Steam's custodian problem, BioWare's closure and a studio that voted to shrink

Luke Plunkett argues that Steam has become something close to public infrastructure for Western PC games, the one place where AA, strategy and indie teams still sell in volume. Valve, in his telling, is a privately held company that wants to sell games rather than steward a market. He points to its patchy enforcement of its own AI-disclosure rules, its failure to deal with clones and copycats, and its long-running discoverability problems.

Plunkett accepts that Valve has no obligation to change, but says that however it treats the store sets the terms for everyone who depends on it. He warns that tolerating slop and ignoring AI rules could erode trust among developers and buyers. He closes by hoping Marc Wilkinson's remark that many people at Valve are working on discoverability and slop leads to real fixes.

CounterpointValve and its defenders would say a lightly curated open store is the reason Steam works, and that heavier policing means more arbitrary rejections and more power over what gets sold; the comments Plunkett responds to were also made informally at a trade show, not as policy.

Previously: Valve's earlier response to AI clone games was to suggest developers make their games harder to copy. — Thursday October 29 edition.

For Inside Baseball Week, Luke Plunkett shows a day in Aftermath's shared inbox in which a press release arrived roughly every four minutes, mostly for indie Steam games and mostly from third-party PR firms. He says the volume makes his job harder, devalues email and gets the messages ignored. In his view it also shows that the firms don't understand their clients or the state of the media.

He asks PR teams to match outlets and writers to games the way the better reps already do. Failing that, he says, small studios paying for 'outreach' should know that mass mailings mostly slide past unread.

CounterpointPR firms would say that blanket mailing is cheap insurance when coverage is scarce and that a game's launch week doesn't allow for careful targeting; a small studio with no press contacts may have no alternative.

Nathan Grayson talks to creative director Rebecca Ford, who took over in early 2022, about planning a live-service game years out. Much of what is happening now, including the Tau star system and the Sentient storyline, was already on a whiteboard in 2022, and Digital Extremes still plans mostly on whiteboards, with a quarter-by-quarter visual schedule of Warframe releases.

The plan did bend: Tau and the detective frame Brysko were pushed back a year to make room for The Old Peace, an idea from the former leads now on Soulframe, and the demon frame Uriel took Brysko's 2025 slot. Ford's argument is that live-service games must take big swings and keep the flexibility to rearrange them.

CounterpointSkeptics would note that this is a success story told by the studio's own creative director about an unusually loyal, long-lived game; most live-service titles lack the audience to survive a mid-plan reshuffle.

Riley MacLeod reports on KO-OP, the Montreal studio behind Goodbye Volcano High and Young Suns, which in September announced it was parting with 13 of roughly 30 people. The decision was made democratically: members knew about the cash shortfall in advance and an elected group planned the cuts, which were ratified by membership. Everyone is paid the same $90K CAD, and affected workers, described as furloughed, keep profit share and voting rights in case they are rehired.

Co-founder Saleem Dabbous says funders now want a polished vertical slice or a year of full-team development, which the studio can't deliver while Young Suns is still in production. Former narrative designer Jenna Yow says the advance notice let them cancel a move to Montreal and relocate near family instead. The piece treats the process as better than a typical layoff while not changing the funding squeeze that caused it.

CounterpointCritics of the co-op model would say that equal pay and consensus decisions leave a studio slow to adapt, and that a democratic vote doesn't change the fact that 13 people lost their jobs.

In a rare interview with 80lv, reported by PC Gamer, Zeschuk called BioWare's closure by EA sad, especially for Edmonton, but said his main concern is the people now looking for work. He doesn't regret selling to EA, which offered stability, but says he sensed the PIF takeover would go badly for a studio whose long, complicated games don't fit a guns-and-sports model. He also rejected the idea behind recent mergers and AI-driven cuts that great games can be recreated with 'random people and AI', and said that executives who came up through business rather than development don't know how games get made.

CounterpointExecutives and investors would say that BioWare's recent output did not justify its cost and that the business side of the industry has to make decisions developers dislike.

Previously: Polygon argued Larian shouldn't take over Dragon Age after BioWare's closure, and Sam Hulick planned to rescore the leaked Mass Effect Universe trailer. — Thursday October 29 edition.

Former Silicon Knights head Denis Dyack argues that big publishers are using early access as a release strategy rather than a development one, and that games like Subnautica 2 are 'skewing player expectations' of what early access means. His concern, as PC Gamer summarises it, is that this makes things harder for smaller teams who use early access the way it was originally meant.

CounterpointPublishers and the developers of large early access games would argue that charging for an unfinished game funds development and brings in player feedback, and that players can see the label before buying.