So your opinion is that Amazon’s leadership decisions are always perfect and they have perfect insight into their company and foresight? That leadership of a tech company has never before undervalued the importance of their engineering staff, or how willing they were to quit in the face of an RTO mandate?

This is pessimistic nonsense.

No, Amazon is still very dependent on their software engineers, and no, it’s actually quite easy to move cloud offerings and they face stiff competition from both Azure and GCP amongst others.

Also, virtually every single internal piece of HR, management, customer service, DevOps, random internal tool to do X, is written by other software teams at Amazon. You fundamentally do not understand how big tech companies operate if you think they can afford to hemmorage engineering talent without impacting their bottom line in a multitude of ways.

And this is not even to mention the competition that Amazon faces across all its different businesses: Kobo in ebooks, Roku, Google, and Apple TV in streaming boxes; Netflix, Disney, HBO, YouTube in streaming video; Google, Apple, Spotify, Tidal, in music streaming; Shopify, PayPal, Visa, etc in payment processing; Walmart, Best Buy, Shopify, in eretail, etc. etc. etc.

Congrats then on making a bold pedantic claim that you can’t actually back up and is based on nothing.

Big round of applause for yourself. I’m sure the Valve software engineers who know how profitable they are happily accept lower salaries than their counterparts at Amazon and Meta. Such wisdom.

Great! So in the context of the conversation, you then agree with me that Valve is an even worse company, that’s definitely not worthy of praise since they can afford to make all their employees multimillionaires but instead keep it for themselves.

Glad we can agree on the entire fucking point of this thread: that Valve is a greedy company not worth praising or dick riding.

Wolfire estimated that Valve had roughly 360 employees (a number likely sourced from Valve itself in 2016) and that per-employee profit was around $15 million per year.

Even if that $15 million number isn’t exactly right, Valve, in its public employee handbook, says that “our profitability per employee is higher than that of Google or Amazon or Microsoft.” A document from the Wolfire lawsuit revealed Valve employees discussing just how much higher — though the specific number for Valve employees is redacted.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted

If you don’t want to be insulted than don’t blindly dick ride a corporation.

At the end of the day, what I’m trying to explain and that you keep stubbornly refusing to hear, is that: way the way industry is currently, someone other than the developer is going to get that hypothetical 15% when it comes to 99% of total sales revenue.

BECAUSE THATS HORESHIT.

Jesus fucking christ. It’s literally objectively false. You are just saying that to blindly defend Valve because gamers dick ride Valve like dumbass fucking lemmings.

A game developer has a revenue sharing deal with their publisher meaning that the publisher will get X% of whatever their revenue is. If their revenue is lower because Valve takes more, then they both get less. If their revenue is higher because Valve takes less, then they both get more.

It’s not fucking rocket science. Stop making up hand wavy bullshit like the money will just dissappear into the ether so let’s keep making Gabe Newel richer.

They literally, objectively, have, monopolistic anti-competitive power, largely thanks to blind corporate dick riding gamers like you.

And yes, in literally every single western democracy you have special obligations to actually further competition beyond normal if you’re in a situation without competition, because competition is inherently beneficial.

I have serve-web running as a service, but that only works well on desktop screen layouts — from my experience, it runs terribly on mobile.

Congrats, if you’re trying to write software from your phone you should be fired as a software engineer.

Again, it is stupid as fuck for any software developer to use VIM. If you have to telnet into some random bullshit server for whatever reason you’re obviously in a different position. But real, good, maintainable software is not written and built by teams insisting on creating learning curves for no reason.

Are you saying that creating literally all the code that make those usability improvements possible is not worthy of praise?

Do you only praise the window washer and not the architect or construction worker who built the building? Are you really sitting here trying to praise surface level sheen over the actual infratstructure and bones?

UX is important but so is the literal foundation it’s built on. If Valve deserves praise as a saint for their Linux contributions, then so does Microsoft and IBM. If that makes you uncomfortable, the lesson to learn is to stop dick riding Valve, not that you need to praise IBM.

You’re just not getting it. That hypothetical money isn’t going anywhere but the pockets of the people a level above the actual developers.

Literally just objectively false.

If I self publish my game on steam, I get every dollar from it except for the ones that valve takes.

Are the developers a studio owned by a large publisher like Microsoft? Microsoft is funding the entire project and studio operating costs, and all the revenue is going back to them. They set the budget, and anything above the projected sales figures a nice bonus for Microsoft execs and shareholders.

Yeah bro, some developers are not owned by Microsoft, what’s a twist!

Your premise of lowering platform fees leading to better games is only ever going to happen for early-access indie games where the devs quit their day job. Those devs are a tiny minority of gross PC game sales, and while it would be nice for them to be paid a bit more, it’s not going to change anything for the average Joe Gamer consumer.

No dumbass, it’s just fundamentally more efficient. Your premise of giving Gabe Newell 15% of every game sale and then deep throating him while you thank him for the opportunity, for literally no benefit or reason, is just asinine.

My point still stands: you’re proposing something that doesn’t actually benefit the typical consumer, but merely shifts the profit ratio between two profit-driven corporations.

No. It doesn’t. Your position is that you want to waste 15% of every gaming purchase on enriching Gabe Newell instead of the developers who actually made the game. Congratulations, that makes you a dumbass who likes wasting money on hero worship.

This is either false, or you didn’t understand the environment you were working in.

You have to explicitly turn on the setting to have VSCode reformat on save, it’s not on by default, and when it is on, it’s there for a reason, because having software developers that do not all follow the same standard for code formatting creates unpredictable needless chaos on git merge. This is literally ‘working as a software developer on a team 101’.

It literally is if you have a monopoly.

Try clicking past the first result next time you “research” something to prove how unbiased you are:

https://upptic.com/valve-structure-employment-numbers-revenue-revealed-in-lawsuit/

Also, stop dick riding corporations.

So basically “we should all be little dumb dumbs who praise the shiny bauble in front of us, not the actual work and effort that goes into creating something”.

Interesting point.

Bruh, there’s a whole help page on that:

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/ssh

Yes you are defending rent seeking behaviour, which is what rent gouging landlords do.

Its not arguing about shifting money between two arbitrary corporations, it’s about shifting money to the people actually creating something, not the people who own the store that sells it to you.

Every dollar Valve gets, is one less that a game developer had to spend on staff and creatives to make a better game.

So?

Just because you don’t understand electrical engineering doesn’t make it less valuable then paint. If Valve is a saint for contributing to Linux then so is Microsoft and IBM and we should all dick ride Microsoft and IBM like the Valve dick riders in this thread.

No, they’re anti Starbucks price gouging. It’s like all those companies taking advantage of a little inflation to drastically increase retail prices.

I said Valve is taking 15% more that they don’t have to, they said who cares if a landlord drops Starbucks rent 15%, the consumer won’t save. I pointed out that that means that not just Starbucks is being gouged but also independent stores and places that might actually drop their prices, or not increase them as quickly in the future.

There is literally no way to defend rent seeking. It makes everything more expensive for everyone.

I know it has a steep learning curve with no benefit over GUI alternatives (unless you have to operate in a GUI-less environment).

Which makes it flat out dumb for a professional developer to use. “Lets make our dev environment needlessly difficult, slowing down new hires for no reason will surely pay off in the long run”.

Lmao, devs who insist on using VIM and the terminal over better graphical alternatives just to seem hardcore are the worst devs who write the worst code.

“Let me name all my variables with a single letter and abbreviations cause I can’t be bothered to learn how to setup a professional dev environment with intellisense and autocomplete.”