Oh, I don’t think they messed up at all. I think it was intentional and calculated. Business decisions don’t just materialize out of happenstance, they are written, proposed, and approved by multiple people. They came up with and implemented the pricing and the bait-and-switching of components. Their lawyers wrote, reviewed, and approved the contract. Their public relations personnel came up with the untrue statements that should be said in sponsored videos. And now that the shift has left the ass, the CEO wants to pretend it was all a mistake? Fuck off.

(points at the Mars rovers) Except for that machine, Spirit.

Stockholm syndrome, it sounds like.

If you’re so passionate about the subject, why don’t you redirect that energy into making a real change? Join a protest, call a politician, get organized, instead of engaging in tired, empty, useless whataboutisms on the internet.

Success is not illegal. In Valve and Gaben’s case, it’s deserved, and probably as clean as you’ll ever see.

I firmly believe that Steam has allowed fair competition to exist. Epic had the greatest chance to become viable competition, but they fumbled the store’s launch, poached Metro Exodus and fucked over the people who preordered, did not have the foresight to implement some kind of preloading for Borderlands 3, and pissed people off when they refused to allow non-exclusive indie games to exist on the store while they made an exception for Cyberpunk 2077. In that time, the only thing that Valve did that might have hurt EGS is refuse to host store pages and ads for games that weren’t going to launch on their platform. Shortly after that, Valve released the Steam Deck (the most pro-consumer handheld I’ve seen to date), SteamOS (free), Proton (free), DXVK (free), Gamescope (free), and have contributed (for free) to upstream projects like Wine. Of all the billionaires, Gaben is the only one I can think of that I’m okay with being a billionaire.

Valve has about 100 employees, Steam is operated by about 40, but I would love to have a source on the “generational wealth” part. Most of the income is likely spent on operational costs, like the aforementioned massive CDN infrastructure. If you’ve never worked in corporate-level networking, it might elude you how ridiculously fucking expensive stuff gets, especially at a worldwide scale.

Here we go again. Armchair economists bleating “why everything cost money, corporate bad” with no actual expertise to back it up. Steam is not a parasitic middle man, it is a collection of services that would have to be provisioned and operated by the developer otherwise.

• A massive infrastructure to store and deliver the game and its updates, worldwide, and at an acceptable bandwidth that Valve operates
• A storefront that enables monetizing the game
• The audience and discoverability that would not exist otherwise
• The Steam API, achievements, cloud saves
• The client itself, content management, validation, and Linux compatibility tools
• Network and operational security
• (edit) Also keep in mind that Steam and its services are operated by experts. A game developer would have to hire the experts or get training.

That’s where the cut goes.

Summoning !nokotan@ani.social

https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

I was ready to have a rant about PHP. Well played.

Even worse is that there have been several episodes with that message. Many of the Geordi-focused episodes, and the woman who couldn’t live in normal gravity in DS9.

Basically I wanted her to take a long walk out an open airlock then have Picard reverse course and later apologize to Geordi for causing an in-flight human ingestion. She is not fit to be a physician if she can’t reconcile her views with another culture for the benefit of her patient. Great episode overall, but as always, I wish there had been some fallout later.

The barrel incident really made me fucking hate Crusher.

Tzeentch convinced the officer to paint the casing instead of the shell.

“Archiving legally purchased content as an insurance against corporate-sanctioned theft”?

Nice strawman, bro. I never said a damn thing about screen readers or translators, good or bad. And yes, I’ve read and filled out the entire survey. It doesn’t become a good survey just because it’s biased towards your personal views.

Nice assumption, dingus. I filled out the survey (it’s a terribly written survey) and sent it in before even writing that comment.

My question is, who asked?

I have many opinions about machine learning and its current position in technology, but expressed none of it in the comment. In case you missed it, the point I was trying to make is that this is a bullshit survey with obviously loaded questions and foregone conclusions, uninterested in gathering impartial feedback or addressing concerns.

“We’ve decided to focus our efforts on AI and advertising. Please tell us why you think that’s a good idea!”

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