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Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, it's great that there are more places to sell games and more ways for game developers to be paid. This can improve the ecosystem.

On the other hand, Twitch manufactures its cultural bonafides. As opposed to Valve, who makes great games, Twitch sponsors conferences, runs an elaborate developer relations team, and makes a lot of strategic investments in other games.

Authenticity matters a lot to gamers. Valve earned it. This affiliate advertising program would seem to undermine authenticity.

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From a dev point of view, the multitude of platforms is making it incredibly cumbersome to deal with.

Assume you make a game in Unity that works well both in mobile and desktop. Now you need to publish on iOS, Google Play, Amazon App Store (Underground or not?), Steam, GoG, Twitch, and Facebook. You may want to make a WebGL demo version for web portal sites as well. Each Platform has their own contracts you have to read carefully and not break.

To complicate it even further -- your game may work best as a paid game on iOS, but ad-revenue based on Android, and Underground on Amazon. These all require exceptions and finagling in the codebase.

Lets add some more complexity! "Gamecenters" -- Google Play integration, Amazon Gamecircle, iOS Game Center, Steam. Do you have Achievements? Steam has their own Achievements, as do all the platforms. Cloud save, Leaderboards? etc.

Now you make an update on your game..and have to export your game for all the various platforms and their special cases, and test them as well.

At least you can reuse most of the code thanks to unity support. For any other app, until very recently with react-native, you had to create separate code bases in totally disparate languages just to target the three major platforms (iOS, web, android). And let's not pretend react-native is a panacea; there's still plenty of work required for cross compatibility especially if you want to use cutting edge features.

Walled gardens and market fragmentation drastically increase the cost of app/game development. It's hard for small or single-person dev teams to produce properly multi platform apps. It's sad to think about how much engineering is wasted replicating identical features across platforms, just for the right to play in the walled gardens of our technological overlords.

"Twitch sponsors conferences, runs an elaborate developer relations team, and makes a lot of strategic investments in other games."

Other than maybe that last one, and that depending on what it expands to in practice, it is not clear to me why I'm supposed to somehow consider these things a bad thing. Hosting, creating, and engaging with community doesn't seem like "manufactured" cultural bona fides if the effort is real and substantial. An accusation about "manufactured" cultural bonafides would to me involve trying to project an impression of greater involvement than actually exists, not doing a lot of real involvement.

Am I missing a nuance you are trying to communicate here?

I dunno, Twitch has a huge audience they developed mostly naturally by being free, reliable, and having some nice features for both streamers and viewers.

I don't know that this translates to game sales, though, especially because the majority of Twitch viewership goes to F2P games.

Valve isn't without its faults though. I've talked to plenty of people who are somewhat tired of the chokehold Steam seems to have on the gaming ecosystem. They may not be exactly destroying their image with mistakes like this past Christmas[0], but I imagine they're not fostering a lot of loyalty.

[0]http://gadgets.ndtv.com/games/news/steam-offline-after-secur...

As a longtime Steam customer, I've also grown fed up with what I perceive as Valve's attitude of complacency. There are numerous GUI bugs and usability annoyances on Steam for Windows that have long gone unaddressed - for instance, the lack of a "Confirm Order" progress spinner on the store checkout page, or the mobile app's inability to correctly load the Steam market "Confirmations" view on first try (always succeeds on retry, which I _always_ have to do manually). As an outsider, I imagine Valve's flat-org developers sitting fat and happy on their pile of Monopoly money, with little incentive to improve their current product so long as it keeps printing money. In this frame of mind, I'm happy about Twitch's announcement as it means Valve could finally see some real competition.

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