No, of course it’s not surprising that they’re not a charity. Sure, the big app stores exploit their near-monopolies with exorbitant fees.

Good for Apple, Valve and Google, but I think it’s better that game dev studios and app developers get money instead. However, devs don’t currently have a real choice but to pay up.

Competition can change that, so we should support technically worse stores like Epic so developers will not have to pay their unreasonably high fees.

Yeah, I understand why people like and buy from Steam. It gives real value.

However, especially for smaller game studios, I believe I get more value if actual game developers get more money than Steam getting it. Let’s say a studio gets $1m in revenue after years of work. Having $180k more ($120k Epic fee vs $300k Steam fee) to spend on artists and developers for their next games/DLCs is a big difference.

Those $300k is literally 0.003409% of Steam’s revenue (estimated 8.8 billion in 2020). Valve could have an army of over 40,000 developers at a yearly $200k compensation and still be profitable just from selling other people’s games.

So I make a big convenience sacrifice when I buy from Epic. I also don’t like to support Tencent. But unless the dev is selling Steam keys directly from their web site, that’s where they get the most money.

Steam is a better product, but you give less money to the developers of the actual game. Unless it has Steam exclusives (e.g. Steam workshop) I would rather buy wherever I give the devs most money.

Yes, those are all unreasonably high, which is why they have so many billions of dollars in profit. The cost of running their services is a pittance compared to their revenues.

You could make the same argument for voting. What does your little drop in the vote bucket matter? Do you believe voting is a waste of time too?

Some developers seem to enjoy making their code obscenely difficult to understand, either because it actually makes sense to them that way, or because it makes them feel smarter.

Be wary about this mindset. This type of explanation sets you up for conflicts with existing developers. Several times I’ve seen developers coming into a team and complain about the code, creating conflicts that can last the entire working relationship for no good reason.

Much of the time the people who constantly work with code are already aware of the problems and may not be happy with it, but there’s no time or big benefit in improving working code. Or it’s complicated for good reasons which may not be immediately apparent. (ie. inherent complexity).

Here are a couple of benign reasons which probably will serve you much better.

1. It’s much more difficult and time consuming to make code that is easy to understand. Even in open source, there’s a limited amount of time to spend on any particular thing. This explanation is like a variation of Twain’s “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”, or more abrasively Hanlon’s razor “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity time pressure”.

2. When writing the code, the developer has the entire context of his thought process available. You don’t have that, and that’s also the reason why your own code can make no sense a while later. Also it’s just much harder to read code than to write it.

Maybe it’s something about not knowing if the last element is the top of the stack or the bottom of the stack?

Yeah. Everything depends on the complexity of the product, but it’s just as likely that it’s the new CTO and his team that gets canned when they get bogged down in the details and the costs start racking up.