Valve / Blender Market as Main Sponsors of Blender

Hello everyone

On this page https://www.blender.org/foundation/development-fund/ you can find a list of everyone donating 25€ or more to the blender development fund. I saw that Valve is listed as a main sponsor. Interesting, but:
What is Valves motive to do so?
Is it just because there are many Blender users creating stuff in the Steam workshop? Or is this actually the money coming from those users and not ‘directly’ from valve? Or does Valve actually care about Blender? (I really like Valve, but honestly I don’t think so.)

Same question for the CG Cookie Blender Market.
They are listed as Main Sponsor as well. Is it just their content creators donating with their sells or does the CG-Cookie Blender Market donate besides that?

Does somebody actually know this (and not just assume)?

Thanks

Valve donation is from the Steam Workshop. People create/sell assets, and can optionally set a portion of Valve’s cut of the profits towards Blender or various other projects.

Blender Market is similar.

https://code.blender.org/2013/09/valve-steam-workshop-donations-2-devs-get-hired/

Valve expects that Steam Workshop is going to be earning us a sizeable share. We”ll learn more about this during the next months though. But if this continues, more projects for developers can be funded this way. Main focus will be on good tools for game artists though, including features that benefit everyone well too. This also opens up an opportunity to realize a bigger project related to our Game Engine. That”s something we”ll discuss with the current GE team first though.

Let’s just guess they want more games on Steam to get like more… what was that stuff… yes, money. Better tools = more games faster. Can’t be really that hard to understand.

Thanks guys. Everything clear now.
Krice, yes it is hard to understand, because it was very misleading for me. It’s not Valve or the Blender Market, but their !Users! donating.
And your ‘better tools = more games’ assumes falsely that the money is coming from Valve directly as well, but it’s not.
Valve itself is not really concerned about blender becoming better.

Valve is concerned with maintaining a healthy content creation marketplace to monetize their free to play games. keeping the barrier to entry low means more people are willing and able to create content on the market. Valve may not be best friends forever with blender, but high quality, freely available 3d software is advantageous for them.

Looking at both of them, and as others have pointed out, the “sponsorship” is coming from the users there. Valve is simply passing on the donations from artists that have specified they want a percentage sent to Blender, Blender Market is passing on similar.

Perhaps not important to some, but some of us were around for the “Valve sponsorship” BS with Gooseberry. [SUP][SUB]shrug[/SUB][/SUP]

Creators choose to donate to Blender (and I believe Valve is passing on a cut from their end, not the creators). That doesn’t mean they get to “vote” on what the money is spend on, or that the donations are automatically earmarked for specific fields. If creators are against the way BF allocates the funds, they are free to stop donating to it.

As a BlenderMarket vendor, I notice that they basically get half of everything you should make. Selling Easy Clouds addon for $20, have had a couple sells. Not sure if the 30% they keep from each sale goes all to Blender Development fund. How does one confirm?

BF should have a split income,

Game Dev

ArchVis

3d cgi (movies and stills)

game engine

composition

etc

this way people could focus their contributions and vote with their cash.

Well, we know now that the funds are not automatically earmarked for specific fields now from the actions taken by the Blender Foundation. It is, however, inarguable that Ton stated the funds from the Valve arrangement would be put towards features for game artists and game developers. That said statement was less than an “earmark” for the funds is apparent now, even though it wasn’t apparent to many before Gooseberry.

The last few releases have seen many new tools that are useful for game developers.

-Normal Edit
-Data Transfer
-Absolute grid snapping
-Action stashing
-Improved decimation
-Fbx export improvements (as far as what can be done due to the GPL anyway).

Now it might be only some of these that are more or less a direct result of Valve’s money, but I would think Valve would find appreciation that such tools have been developed.

I’m sure they would, AD. Of course, I too am grateful for Epic’s contribution to the FBX development too ($10K is nothing to sniff at!!!).

As you’d be aware, having been a part of the discussions at the time, characterising the Valve/Gooseberry funding argument as one of “Blender not doing anything at all that Valve would appreciate” is quite different than what people actually had an issue with. Especially given Valve was just getting free Gooseberry “sponsorship” PR out of doing nothing more than providing the percentage of asset sale revenue they already were passing on from the asset sales artists had asked for money to be sent to Blender for.

That to one side though, could you link me to what you mean by “action stashing”?

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.74/Animation#Action_Stashing

Ah, the fix to the fake user problem with NLA Actions. Gotcha. Yes, a workaround for that bug was direly needed (and, despite the arguments back and forth on that one, losing one’s work after saving the file was a bug :wink: ).

edit: nevermind. This topic is just a big rabbit hole I don´t have the urge to explore…

In that case I guess a lot of indie developers want Blender to progress as well, because it could be a great tool for 3D instead of big players who have in turn trying to get as much money from artists as they can with new payment models. Since game development is quite risky today it would be nice to have a 0$ tool for graphics content creation.

It shouldn’t be a big surprise us indie developers want Blender to progress as a game art/asset tool. We’ve been saying that for years. Despite Ton’s personal film/animation focus, others (including myself) have been using Blender for years for our game dev purposes. :wink:

It’s kind of the reason the Valve “donation to Gooseberry” touched off a nerve. http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/8/81870/2252157-smiley_emoticons_stevieh_rolleyes.gif

Source 2 is going to be a blender game engine fork

I CALLED IT

Blender is a free tool that makes creating game assets easier. Valve gets more content for their games, which means their games live longer and sell more copies. The users creating that content get paid for it, and those users can choose (thanks to Valve) to support Blender with part of that money. Everybody wins.

So thanks to a free market mechanism like this, Valve doesn’t actually have to “care” about Blender in order to help make it better, as long as all the actors in that cycle stands to gain from it. You don’t need to care about Valve’s level of love for Blender to reap the benefits.