I’m invested because higher adoption of my preferred platform causes prices of said platform to drop, making the platform economically attractive to develop for.

Fewer users causes less effort to go into the platform by larger corporations due to lower revenue streams, diminishing updates and feature count over time.

Eventually, users leave due to pain points not being addressed. Shrinking user bases causes independent developer talent to focus on other platforms since the economics no longer work in the marginal case.

The shrinking independent developer contributions to the ecosystem make the required effort to develop for it that much higher, since the tools and apps that would have been built weren’t.

Higher development costs slow down feature pacing, due to the increased effort needed to substitute the efforts of missing ecosystem developers.

Lack of feature cadence drives users to other platforms, shrinking the user base, bringing us back to step 1.

From other discussions I’ve seen, the guy stepping down was frustrated by having C code rejected that made lifetime guarantees more explicit. No rust involved. The patch was in service of rust bindings, but there was 0 rust code being reviewed by maintainers.

Basically Blizzard’s story.

I quit using signal after they stopped supporting text messaging on Android. I had my whole family using it and that just evaporated overnight 😭

I have listened to a ton of game developer talks over the years. Some of the old indie devs that have given talks basically all welcomed steam because it meant that they didn’t have to deal with all of the stuff that steam does themselves. Before people started buying games through steam, doing an acceptable level of DRM, distribution, payments, refunds, etc. was all hand-rolled, for each company.

You can still do that yourself. Why do people stick with steam with the supposedly onerous 30% cut? It’s because steam provides a valuable service. Now the people that build games don’t have to deal as much with the things that aren’t building games.

In my opinion, a platform like Steam was bound to emerge at some point. Let’s thank our fucking stars that the company that “won” is not beholden to any shareholder and is run by a gamer that understands what people who love video games needed.

If you think that the 30% cut is too high, there’s nothing stopping you from building all the infrastructure yourself. And there are plenty of companies that have done so, like Epic and, until recently, Sony.

But I would say unless you are a team building AAA games and making millions and millions a year, where the savings you can realize outweigh the cost of rolling your own infrastructure, steam is kind of a good deal.

I use it all the time. I’m an engineer though so it doesn’t really counteract what you’re saying.

I drive a 750cc bike and own a 2015 Prius. The bike gets better mileage.

I built a computer and didn’t have high speed Internet about 18 years ago. Couldn’t get Windows activated so a friend gave me a (Debian?) CD so I could get something going. Been keeping old machines alive with it ever since.