We are excited to announce that Arch Linux is entering into a direct collaboration with Valve. Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on our distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave. By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.
This opportunity allows us to address some of the biggest outstanding challenges we have been facing for a while. The collaboration will speed-up the progress that would otherwise take much longer for us to achieve, and will ultimately unblock us from finally pursuing some of our planned endeavors. We are incredibly grateful for Valve to make this possible and for their explicit commitment to help and support Arch Linux.
These projects will follow our usual development and consensus-building workflows. [RFCs] will be created for any wide-ranging changes. Discussions on this mailing list as well as issue, milestone and epic planning in our GitLab will provide transparency and insight into the work. We believe this collaboration will greatly benefit Arch Linux, and are looking forward to share further development on this mailing list as work progresses.
Ever heard of royalties? You know, that type of agreement where the creator earns X% of gross sales.
Or considered that publishing agreements can be made to include publishing costs (aka platform fees) as part of the publisher’s fixed cut? I’ll let you in on an obvious secret: if Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all take 30%, the publisher is going to use 30% as the deduction for platform fees regardless of where the sale comes from.
I stand by my opinion that the most likely outcome of lowering platform fees on Steam is the publisher finding a way to vacuum an extra 15% into their own bank account.
That being said: Please tell me what drugs you’re on, because I would love to also live in kumbaya la-la land where unchecked late-stage capitalism isn’t a problem and corporations don’t exist to enrich the 1% by infinitely increasing growth through screwing everyone below them.