HN user
I'm 27 and I've cofounded only one company in a lifestyle industry (video games). Despite being nearish the top of my particular field, I don't have a PhD in a relevant field like AI. Games are hard in that they are very competitive, but we're not exactly curing cancer.
How behind am I, assuming my primary goal is maximizing positive impact on the world?
Yeah you're right, Steam does offer a lot more than just file hosting. They also do DRM, friends lists, games promotions, and modding marketplaces, although each of these things certainly also have cheaper/decentralized solutions.
The 30% number is one that they might start to get pressure on with competition. GOG now pulls something like 10% of steam sales on the games they curate (citation needed) and I believe they are working on a stronger community/online platform.
There are also more indie upstarts like http://itch.io, which are smaller but focus on developer outreach and close-knit community.
So Valve is definitely idealized by people outside (and inside) the game industry, but definitely much less so by people who have worked there. The flat structure is sort of a pipe dream that leaves nobody actually in charge of important decisions, while hiding a de facto power structure that certainly exists despite being non-explicit.
The company has transitioned to being the company that owns Steam as a platform (including and subsuming Vive), and not much else. People that have joined Valve expecting to develop games there end up fired in less than a year, which surely is destructive but also serves a real purpose of perpetuating the Valve culture. A major shakeup is unlikely to happen; Gabe seems to be unable to decide whether he wants to be a super-public figure that is the face and decision body behind the whole company, or if he wants to shrink into a hole and rub shoulders with tech legends hoping to determine the future of everything. The company will make money for a while, but they are open to platform disruption, even in their VR space where they have (more than Oculus) tried to be the open platform. Eventually the market will figure out that they don't need to pay Steam 30% of sales to host files on a server. If this view is right right, Steam is about to find out that the PC world wants to be even more open than they are offering. Of course, the board of investors will certainly find a way to use Valve's intellectual capital regardless of whether they stay on top.
Whoops, off by 29!
Whoops, off by 30!
I have the luck of having written GPU code on the base pixel shader on a title (Halo 4) that sold on the order of 10 million copies, first game I ever worked on. A back of the envelope calculation for how many times this code has been executed since 2012:
1e7 copies * 10 hours * 60 minutes * 60 seconds * 30fps * 1280 * 720 ~~ 300 quadrillion
They're not embracing it, they're consuming it. Embracing another culture is altruistic. Narcissism is looking at another culture and considering whether to "inoculate against" or "experience" it as a feature of your own life.
The twenty-somethings are filled with a sense of meaninglessness because their lives are meaningless. They allowed their careers to define who they were, and are now surprised when the market created a large, ticketed carousel for them.
The concept was a lot more interesting to me than the implementation. I thought I would end up being able to view a and click bunch of masked, active HTML items, instead it seems to bake it down into a single image. Editing tools looked neat, but "print on a T-shirt" was the last thing I expected, and a disappointment.
Shell out some monthly cash for a coworking space in your area (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coworking).
Assuming of course you live in a somewhat business-hopping city. If you do, the monthly cost is a no-brainer for the productivity gain of having other people around, having a physical workspace, and a reason to leave the house.