Something quite unexpected here - the newer owners of Nexus Mods have now acquired the popular community website SteamDB, a site that many rely on.
      • inclementimmigrant@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        0·
        13 days ago

        I don’t know man. We’ve seen how bad enshitification takes hold once a big corporation takes over. Honestly, in a lot of cases, I would rather have them fade and get forked vs relying on the enshitificated version to amble along, like git hub, source forge, all of the game development studios in the past decade.

          • dgdft@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            13 days ago

            Why would network externalities not apply here?

            They’re a very common and well demonstrated pattern that plays out with this sort of site; e.g. it’s taken almost a decade for many gaming wikis to get off fandom after they were locked in. There’s a finite pool of user attention and contribution that these projects can pull from, and splitting that pool worsens the commons.

          • FishFace@piefed.socialEnglish
            0·
            13 days ago

            In practice it does. There’s a big, entrenched competitor out there already, so that puts a damper on any motivation. If the site just closed down, that wouldn’t be the case.

            Even if SteamDB is gradually enshittified, there will still be that competitor that does a “good enough” job for a lot of people, meaning the bar for a new player to come along is higher.

      • Grimy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        13 days ago

        There’s also selling it to another party that isn’t a vampiric parasite as an option. I doubt they were the only potential buyer.

  • MurrayL@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    13 days ago

    If NexusMods is anything to go by, SteamDB will soon require an account to use, with strict limits unless you pay for premium access.

    • DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      0·
      13 days ago

      Plus they’re going to allow developers to hide whenever they make changes so we can track minor changes anymore

      Fuck they’re going to break/API Paywall IsThereAnyDeal aren’t they

    • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      13 days ago

      Seems reasonable. Most people make a few requests, and heavy users can pay for the operational costs.

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.socialEnglish
    0·
    13 days ago

    In it they note SteamDB might finally gain a proper API for people to use, and there’s no plans to put adverts on it.

    Cool. 😃

    But, they will be looking to commercialise it somehow - as they said, “SteamDB needs to make money”.

    Oh… 🫩 Aaaaaaaand it’s fucked.

    • creamfresh@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      12 days ago

      Yes it’s fucked because running servers costs a lot of money and SteamDB runs on donations. So I hope you did donate at some point when you used their services and disapprove of this development.

      • RadiallyAxiomatic@lemmy.caEnglish
        0·
        12 days ago

        Being financial able to contribute is required to validate an opinion. Just like only the wealthy should vote.

        • creamfresh@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          12 days ago

          Well if the opinion is „they shouldn’t be bought to sustain themselves financially“, yes.

          • orioler25@lemmy.caEnglish
            0·
            11 days ago

            Right, did you look up if they sold because of financial hardship? Pretty sure everything I’ve read has been about its owner personally suffering burnout and disillusionment with the current tech and internet landscape.

  • doctor0710@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    13 days ago

    What’s special about SteamDB that no real, fully fledged alternatives showed up yet? What would prevent someone from “forking” it?

    • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      13 days ago

      They’ve been working on collecting data for a long time. They have a lot of established methods and data that a newcomer would have to do the work to replicate.

      I’m not aware of anything they do being open source, so you couldn’t just fork it. You’d have to start from scratch.

      • doctor0710@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        13 days ago

        That’s kinda what I was trying to point to. Yes it is a lot of work to replicate the functionality, but apparently Valve has no intention of “plugging the hole” this data is coming from, and I’m not sure NexusMods would have any ability to torpedo any potential alternatives as they also depend on a third party. So if/when the original enshitifies it would be possible to move on to a new platform.

        • inclementimmigrant@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          0·
          12 days ago

          Well if there’s “nothing special” about setting up a full stack, interpreting and collecting data, write the database back end to efficiently store and retrieve the data, and create the algorithms to parse and massage the raw data to create the proper meaningful data to the user and plot them then it sounds like you’re the perfect candidate to get cracking on this project since it’s really “nothing special” and software development is easy.

          • doctor0710@lemmy.zipEnglish
            0·
            12 days ago

            Sounds like you’re the perfect candidate to do nothing about it and let the existing platform be enshitifed with providing nothing in return. Good luck with your defeatism.

            • inclementimmigrant@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
              0·
              12 days ago

              Yeah, because I do software for a living, participate in open source projects in the domains I know WTF I’m doing and good at.

              I am that perfect candidate for doing nothing in this particular situation because I’m not a person who’s going to downplay how hard it is to develop software unlike you who has no clue apparently what it takes to develop anything and then goes on to say how it’s “nothing special”, I know how hard it is to develop software and how hard even developing a simple front end GUI can be when that’s not your area of expertise much less something that is big as this.

              But you feel free to go right ahead and be that middle manager that has no clue about what it takes to develop that “nothing special” while not picking up and write that full stack. Go ahead, I bow down to your middle manager expertise as you develop that “nothing special”.

              Defeatism…rich when you’re not the doing the software and leading the charge there bud.

              • doctor0710@lemmy.zipEnglish
                0·
                12 days ago

                Well I also do software engineering for a living, except I don’t just spam out a bunch of bullshit that has nothing to do with the project we’re talking about. “create the algorithms to parse and massage the raw data” my fucking sides… “front end GUI” as opposed to… backend TUI? If you knew anything about your job you’d see that most of the inner workings of the site is very well documented with multiple libraries ready to go for like 90% of the functionality. Just because you chicken out of anything that your precious LLM would deem too hard doesn’t mean everyone is else is a bad coder. Nothing would ever get made if people were like you.

                Just FYI, I literally never said there’s nothing special about the site, that’s your halucination. I ASKED if there was anything special that would prevent recreating the functionality, but I know how hard it is for you to read. I wonder how you cope with a Jira ticket that’s longer than two sentences…

                I thought fucking karmawhores with their dumbass opinions would stay on reddit…

  • muusemuuse@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    13 days ago

    you know, couldn’t someone make a sort of decentralized git of game art assets and just have a client fetch the missing assets, dumping them into the steam library when it finds entries that dont have populated metadata? we dont actually need a centralized web page for this