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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

All of this is self-serving, even from the Stardew Valley dev. It’s win-win.

I disagree. I think ConcernedApe is actually genuine with his charity and we should see this as a standard for corporations to follow.

I'm confused. What exactly makes his charity genuine vs Epic's charity "disingenuous"?

Ostensibly what u/skibidithink replied. We should have a healthy distrust of international corporations giving for unapparent reasons beyond being in the same sector. We can gesture about how a gift has no obligations, but no one gets into business to not make money, and true charity is without obligation.

ConcernedApe donated to give back to the foundation he came from, while Epic is out for global domination in the virtual entertainment sector.

Epic - like every other company in the world right now, particularly tech companies - was built on open-source software. Just because they may or may not have used those specific tools does not mean their desire to give back to that community is evil.

I'm really still just trying to see the whole "Epic is donating money to take over the world!" argument here. What obligation do they get from these donations, exactly?

Tim Sweeney also has indie game developer roots; can’t he give to projects in the same spirit as how he started?

Sure, and maybe he does. I think there's a difference between Epic doing it as a company, for which they would likely expect to extract some value from the contribution, and Sweeney doing it as an individual.

They’re both making self-serving donations. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Stardew seems to make choices consistent with the gaming community's interest, such as continued free updates and DLC along with reasonable pricing, messaging, and scope.

Epic values exclusive titles, walled gardens, poor support, and a scumbag CEO who will stomp over every market he can to get his next 8 Billion.

They ruined Rocket League, a game I purchased on steam while supporting Psyonix, which is now unusable until I agree to give them my PID and create an account. It's so egregious you can't even play bots offline. Every goal will move focus to a popped up browser window requesting account creation.

Everyone can decide where to draw the line on personal support, but to act like Epic is just being given shade because it's a corporation (as the comments below implied), is inaccurate.

Indie good, big company bad

Charitable donations that are self-serving aren’t non-genuine. The money still spends the same.

Look, it's really nice that you maintained WooCommerce for so many years.

I know you might be tempted to move on to do something else, but I really need my shop to keep working.

So, here is the deal: I am going to send you a 'donation' of 500 USD now, and then a monthly recurring 'gift.'

Contractually? You have no obligation to work, and I have no obligation to pay.

But if you stop working on WooCommerce, I will obviously have to stop the donations.

Sounds cool?

The output of that is rather positive here though, but it would be naive to not see the self-interest.

Every action is self-interested if you squint enough

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