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.
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.
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.