Lots and lots of people work for much less or for free on whatever they like.
Problem is that doing "boring" parts of open source project maintenance is not very exciting for many top tier developers so it should pay at least competetively for experience or people will just burn out.
And while you can obviously fund a team of 20 on $1M/year outside of US whatever said team will manage to keep up to the level of quality is another question.
I do think about this in the context of other tech companies, the "bidirectionality of enforcement", or whatever you want to call it
Let's say you have Facebook, which is notorious for banning people yet never seems to ban the things people report that should be banned. That's a real life example, but take any hypothetical company
If someone posts x bad thing and doesn't get banned, do we immediately take our torches and storm the premeses to protest? Maybe, maybe not; "look, scale is hard" (and sometimes calls to remove things outright get politicized, as seen in the last few years, so sometimes it's a tricky line)
That would be... not fine, but more fine than it is now. The lack of fairness in the bidirectionality ensures that you, Joe Schmoe, get a month ban for calling someone a jerk while the most egregious hate or racism or... anything... gets a quick check followed by This Does Not Violate Our Community Guidelines
(And of course because these services are monopolies, well, too bad, you just have to suffer. Hope you don't need the information from that Facebook page, because Facebook will tend to make it borderline impossible to view something public without an account)
I think companies like Google dont even try like they are "Too Big to be Regulated".
Facebook is much worse because everyghing on there is user gemerated. Any small company would be just crushed by governments if they would have similar issues.
I think they are similar to FedEx. FedEx knows that millions of packages per day are transporting illegal goods, any bad enough accident shows it. However, FedEx would absolutely go bankrupt if they tried to open every package and make sure the contents were good. At the end of the day, that's the government's job.
If the DEA and ATF wants to staff every shipping hub with people checking every package, that's fine by them (though admittedly it would hurt revenues).
For Google and Facebook and all the other user-content sites, it's just impossible to actually, fully uphold the law themselves, so their best bet is just to try to make it a pleasant experience for the users and leave upholding the law to the upholders of the law.
To build things you also need a lot of people with education, know how and experience. You cant just bring low-wage workforce and expect to compete with China.
Let alone that to provide same quality of living to average chinese worker as they have in China their salary in US will have to grow 5-6 times.
> Let alone that to provide same quality of living to average chinese worker as they have in China their salary in US will have to grow 5-6 times.
That's Baumol's Cost Disease, a symptom of not allowing massive amounts of workers in. The solution is to let them in, something like how UAE or Hong Kong does it but even more.
Most people don't want to do that. That's a choice they made, but they must live with the consequences and stop complaining.
> To build things you also need a lot of people with education, know how and experience.
Let those people in too as guest workers. There's millions of people that know how to build housing, do surgery, and so on, but they're not allowed to do it.
This just doesnt work. The days when the same line producing cars can be turned into production of tanks has long been gone.
Basically the same manufacruting line cant be even used to build cars on different platform than intended.
Example: a lot of car manufacturers have left Russia in 2022 and most of capacity used for cars is just stay rotting. Even used facilities are only utilized for semi-knocked down assembly.
This is basically almost public information: 25% cut on earnings between $10 million and $50 million.
Yet most likely very big share of sales is well below $10 let alone $15 due to sales and regional pricing.
So yeah I doubt numbers anywhere close to those adverised.
> Generally, the Steam cut is considered “fair” for Indy devs. The benefits of steam (discoverability, massive audience) generate more sales. My Indy dev friends are not upset about the steam cut at all.
Steam no longer provide any discoverability on its own unless you either bring your own community ftom outside or spend $10,000-100,000 on marketing to gain wishlists.
If you're small 2-10 people indie gamedev studio and have external funding Valve will earn more from your game than you.
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