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.
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.
I'm pretty floored by Unity's decision. Even after their partial walkback (saying devs will only be charged for the first game install, not EVERY game install) it's still a crazy way to monetize instead of profit sharing.
Unity appeals way more to hobbyist devs getting into game dev, and from what I've seen has significantly more resources and tutorials online than Unreal. Hopefully we see the same resources start to be published en-masse for Godot.