As open models become better (DeepSeek-v3, Kimi K2), the risk increases that someone might use them as an aid in development of biological or nuclear weapons. Current refusal training prevents this. But if models can simply be uncensored, things might get ugly as capabilities continue to increase.
You wouldn't like Valve so much if you explicitly saw the 30% Steam tax, I mean fee, declared every time you bought a PC game on Steam. Imagine if Microsoft did that. +30% for every Windows software. Like iOS. Then Steam games would be +60% rather than +30%.
It's not really a tax though. Other platforms offer a lower percentage (Epic: 0% up to 1000000 copies sold and 12% above) and yet the prices on Epic aren't cheaper than on steam.
If the final price doesn't change based on the storefront cut, then as a consumer, I don't care.
That's still higher than what seems reasonable for a simple store front, but they aren't as bad as Valve or Apple.
Note that Valve is a relatively small company with only a few hundred employees, but with one of the most extreme revenue-per-employee ratios in the world, estimated at $19 million per employee:
That's orders of magnitude higher than companies like Apple, Elsevier or Nintendo. Steam is basically free money for Valve. Valve is extracting huge rents (around 6.5 billion yearly revenue) for negligible expenses (only 79 people working on Steam).
Based on what? Your arbitrary standards. I still don't understand what's wrong with 30% for everything Steam provides as a platform. It's perfectly acceptable. It's not making indie developers poorer. It helping to ensure Valve can focus on the things that matter to them and do things like invest in Steam Input, Proton, SteamOS, and Steam Deck/Machine/Controller/Frame/etc. And it's still significantly better than the times when your only option was brick and mortar, where you maybe got 10-30% as the developer.
Every other digital storefront does far less and still takes 15-30%. Why is Valve the big boogey man and everybody else is free to charge whatever they want on developers while doing fuck all for anybody but themselves?
> I still don't understand what's wrong with 30% for everything Steam provides as a platform. It's perfectly acceptable. It's not making indie developers poorer.
Of course it makes them poorer if a big chunk of what you pay for their games goes to Valve.
> It helping to ensure Valve can focus on the things that matter to them and do things like invest
But they basically aren't doing that. If a company has an extreme revenue-to-expense ratio, it means they are hardly investing any of their revenue. They only have a few hundred employees while making around 6.5 billion per year.
> Every other digital storefront does far less and still takes 15-30%. Why is Valve the big boogey man
Well, Microsoft seems to do 12-15% in the Microsoft Store. And I fully agree Apple is significantly worse than Valve with iOS, because there is no way to circumvent the 30% fee in iOS; indeed, it wouldn't even be possible to offer a software like Steam on iOS. (But it should also be noted that Apple has a much lower revenue-per-employee ratio than Valve, indicating that they reinvest a lot more of their revenue.)
There's a reason everyone else who comes to take on this "market inefficiency" fails. Amazon threw billions at it. So did Google. So has Epic. And Microsoft.
None of them dethroned steam, so 30% is still the cost to access the steam user base.
If tens of billions can't overcome this "inefficiency" then it sure seems like there might be more to the story than economics 101.
The fact is that Steam has an incredibly loyal _userbase_ and you won't convince them to leave unless steam betrays their trust, which they haven't.
The trust in any competitor is nearly 0 compared with Steam which has been a platform people have loved and used for over a decade now with basically 0 issues. No corporate missteps.
Arguably the biggest controversy is the latest way they made CS2 loot boxes less valuable, popping the insane bubble in the skins market. That's still ultimately good for the average gamer and I expect they'll come out smelling like roses.
> There's a reason everyone else who comes to take on this "market inefficiency" fails.
Yes, network effects, as discussed in the Wikipedia article linked above. It's the reason why Facebook or Twitter are so hard to replace, or eBay, or Amazon. In these cases larger platforms benefit from the fact that everyone else is already there, which makes switching hard. That doesn't mean they are inherently better though. They can even be significantly worse than alternatives, apart from network effects.
I don’t care about the Steam tax. Steam is one of the few storefronts that actually show me what I want. That give me the ability to download any game I downloaded 20 years ago when I first installed it. They went through a few dozen iterations of nonsense social stuff, but through that all the core functionality just kept working.
I hate the iOS store because it’s full of ad-riddled slop. Steam isn’t remotely close to that. If I find a game on there, even if it’s bad, someone clearly spent time and love making it.
The "buffering" message looks like they are using the wrong streaming technology though. They should use a fault tolerant real-time video codec, transmitted via UDP, which produces glitches during brief interruptions but not complete aborts with a "buffering" message.
LandSpace, the company behind Zhuque-3, might be the most advanced Chinese rocket startup.
They said they are even designing a larger rocket with 10m diameter, which is more than Starship (9m). My question is though where they are planning to get the required money from. Unlike the organization behind the Changzheng ("long march") rockets, which is already developing a 10m rocket as well, LandSpace is not state funded. And they don't have a billionaire at the top like Blue Origin and SpaceX.
On the other hand, they were only founded in 2015, and it's impressive what they have achieved since then, no doubt with quite limited funds. They also have some experience with designing methane engines.
Hold up—where do you get the assessment that LandSpace "is not state funded" and that these startups have "quite limited funds"? My understanding is the diametric opposite. Here's WSJ:
> "At least six Chinese rockets designed with reusability in mind are planned to have their maiden flights this year. In November, the country’s first commercial launch site began operating. Beijing and local governments are giving private-sector companies cash injections of billions of dollars."
> LandSpace raised 900 million yuan ($120 million) in December from a state-owned fund focussed on advanced manufacturing, while in 2020 it raised 1.2 billion yuan ($170 million), Chinese corporate databases showed.
They need to raise a lot more if they want to build a Starship-class rocket. Small government injections like the $120 million last year won't move the needle much. I somewhat doubt the "billions" of dollars WSJ is reporting, unless they include state-owned rocket companies like CASC, or non-rocket companies, like military companies.
The first version was supposed to launch 150 tons to LEO. In reality it was something like 15 tons. Even the new V3 (significantly taller) only aims for 100 tons, and whether they achieve it is still an open question.
The individual Falcon turn-around is slow (months of refurb), and the record half-month ones swapped some engines. B1067's 30-reuse is a ship of Theseus rebuilt over 4+ years.
Feh, swapping engine is not an option for the first few initial Mars trips, unless its payload also contains engines (can't imagine the scissor-lift payload either that needs to go with).
The head of SDI formed the Mars Society with Zubrin. He was originally going to run SpaceX as Chief Engineer (cite: Liftoff) but he instead got appointed NASA admin and directed the first few $billion to a zero-experience SpaceX. This same SDI head then formed something called SDA in 2017 under Trump which is the platform for Golden Dome, or "the SDI 2.0".
This is a multi-trillion dollar program which only Musk has been awarded contracts (as of Nov 2025) and involves the total weaponization of space.
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