I’ve seen demos/open betas have become a lot more common in the past year. So I do wonder if that’s changing this paradigm a bit

If you have no marketing budget, then shipping keys to streamers. Like small streamers, with 10 concurrent viewers, they might actually install it and play the game.

That’s 10 more people exposed to the game. Now send out 10.000 of these keys, even if 1% that’d be 100 streamers, actually play it. That’s expose to 1000 people, if you’re lucky that’s 20 extra buyers - But it’s also buyers way more likely to leave a positive review, given they’ve already seen the gameplay loop before buying it.

The early reviews are incredibly important for Steam to determine whether or not it should boost visibility of the game

Honestly it seems like they more or less identified all of the former unidentified users, and it turns out the vast vast majority of which are on unix based systems.

If this goes right down again, I’d imagine the unidentified users to go up - But would be a decent indication for a lot of traffic being scrapers

It does make some menial tasks simpler, but if people think it will actually replace us then they’re in for a shock.

That’s the sales pitch, we’re in a job market drought right now. Give it a year or two and all the slop will begin breaking, making a new job market boom for developers

Veritasium themselves has a video on the topic, they’ve indeed sold parts to investors