Splendid4117

This is equivalent to saying ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’ which is a way of implying you shouldn’t regulate the tool. The tool matters, and how its positioned and what it’s given access to do matters.

Plus, speaking as an OSS maintainer for some rather large libraries… Its obvious. You can also just close MRs and if the user comments and engages in meaningful discussion you reopen. Cost of a wrong decision is low.

As a cloud engineer - renting any distribution servers from a cloud provider will result in a dev paying for every download. You pay based on the bandwidth you consume in the cloud (I.e., you pay per Gb delivered) as opposed to your pipeline like you do when you run your own private servers. You also pay storage costs per month. You’d have to maintain that “forever” as well, because people would want to uninstall, then re-install later.

I get your argument, and I’m not discounting it, but I do suspect that for smaller devs the price they’re paying to Valve is well earned on Valve’s side (and the fact that so many devs choose to use it would seem to bear this out). We should also consider that steam is essentially built-in DRM to games.

For larger customers, they likely have this infrastructure and get annoyed at the costs. They still go to Steam though because it increases their reach as a type of marketing strategy, so they still likely find the cut worth while. If Steam was more hostile to users, then people would actively look for alternatives (I.e., the Gogs of the world), and the publishers would have to target more storefronts.

So yes, Steam’s primary customers are publishers, but I’m not sure they’re really getting the raw end of the deal here :)

I think it’s more that a ton of popular python libraries (things like pandas, tensor, etc) are actually built in C, so python is just C wearing a mask