senior developer senior dreamer senior dj
Cyberspace
Joined March 2012
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Disagree with Sweeney all you want, but hereβs my reality: Steam takes 30%, then US withholding takes 30% of my remaining share on US sales. Iβm left with 49% before covering development costs. I fund the game and take the risk, yet more than half is already gone. Feels like getting robbed, tbh.
Tim Sweeney is taking another shot at Steam.
The Epic Games CEO claims Valve has βheld gaming back for yearsβ by locking PC games into Steamworksβ ecosystem.
Sweeney argues that Steamβs social features make it harder for players on PC to communicate cross-platform while also criticizing Steamβs 30% cut.
However, that claim isnβt completely accurate. Valveβs Steam Datagram Relay can also be used across other platforms.
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I'm gonna spell this out because this issue is deceptively subtle:
1. The Steam client and infrastructure is somewhere between "not that hard" and "trivial". It's a download service attached to a payment processor with a smattering of services on the side. Cloud providers handle all the infrastructure these days.
2. Steam takes 30% of gross revenue; ostensibly for the privilege of using these services, but in reality it is purely to get access to the massive Steam userbase.
3. Steam users love Steam and having their whole library in one place. It works. It's dependable. It has sales and cards and achievements, oh my!
4. PC developers have no option but to distribute through Steam or lose the vast majority of sales. Not releasing on Steam destroys the business model.
5. Therefore, no amount of competition will ever unseat Steam. People post-hoc rationalize this with memes about how gracious Gabe is. And how brilliant their services are. But realistically, no avid Steam user wants other stores to succeed.
The mere existence of other stores risks splintering their precious collection. They are "all in" on Steam. Invested.
Even if an alternative were objectively better, by whatever metric you care about, it would still be of no interest to Steam users. They would in fact find it to be a problem and a threat to their investment.
Competition in this space is not only uninteresting to most Steam users, it's actively denigrated!
The CONSEQUENCE of this situation, is that 30% of all gross revenue is siphoned out of the PC games industry into a black hole.
It doesn't recirculate into studios.
It doesn't pay any bonuses.
It doesn't fund any sequels or DLC.
This is a particularly insidious tax because it's well hidden. It's a second order effect. Most Steams users don't know, and the few that do never consider the aggregate effect this has on their favorite hobby.
It's undeniable that, at this point in history, Valve could EASILY lower the distribution fee while maintaining healthy margins. But they don't have to.
Users are locked into Steam and therefore developers are stuck paying 30% of gross revenue to Valve.
The irony is that Steam users, the very ones maintaining this unbreakable stalemate, would benefit the most from a better financed game development ecosystem.
I don't think this is fixable. It's just sad.
It's really sad that the games industry is drained by a 30% tax on gross revenue.
You could vibe code a Steam alternative in a week. Cloudflare egress is basically free.
The industry is in desperate need of a distribution platform that allows developers to keep their revenue.
Networks effects and the fanatic obsession with "muh Steam library" will make this very difficul.
But if devs could actually keep their earnings, we'd have a greater selection of better games and far more financial success stories.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Steam calculates its revenue share on net revenue after adjustments for refunds, chargebacks and taxes, not gross revenue. It funds Steam's platform services and infrastructure including distribution, Workshop, multiplayer tools, cloud saves and discovery features.
partner.steamgames.com/doc/finance/paβ¦
partner.steamgames.com/doc/finance/taβ¦
partner.steamgames.com/doc/features
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I'm not sure a lot of people understand what game coders actually do. We're not spending 9 hours a day finely hand crafting artisan software and expressing our inner dreams... 90% of the time we are fighting compilers and existing architecture, having to work out how undocumented code works, and tracking down obscure bugs and behavioural issues.
Most of game programming is just difficult, tedious, laborious grunt work, and the cognitive load we have to endure to get anything done is tiring and frustrating. No game coder is doing it for this 90% of the job.
We make games because the 10% that IS actually about making things fun and expressing ourselves is so incredibly rewarding it makes the other 90% bearable.
Now imagine if there was a tool, some kind of AI agent maybe, which could do most of the 90% grunt work for you, leaving you to just make all the decisions and express your creativity. How amazing would that be. How completely revolutionary would that be.
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List of chains that may shut down soon β
Flow
Movement
Fantom
Zeta
Beam
Manta
Mode
Algorand
GOAT
Metis
Osmosis
Soneium
Merlin
Berachain
Hemi
Eden
Astar
Boba
Chia
Mythos
Lisk
Fluent
Shido
Pearl
Missing anything?
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So many ppl gamble on memecoins trying to make it overnight.
Youβre far more likely to win by investing in a few solid revenue-generating apps while working to grow your income via a side hustle.
You wonβt get rich fast, but you'll have a real shot at building wealth over time.
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"Diamond hands" was the most expensive marketing campaign ever run on retail and I helped run it.
I had millions of views on TikTok telling people how to stake ethereum:0x64aa3364f17a4d01c6f1751fd97c2bd3d7e7f1d5. I believed every word.
I ate almost 90%.
Here's what I understand now that I didn't then.
Every time a protocol tells you to hold, check whether holding pays. Not in vibes. In money. Find the line in the code that moves value from the person leaving to the person staying. There isn't one. There's almost never one.
So what "hold" actually means is: absorb the sell pressure for free while the people with better information leave at your expense, and we'll call you a diamond hand on the way out.
91.5% of OHM was staked at the end of 2021. That community held harder than any group I've seen in this industry. It went to zero anyway. They weren't weak. They were unpaid.
If a protocol wants your discipline, it can pay for your discipline. Anything else is asking you to subsidize somebody else's exit and calling it culture.
91.5% of $OHM was staked. It still went to zero. Here's the part nobody explains.
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If you mint this shit you have learned nothing from 2021/22
ACK is a 6529 Cabal member and this is a mass extraction event
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.@brian_armstrong's ai founder mode is getting out of hand
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"so you staked your ETH on the Ethereum blockchain to earn yield?"
"yes, Dave"
"except you didn't want your capital to be locked up so you actually staked it with a liquid staking protocol called Lido?"
"that's correct, Dave"
"and Lido gave you a liquid staking receipt token called stETH in return?"
"yes, Dave"
"and then you didn't think that was enough, so you juiced the yield even further by depositing your stETH receipt tokens into a restaking protocol called Eigenlayer?"
"you are correct, Dave"
"and now you didn't want to lock up your capital, so you actually restaked with a liquid restaking protocol called KelpDAO who provided you with a liquid restaking receipt token called rsETH?"
"you got it, Dave"
"and then that was surely not enough juice, so you then deposited your rsETH tokens into a lending protocol called AAVE so that you could open a leveraged looping position that borrows ETH against the rsETH collateral and restakes the ETH into rsETH which is then deposited as collateral, except it turns out rsETH used a cross-chain bridge called LayerZero whose security is held together by a 1/1 toothpick, which was obviously hacked by north koreans causing rsETH to become undercollateralized and now these looping positions are stuck and unprofitable, and everyone is pointing fingers at each other, and also DeFi is a very serious industry"
"you are 100% correct, dave"
jfc.
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The main FUD is not the quantum itself, but the incompetence of BTC community to agree on reasonable solution...
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Here is recalculated Solstice airdrop by tiers.
T6 not worth registering.
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I am a Web3 Ambassador at World Liberty Financial.
There are 12 of us on the team page. 4 are named Trump. 3 are named Witkoff. The page calls us "the passionate minds shaping the future of finance."
600,000 wallets bought our memecoin. They lost $3.87 billion. The family collected $350 million in trading fees. It launched 3 days before the inauguration. 80% of the supply went to CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC. I did not choose the names. I designed the allocation, the vesting, the timing, and the distance between the product and the President.
The distance is my best work.
I am the reason these events are unrelated.
World Liberty Financial sends 75 cents of every dollar to DT Marks DEFI LLC. That is the family entity. Zero capital contributed. Zero liability assumed. I wrote this into the Gold Paper. Page 14. The lawyers bound it in white leather. The binding cost more than the due diligence.
Justin Sun invested $75 million. He was facing SEC fraud charges. The SEC dropped the case. He is now our advisor. These events are unrelated.
Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to federal money laundering violations. He received a presidential pardon. The SEC dropped its lawsuit against his exchange the same week we listed our stablecoin. Then the exchange settled a $2 billion deal entirely in that stablecoin. These events are unrelated.
Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed of BitMEX pleaded guilty to Bank Secrecy Act violations. All 3 received presidential pardons. Then the company itself was pardoned. $100 million in fines. Gone. An American first. These events are unrelated.
Sheikh Tahnoun of Abu Dhabi paid $500 million for a 49% stake that was never publicly disclosed. Then the administration approved semiconductor exports to his companies over national security objections. These events are unrelated.
Everything is unrelated. I track the unrelatedness on a dashboard I built. The dashboard has 7 columns now. I am proud of the dashboard.
On May 22nd, 220 people paid a combined $148 million to eat dinner with the America First president. Over half were foreign nationals. Justin Sun paid $18.5 million for the first seat. He visited the Executive Office Building the day before. I designed the seating chart. I put it on the Investor Confidence page. That page is doing well.
The team page lists 3 Witkoffs. All 3 are Co-Founders.
Steven Witkoff is the President's Middle East envoy. He testified as a character witness at the President's fraud trial.
His son Zach runs the crypto operation. His son Alex is also a Co-Founder. I have not been told what Alex co-founded.
The father runs the diplomacy. The sons run the platform. The family runs both. That is organizational efficiency.
Barron is 19. His title is Web3 Ambassador. The same as mine. Donald Jr. called the conflicts of interest "complete nonsense." Eric launched a Bitcoin mining company called American Bitcoin. America First. The mining partner is Hut 8. Hut 8 was founded in Canada. America First means the name.
On March 6th, the President signed Executive Order 14233 creating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. The order directs the government to hold Bitcoin. The President's family holds billions in Bitcoin. The executive order appreciates the President's assets by presidential decree. I did not write the executive order. I made sure it looked unrelated to the portfolio.
Trump Media put $2 billion of Bitcoin on its balance sheet. The ticker symbol is DJT. His initials. The press secretary said it is absurd to insinuate the President profits off the presidency. Forbes calculated his crypto holdings exceed the combined value of Mar-a-Lago and Trump Tower. I would call that absurd too. That is my job.
600,000 wallets bought in. 1 of them asked why she could not withdraw her funds. I told her the protocol was experiencing dynamic market conditions. She asked what that meant. I sent her the Gold Paper. She said she had read the Gold Paper. I muted her channel. Dynamic means the conditions change. The condition that changed was her access.
A congressman called us the world's most corrupt crypto startup operation. We put it on a coffee mug. Ironic merchandise. $45. The revenue split on the mug is also 75/25.
My own tokens vest on a different schedule. I wrote that schedule. That is not in the Gold Paper.
The memecoin funds the family. The family funds the platform. The platform funds the stablecoin. The stablecoin funds the deals. The deals require the pardons. The pardons free the partners. The partners fund the platform. The President signs the executive orders. The executive orders inflate the assets. The assets fund the family.
I am the reason these events are unrelated.
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a bit ironic that claude mythos is this giga smart cyber security expert model but they accidentally leaked all of claude code a week ago
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1982 soviet union but with leonid brezhnev hyperactive and unhinged on social media
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I was on a call with a bunch of execs and you could see the tired look in their eyes
the AI code they thought they could write is just not working very well and they're having to learn, very quickly, how to code
This will be the experience of every CEO, until eventually they hire these 20 million back. because they were actually doing very difficult work
20 million developers used to be the gatekeepers to software.
Wabi CEO Eugenia Kuyda on who gets to build now:
β"The only people who could make software up until last year or so [were] just professional developers... Very few people in the world."
"Even if you have a good idea, go ahead, find an engineer, find a co-founder, find a technical co-founder to build this. But you can't really otherwise build it... It requires a lot."
"But now anyone can."
"This is just wild."
"Before βwe had to spend months developing that, developing an app and figuring out some illustrations and sounds. Now you just write one prompt and it's there."
@wabi CEO @ekuyda on @solofounders with @julianweisser