects will follow our usual development and consensus-building workflows. [RFCs] will be created for any wide-ranging changes. Discussions on this mailing list as well as issue, milestone and epic planning in our GitLab will provide transparency and insight into the work. We believe this collaboration will greatly benefit Arch Linux, and are looking forward to share further development on this mailing list as work progresses.
Yes you are defending rent seeking behaviour, which is what rent gouging landlords do.
Its not arguing about shifting money between two arbitrary corporations, it’s about shifting money to the people actually creating something, not the people who own the store that sells it to you.
Every dollar Valve gets, is one less that a game developer had to spend on staff and creatives to make a better game.
You’re just not getting it. That hypothetical money isn’t going anywhere but the pockets of the people a level above the actual developers.
Are the developers a studio owned by a large publisher like Microsoft? Microsoft is funding the entire project and studio operating costs, and all the revenue is going back to them. They set the budget, and anything above the projected sales figures a nice bonus for Microsoft execs and shareholders.
But hey, maybe it’s not Microsoft—maybe it’s a couple friends in a garage who went with a publisher to help fund development and set up distribution for all the major platforms. In exchange for their services and marketing, the publisher will take 60% of the sale price. Valve or whoever takes their 30% cut from them before it hits the publisher’s bank account. The guys in the garage still only get the remaining 40%, even if the sale came from EGS with its lower fees.
Your premise of lowering platform fees leading to better games is only ever going to happen for early-access indie games where the devs quit their day job. Those devs are a tiny minority of gross PC game sales, and while it would be nice for them to be paid a bit more, it’s not going to change anything for the average Joe Gamer consumer.
My point still stands: you’re proposing something that doesn’t actually benefit the typical consumer, but merely shifts the profit ratio between two profit-driven corporations.
Literally just objectively false.
If I self publish my game on steam, I get every dollar from it except for the ones that valve takes.
Yeah bro, some developers are not owned by Microsoft, what’s a twist!
No dumbass, it’s just fundamentally more efficient. Your premise of giving Gabe Newell 15% of every game sale and then deep throating him while you thank him for the opportunity, for literally no benefit or reason, is just asinine.
No. It doesn’t. Your position is that you want to waste 15% of every gaming purchase on enriching Gabe Newell instead of the developers who actually made the game. Congratulations, that makes you a dumbass who likes wasting money on hero worship.
Congratulations, you poked a hole in my argument by agreeing with me that indie devs are the only possible people who would benefit from lower fees! Do you want a medal, or do you want to actually finish reading before trying to pull off a “GOTCHA!” moment?
The other twist I absolutely, totally, did not expect today was no comment about my paragraph on publishers taking that juicy 15% from devs. Shocking!
Have you never ever heard the phrase “the devil you know”? If my $10 isn’t going back into my own pocket, but into the bank account of one of two corporations, which do you think it will be?
A private company that doesn’t have a track record of fucking me as a consumer, or a corporation legally obligated to inflate its own share price that sees the consumer as a means to an end?
Don’t worry, take your time. It’s a tough question.
I’m going to assume you read my previous comment and are willing to acknowledge that self-published indie devs would be the only demographic of developers who would actually get that 15% instead of the game’s publishers.
Do you know how many self-published games I purchased through Steam in 2024? Exactly one: Hades 2. And that’s only because my the only options available were through Steam or Epic Games. Everything else indie gets purchased directly or through Itch, then saved to a NAS for permanent ownership.
But hey, between enriching Valve and enriching some other company that does nothing for you as a consumer and entirely exists to profit off the work of the actual developers, go ahead and support the one that has no incentive to treat it’s customers as anything more than a sales figure.
Valve is the city. Indie devs can easily use itch.io or GOG instead.