Tech news picked on 2026-07-13
The Paradox of Steam's All-Time Highest Revenue: Old Games, Not New Releases, Made the Money
- Steam recorded its highest-ever half-year revenue of $11.1 billion in the first half of 2026, with only 21% from new releases and 79% from older titles.
- That doesn't mean marketing for new releases should be reduced.
- To maintain a catalog that grows exponentially, initial sales are necessary, and competition for new releases has become tighter.
- With major publishers abandoning their own launchers and returning, reconsidering the idea of building your own distribution to save fees is advisable.
Nvidia and Hugging Face Release Agent Training Data, Where Does the Data Moat Remain Now?
- Nvidia and Hugging Face have released a large number of open datasets for AI agent training and evaluation.
- From 200,000 software agent trajectories to corpora of up to 10 trillion tokens, anyone can access them.
- Entry barriers have lowered, but small teams lose their differentiators in exchange for saving months.
- What remains exclusive are failure logs of tasks inaccessible to others and evaluations that quantify accuracy on those tasks.
Recruitment or Theft? What Apple vs OpenAI Lawsuit Asks Founders
- On July 10, Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, io Products, hardware head Tang Tan, and former employee Chang Liu for alleged trade secret theft.
- The claims include requiring candidates to bring parts to interviews and coaching departing employees on bypassing security protocols. OpenAI has over 400 former Apple employees.
- Small teams lack legal and security buffers, so even one piece of material from a previous employer can destabilize the entire company.
- It is necessary to maintain documented boundaries when hiring experienced staff.
- As OpenAI and Anthropic API prices rise, U.S. and European companies are switching to Chinese open-weight models like DeepSeek and Q1.
- Because they handle the same tasks 60% to 90% cheaper.
- However, lower inference costs do not necessarily mean lower total costs.
- Korean entrepreneurs should calculate not only inference costs but also where prompts and logs are sent legally, including personal data overseas transfer and regulatory compliance, to realize actual savings.
Pushing AI Use Backfired: Conditions for Adoption Small Teams Can Learn
- Companies that forced employees to use AI are facing backlash.
- A study of about 6,000 executives found that over 80% of companies did not perceive a clear productivity change from AI, and organizations with AI as a colleague actually experienced fewer errors being caught and more blurred accountability.
- Mistaking usage volume for performance only increases review costs.
- Small teams are better off selecting a narrow problem that actually reduces work and leaving the final judgment to humans rather than full-scale adoption.
Growth Foundation for South Korean Startups: Investment and Innovation
- Holiday Robotics received 155 billion KRW in Series A funding, and K-beauty startup Prawn secured Pre-A investment.
- The fact that this amount went into Series A suggests that more value was placed on factory plans rather than the product itself.
- South Korea has dense manufacturing sites and noticeable labor shortages, so humanoids are first verified at nearby factories before export.
- Similarly, for Prawn, the key lies in how densely they can accumulate initial preference data, given the rapid domestic response.
The Importance of Shareholder Returns and Digital Transformation
- Barrel increased shareholder returns through a 1 billion KRW share repurchase, while Orkestro Cloud transferred AI-based cloud transformation capabilities to the Moroccan Customs Administration.
- These two news pieces operate on different timelines, making it difficult to lump them into a single trend.
- Shareholder returns gain credibility only after a sustained period of dividends and share cancellations, while cloud training, even if started early, does not guarantee swift establishment in administrative practice.
- It's important to first calculate the gap between execution and results.
Execution Is Success: The Path of Entrepreneurs
- This article emphasizes execution, spearheaded by support from the Gyeongnam Center for Creative Economy and Innovation.
- Joining support programs and adding AI do not automatically create execution capability.
- Planning mentoring, cloud, and social responsibilities all at once can blur what needs to be validated.
- Instead of adopting trending technologies first, it is better to narrow down to a few choices that are actually necessary for your business model and operations.