watched the recent Dropped Frames podcast with Rami Ismail as a guest again. I like it when they talk about Devs, Games, and development, but every time Rami talks about Steam and Cooh and company nod their heads at his "critique" I am further entrenched in my opinion that nearly every (media active) indie dev is an entitled asshole.
30% this, Valve doing nothing that, and Cohh even implied that Valve "stole" 30% from the Valheim devs.
I guess that once you get to a certain point you only really care about you. You know the whole, "why do I need them for? I mean I can do this by myself". Some indie devs have done that and it has worked out for them but it doesn't work out for everyone. And the biggest issue is that smaller devs might take what these successful Indies devs had said to heart and try them only for them to not work.
Just remember everyone once I get rich and famous "you can all go to hell for all I care". Because that's what it feels like entitled people say.
Journalist are weird because there does seem to be a number of them (I'm not sure how big of how small) that really don't give a rats bum about video games and are only in "video game journalism" because that was the only available "journalist" job that they were offered (and they might have college debt). Not only do you have people that don't really care about video games talking about video games you also have them basically sharing the exact same information (credit to XYZ) so as long as you can paraphrase what some other gaming site said them you too can be a video game journalist.
How ever there are those that do more than that and do stuff like talk about more obscure titles, those that write reviews for games (that can also be a problem as well) one of our own MC members writes for RPGSite from what I recall and he mainly does reviews I think?
You do have those that also do stuff like interview game devs, which is nice since it can be hard to get a hold of some devs and have them talk about their game and other projects.
As for journalist and influencers they know better than to bite the hand that feeds them, after all it is possible for them to be black listed and then what? With being a game dev you can still keep making games and distribute them some way, but what if you were a big name Twitch streamer and then twitch permabans you? YouTube may still be an option but then you would only be a fraction of the size that you were before.
And as for SIE, Nintendo and MS. You have to understand that that 30% cut comes from the billions of dollars that they spend on hardware dev cost, the cost to promote their hardware and services and to promote your game. Oh wait what's that despite all of that your game ended up selling more copies on Steam compared to other platforms despite those billions that they spent, but you are still okay with that 30% cut? How strange. Maybe those 3 should just change their business model or something.
If you could "betray" (cut business ties?) With SIE, Nintendo, MS, or Valve (let's add EGS in there since they are still growing) you would most likely cut ties with Valve since they are not going to offer you a timed Exclusive deal. They are also not going to spend a few hundred thousand (a million?) To promote your game.
You can smack talk Valve and they won't do jack squat. How ever if you talked very badly about Nintendo they may cut ties with you outright. I could be wrong but with the Nintendo partners program for content creators, if you so much as smack talk about Nintendo then they will end your partnership and I think it had happened to some already. I'd image that being in Japan and smack talking about Nintendo would be a big no no. (Being In Japan and telling people that Nintendo is not that great and other stuff could potentially get you pilled on by Twitter Users?) This could be false information and maybe I just have not looked hard enough but I don't think I have heard about Japanese indie devs "critique" with Sony or Nintendo (but then again I don't think I have heard major complaints against Steam but then again there are smaller Japanese devs that just outright skip a Steam release).