If your proposal is some sort of grant program to make that infrastructure easier to come by then that could be neat. Nothing about steams actual technology is unique though.
A federated indie store could also be neat, though like other federated systems with money involved especially you’ll need to be extra careful about how it’s all set up to make sure the result is any good.
Steam doesn’t need to be unique in order for programming a Steam clone to still take a lot of humanhours. A government mandated opening of the source would eliminate most of those humanhours spent programming. A company could have only a handful of developers and sysadmins, and mainly employ customer service representatives, and that would be a business with the potential to compete with Steam.
The point is, steam competitors don’t do badly because they lack the man hours of steams Dev team. They do badly because of terrible company vision and incentives. Open sourcing a tech doesn’t solve a problem that doesn’t exist. I don’t even think open sourcing steam really does… Anything, for developers. Philosophically cool, practically useless, everything that steam is exists in piecewise form already. Turning steam into a federated service is not meaningfully faster because you make steam open source.
Gog is the closest and does fine. The technology is about on par with steam, the philosophy of the service better, and they are doing fine. Not overwhelming steam no, but fine.
The reason all the steam competitors have bad vision is that there’s not enough of them. If the barrier to entry were lower, there’d be more competitors and some might have good vision.
The barrier to entry is an online store, something many small businesses set up. You could barely stretch it to include an application and download servers. None of those things are things steam does uniquely nor are particularly difficult. Barrier to entry is hardly the issue.
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If your proposal is some sort of grant program to make that infrastructure easier to come by then that could be neat. Nothing about steams actual technology is unique though.
A federated indie store could also be neat, though like other federated systems with money involved especially you’ll need to be extra careful about how it’s all set up to make sure the result is any good.
Steam doesn’t need to be unique in order for programming a Steam clone to still take a lot of humanhours. A government mandated opening of the source would eliminate most of those humanhours spent programming. A company could have only a handful of developers and sysadmins, and mainly employ customer service representatives, and that would be a business with the potential to compete with Steam.
The point is, steam competitors don’t do badly because they lack the man hours of steams Dev team. They do badly because of terrible company vision and incentives. Open sourcing a tech doesn’t solve a problem that doesn’t exist. I don’t even think open sourcing steam really does… Anything, for developers. Philosophically cool, practically useless, everything that steam is exists in piecewise form already. Turning steam into a federated service is not meaningfully faster because you make steam open source.
Gog is the closest and does fine. The technology is about on par with steam, the philosophy of the service better, and they are doing fine. Not overwhelming steam no, but fine.
The reason all the steam competitors have bad vision is that there’s not enough of them. If the barrier to entry were lower, there’d be more competitors and some might have good vision.
The barrier to entry is an online store, something many small businesses set up. You could barely stretch it to include an application and download servers. None of those things are things steam does uniquely nor are particularly difficult. Barrier to entry is hardly the issue.