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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • This is incredibly disingenuous. The US might not be a true democracy, but it’s not an authoritarian regime. Xi and putin disappear people who have an opinion on whether they should be forever-rulers.

    The fact that independent parties exist and hold seats at all three levels of government mean you are fundamentally wrong in saying there are only two choices.

    The US is a flawed democracy. That’s still better than an authoritarian regime.




  • You’re likely right. If I recall correctly, the decision to do a refund is entirely steam’s and the publisher has no choice but to foot the bill because of steam’s tos. To add to that, refunds don’t include the 30% cut steam makes on the sale, so the publisher actually loses that money if they have to cover a refund.

    Say the game costs $50. Steam takes $15 of that and the other $35 goes to the publisher. If steam decides a refund is in order, the publisher must pay back all $50.

    So yeah, Sony was losing money for every copy that got refunded due to a reason steam found justified. Given the sheer publicity of this whole thing, someone up top probably realized that if they carried through with it it’d cost way more than the pennies they’d squeeze per player by force linking their accounts.

    People shit talk steam being a tyrannical monopoly all the time, but they are pretty consistent when it comes to treating their users fairly. This is a prime example of steam using its leverage to stop something really shitty.


  • It’s not just a data mining cash grab. It’s a bigger cash grab than that. If they had required the account link from the beginning they would not have sold the game in countries where you can’t get a PlayStation account.

    They clearly waited until the hype from the game settled in before they made this requirement so that they could make all of the money from the countries they don’t service.

    That way they could squeeze a little extra out of the player base by mining their data long enough later that players can’t get a refund. Doesn’t matter to them that they’re forcing players in half the geological world to quit.

    Truly despicable. They should be forced to issue refunds to players they are effectively kicking from the game, but something tells me nothing is going to happen.


  • The paradox of tolerance applied to this situation suggests that in order to keep a community where choice is preserved, we need to be intolerant of bad actors with the ultimate goal of killing that choice.

    Meta absolutely is a bad actor looking to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish the fediverse.

    They’re pivoting the overwhelming userbase of Facebook/Instagram into a sort of federated Twitter alternative that their users as a whole don’t understand but do generate content for, in an attempt to steer the federation architecture into something they can control and make money off of. It’s not subtle.

    Whether it will work or is even possible for meta to do remains to be seen.

    But, yes. To answer your question, we need to “deny the choice” of federating with what amounts to a wolf in sheep’s clothing to preserve what we have, because that wolf is looking to destroy it.

    This post demonstrates that all of the major instances on lemmy but one understand this concept. If lemmy.world doesn’t want to acknowledge what meta is doing, then they’re also a bad actor in enabling meta to do it.


  • For people who consider this a sign of social status

    Ok well,

    1. Anyone who considers apple products a status symbol already has bought in and won’t be swayed one way or the other by windows becoming worse.

    2. Anyone who actually understands technology knows that regardless of how many different apps or environments apple OS’s provide, you are always operating in a closed system with the tools they allow. Whereas an operating system like android, or Linux, or (at least for now) windows, your options for the capability of a tool are limited only by what exists or what you have the capability to write.

    In short, apple isn’t an OS that technologically literate people flock to as an exclusive option.


  • In addition to the other great points in this thread, Apple has a cost barrier that other operating systems don’t.

    In an economic climate where everything is getting more expensive, a consumer isn’t going to fork out $800+ on a MacBook or an iPhone without first actively wanting to be part of the ecosystem, especially if the hardware they have gets the job done.

    The reason Apple isn’t growing as fast as it’s competitors right now is exactly that. Apple is expensive to get into. No amount of enshitification on other OS’s is going to change that.






  • Here’s the thing: Lots of Republican leaning business owners see it as their right to retaliate against their workers without the gov intervening. So to them, the only thing they see wrong with this is the “child” part, because retaliation against children makes them look bad.

    Hence the “they aren’t children” rhetoric.

    By the way, this part of the bill was explicitly included by a congressman who owns some franchises and says his underage workers “don’t even want lunch breaks”.

    So this is one dude trying to squeeze 20 extra hours of labor from literal children who’s dictating this for the entire state.


  • I meant that to say, it’s a genre that deserves to be distinguished from just one of the many games that define it.

    As a rephrase of that comment, defining the 5 games I listed after one game that basically just came before them would be dishonest because of how different those games all are from Slay the Spire and each other. That’s why the genre is named after what they all have in common, which is a mashup of two existing genres.

    What you’re proposing would be like renaming the first person shooter genre to “halo-like” or “call of duty-like” just because those games predate a lot of others and people like them. It’s unnecessary and loses the descriptive quality of the name it has.


  • The genre can be called “rogue like deck builder” all you want, we all know what it really is: “Spirelike”

    Well, you did. And you also directly acknowledged that the genre already has a name in the same sentence.

    It seems to be your opinion that it needs another one, even though the name it has is already so well established that it has its own steam tag.

    I mean, you’re entitled to have that opinion, and I also understand the logic behind it. But this conversation wasn’t started with “us” saying it needs another name.