Impacted non-studio dev here. It's a bloodbath like some of the leaks in the past few weeks have said. Many important platform/infra teams getting gutted, even in areas where there's supposedly a ton of future investment.
One of my favorite darknet diaries episodes is about corporate whistleblowing, it's a huge business. If you get a massive 1M+ payout, chances are the company is getting just as much (if not more).
The Steam Deck has essentially enabled money laundering through Steam. Before the Deck, if you sold skins on the marketplace you could only use your Steam credit to buy games on the platform, or you had to do a shady 3rd party Paypal exchange. Now, you can use your Steam credits to buy a device with value that you can resell IRL.
Before that, you could also buy the Index VR set, which probably aren't as liquid as a Steam Deck. I won a Dota chest that could only be acquired by watching tournament games in-person, and after letting it appreciate for two years it nearly covered the cost of an Index. I was thankful because I had no idea what to do with hundreds of dollars in Steam credit.
I think most people are fine with the “shady” selling sites when it comes to laundering. I sold my CS inventory a week ago (lucky me!) and I had no problems with getting the cash. Reselling steam decks feels very inefficient
If you are in that business the question isn't really if it's against the rules or not, but if it's possible. You can use your in-game currency that you've gotten through whatever means to get a physical product that you can then resell for cash.
This is actually pretty cool. We have a similar custom library at Xbox that's used extensively across all of our services.
I do wish that there was some kind of self-hostable World implementation at launch. If other PAAS providers jump onto this, I could see this sticking around.
Hi I’m Gal from the team. Thanks! We did ship a reference Postgres implementation. It would receive more love now that we open sourced, but we can’t call it “production ready” without running it in production.
But we did have convos in the last couple of days on what we can do next on the pg world ;D
