this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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But indie devs don't work for Valve.
I guess technically video creators don't work for Youtube, although that one is murkier. Steam is a storefront.
Think of Amazon, actually. That's probably a better comparison. Amazon workers work for Amazon. Their relationship with Amazon has to do with labour conditions and so on.
But if you're a seller, or a small store that tries to sell online your relationship with Amazon is not a labour relationship but it's still extremely asymmetrical. You have no power in that dynamic.
I mean, you're absolutely right, that's modern late-stage capitalism. The astounding thing is how well Valve manages to position itself outside that. Just look at all the pushback that pointing that out gets you in this and other threads. Poeple HATE the idea that Valve exists in that space. "Good guy Valve" is deeply ingrained and it demands that you think about them in a different way than Amazon and Youtube.
Woah that's some gig economy bullshit like saying Uber drivers don't work for Uber or something. I refuse to engage in glorifying that corporations aren't responsible for people who rely on them for their livelihood.
There's nuance to it. You can't ever get good enough at driving that Uber gives you a special deal, and you aren't selling each of your rides to people on multiple services at once. The power dynamic isn't quite as lopsided, at least not for everybody.
But... it's also not completely different, especially for the smaller devs. Valve definitely comes from that same tech upstart mentality, and it only drifted further into it as they stopped being primarily a game developer and became primarily a storefront.
I guess I'm just saying most of the complaints with Valve are complaints with capitalism at large. Valve is a business that wants to make profit.
I would fucking love to have a decentralized ptp game hosting and sharing servi... oh that's just piracy. Something that indy devs typically struggle with.
Work is work the need to be paid out of the hands of a massive corporation is just capitalism no matter how you slice it. I'm not going to cheer lead for any capitalist entity as they bicker who fucks their workers least.
Piracy and its interactions with indie development are way more nuanced than that, but sure, yeah, Valve is a corporation like any other corporation. That's all I'm saying.
That their branding work spares them a lot of criticism and judgement from the same industry-standard practices that are seen as an affront elsewhere in both game development and the larger online content creation industry.
Well yeah, most companies get out of criticism via branding. Look at plastics and how it was lied that it was recyclable when most plastic goes straight to landfill.