This is a glimpse at our future under Techno-Feudalism, by the way. Five companies own all the entertainment and charge you extortionate rates to rent it. Please enjoy these last few years of Steam allowing indie games to be published with $20.00 or lower prices - once Gabe Newell goes away, inide devs are going to get “Spotified” out of existence by whatever venture capitalist buys up Steam.
Would it be impossible or impractical to establish a non-profit trust to buy out Valve and be established with a simple clear charter: to sell games at a price pegged to a metric which at least modestly trailed inflation, and have that trust purchase, own, and act as a board of directors for Steam and Valve? The trust would be set up to have legal requirements to forever explicitly be operated for the benefit of independent developers and their customers. Valve would maintain its present flatter hierarchy.
Is this not a possibility? I presume it would require some sort of benevolent wealth contributions. (Are there not at least a handful of very wealthy people who lean anti-capitalist or at least pro- co-operative enterprise remaining in the US, or elsewhere on the planet? Ideally such persons would also share a love for computer games, but maybe that’s a unicorn stretch too far).
Could not also such a venture be funded at least in part by crowd funding from successful indie developers and well-off customers? I mean, isn’t SC funded to the tune of $500 million in this way? If an arguable scam company can be funded in such a way, why could not an organization with charter-codified explicit community benefits be carved out of this cesspool of a so-called marketplace?
You would need about $10 billion to do that. That’s four entire years worth of Doctors Without Borders funding. IMO, not a good use of limited resources…
Agree.
But then again, Capitalism itself is not a good use of limited resources. Yet here we are.
In a world where people can collectively raise and spend $500 million for a group of software developers to build and release a game like Star Citizen, perhaps game developers and people who enjoy playing computer games could have a chance at carving out something sustainable for themselves.
But yeah, I get it’s a pretty dumb idea. :(