OceanicAir said:
Doesn't epic also give out grants? I read they gave Blender 1.2 mil yesterday.
They do, and so do companies like Ubisoft. Ubisoft is the primary funding behind Omar Cornut's ImGUI, for example.
but the amounts they spend are drops in the bucket compared to valve. When you start stepping into the developer sphere and really start looking at tooling, you quickly learn there are two titans in the PC industry: Microsot, and Valve. Valve's closest competition these days isn't Sony or Nintendo or even Epic. Valve operates these days primarily in the market Microsoft operates in. They develop PC tools, infrastructure, and interface. They have been basically propping up the open source alternative to Microsoft development ecosystem for the past 7 or so years here. Valve these days offers the closest thing anyone has ever come to a "DirectX" alternative. Not just talking about graphics related stuff, but the
other things the X in DirectX represents. Except, instead of them being proprietary owned by valve, they are open source and independently owned (like, again, SDL2).
This goes one step further: start looking into the actual git repositories of these open sourced technologies, and you'll find a second pattern: overwhelming number of git commits from Valve employees. Valve doesn't just fund these technologies, they actually work and develop them in-house. People on Era ask all the time, what does valve do if they don't "make games" anymore? What does the workforce actually do? Putting real, actual paid development time from super talented engineers is what they do. They prop up open sourced tools with a workforce that actually matches big companies, which is a massive benefit to everybody. The entire reason people have stuck to Microsoft's tools and platforms (and thus windows exclusivity) is because they put waaaaaay more money into development than Open Source projects could scrounge up. Valve, in the last 7 years, has been using all of its might to close the gap. They fund Open Source technologies, like Microsoft funds windows. That's why, literally in the last couple of years, we've seen a string of "WTF HOW THE FUCK DOES THIS EXIST" type of technologies coming out of Valve like Steam Proton and dx2vk. These are jaw dropping tools, which should be coming out from a giant company like microsoft or a research outlet like MIT, coming out of what appears to be bedroom coder projects, because it's secretly valve working behind them through proxy.
Start talking to the people who make the tools and fundamental technologies that outright powers PC gaming today, and you'll find Valve is secretly everywhere in PC gaming. That's why steam itself can be wholly used as a cross development library to be linked against. Valve bundles nearly every open sourced technology it funds into steam as a single package. If steam is installed on your computer, an entire open sourced platform funded by them is there too, that developers can be assured exists.
There exists a very big difference between how game players view the technology they use and where it comes from, and how developers view the technology they use and where it comes from.
This will probably sound very wrong here, but I'll quote a friend of mine who worked on games like Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam who has been a game developer for many, many years: "A million dollars isn't a lot of money for a product like people think it is."
is invisible to me now.
