Good shit. Haven't tried this yet but it's a great move. Even if they take servers offline you can still enjoy it. Wish more devs did this. Might go ahead and pick this up.

Good advice. Also for passer-bys if you get hit with the Operation not permitted bullshit, just make sure the app you're using has Full Disk Access since this is considered a "protected folder".

That just reinforces my argument, and it sounds like we finally agree: You don't need Steam or Valve to make a financially successful game. You need an audience. Steam provides a big one, but you can absolutely garner that audience outside of Steam and the examples I provided are proof of that.

Plenty of studios and developers build that audience outside of Steam using the massive swathe of social media outlets to this day. Hypixel was/is a massive Minecraft server with a huge number of daily players and their growth in popularity was mostly through forums, and later Discord. Minecraft itself started with forum posts and grew purely through word of mouth. Dwarf Fortress was free for a very long time and lived purely off donations before it eventually came to Steam after it already had a massive audience. None of them had any base to speak of from the start. They built those audiences and none of that build up happened through Steam.

The reason I'm even bothering is because people newer to game dev read threads like this. Tell them "Steam is required" and they don't try anything else. Then the lack of success stories gets used as proof that Steam is required even when it's not. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, and it's wrong.

League of Legends, Genshin Impact, fucking Star Citizen isn't even a proper game (yet?) and it's the highest grossing game-related kickstarter in the history of kickstarters. The 5th highest kickstarter ever. StarCraft series, Diablo (up to 4), Lineage series, FIFA Online, really anything Tencent touches that has online capabilities. And of course the OG Ultima Online which still runs today.

None of these even really scratch the surface of the massive Korean/Asian PC gaming markets or the Browser-only games that were wildly successful in the days of Facebook lmao

That's a lot of Unicorns that don't fit your narrative lol. I could list more, but I think I already proved my point. Yes it's possible to publish a game and be successful without Steam, and yes it's been done multiple times across the existence of Steam.

Destiny too, like it wasn't like they were doing bad before bringing titles over to Steam. It's clear they wanted more money which is why they did that lol. They were already making plenty and decided they wanted to make more

You can't realistically navigate around their service if you want to make money with your game.

Where are you getting this from? Yes you can absolutely do this. Mojang did this for decades a la Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress did this for decades. Roblox is massive. World of Warcraft, I mean, yes you can absolutely make a hit title, sell well, and have nothing to do with Steam.

Edit: The most recent example right now is Hytale, which is purposely not on Steam and reached 1M+ active players in the first week.

Your friends can just request Steam keys and sell them outside of the Steam Store. Then there's no 30% cut. That cut only applies to games and software sold on the Steam store.

Valve does offer the best features on their storefront by far, thus the 30% cut. And honestly comparable storefronts (Sony also 30%, Microsoft also 30% up until August 2021, and Nintendo also 30%) all take comparable cuts. This isn't anything new or unique to Valve.

I'm using Guix which uses Shepherd. It's really nice if you're comfortable with Lisp or Scheme/Guile to be specific.

To people wanting to move away from SystemD though, I'm personally partial to OpenRC. It's not very complex at all. As for distros that use it, Void Linux comes to mind. I was also pretty comfortable daily driving Alpine Linux for a while. Both are very much "get out of the way and let me work" distros in my eyes.

Not sure why you're getting dv'd but you're right. Redis, Mongo, ElasticSearch all did this too. Latest offender was minio

Interesting read. Was very curious why they didn't target .beam files directly instead of absforms. Their reasoning for keeping it intermediate makes sense. I'm a bit curious what hot-reloading benches look like with these changes