Steam is Valve's digital fiefdom, says the most promising Disco Elysium sequel studio. Workers must unite in order to overthrow Valve.

Max Brod, Kafka's biographer, said that Franz Kafka had once said over lunch that the world was not much more than a "bad mood of God." When Brod asked Kafka if this meant that there was hope, perhaps God's bad day could end, Kafka replied, "Oh, hope is enough, infinite hope, just not for us."

The devs of Summer Eternal, a worker-owned studio that is one of many Disco Elysium replacement companies that sprang up after ZA/UM split, give me a very similar vibe. In a recent interview with VG247 the devs of the studio were asked if there was any chance that the industry would improve after a devastating two years of layoffs. Their answer? "I believe this industry is over. But fortunately, videogames remain.

Dora Klindzic was the dev who made that statement. It should tell you a lot about the state of the gaming industry and the general atmosphere at this studio that hers wasn't the most alarming response given by the team. Aleksandar Gavrilovic, her comrade, has a more "accelerationist' view. The games industry finally has its own Sergei Nechaev.

Gavrilovic says, "I subscribe to the accelerationist viewpoint that the only way to improve conditions is to enter crisis which highlight the contradictions in society and force us remake the world." "Now, following tens and thousands of layoffs it seems that the time is right for game developers stand up for their rights in opposition to systemic greed."

To be honest, it sounds more Marxist to me than "accelerationist". (And certainly not Nechaevist. This was a joke. Please don't email me to tell that I got Nechaev incorrectly. That society's contradictions--bourgeois vs proletarian, greedy games industry exec vs crunching dev--have to sharpen to a point that they can no longer be sustained, opening the way for change, is plain old dialectics.

Then again, I might take that back. Gavrilovic says that he is "eagerly anticipating a second crises, one which would highlight the largest structural problem in game development: the fact that a third of all PC revenues from all developers (from AAA to indies) are syphoned into digital fiefdoms."

You ask, "Who are these digital fiefdoms, as if I didn't know the answer?" Gavrilovic says that Valve is an egregious case. He hopes for a world where developers, not digital feudal Lords, will have more power. "But I lack the imaginative to imagine the replacement of Valve by a community-owned alternative." This 'winter' castle will not fall so easily, but at least we should start openly discussing alternative solutions."

He's referring to the storming the Winter Palace, and the dissolution the much-hated provisional government in the Great October Socialist Revolution. Is Gabe Newell the modern Alexander Kerensky? Will he be defended until the end by a Women's Battalion of Death, when the red guards of the games workers storm Bellevue. The answer is, of course, yes.

Summer Eternal, however, is starting small, hoping to ignite a prairie-fire with a single flame. It has set itself up as a cooperative and, at least in Gavrilovic's instance, has tried to unionise the other developers. Summer Eternal won't fix the games industry, says Klindzic, "but as a result of our operation, we may generate a panacea to agriculture, astronomy and inaccurate bus timetables. We might also produce a cure for syphilis, local elections, hoax messages targeting your mom, and those hoax message that target you.