So?

Just because you don’t understand electrical engineering doesn’t make it less valuable then paint. If Valve is a saint for contributing to Linux then so is Microsoft and IBM and we should all dick ride Microsoft and IBM like the Valve dick riders in this thread.

No, they’re anti Starbucks price gouging. It’s like all those companies taking advantage of a little inflation to drastically increase retail prices.

I said Valve is taking 15% more that they don’t have to, they said who cares if a landlord drops Starbucks rent 15%, the consumer won’t save. I pointed out that that means that not just Starbucks is being gouged but also independent stores and places that might actually drop their prices, or not increase them as quickly in the future.

There is literally no way to defend rent seeking. It makes everything more expensive for everyone.

I know it has a steep learning curve with no benefit over GUI alternatives (unless you have to operate in a GUI-less environment).

Which makes it flat out dumb for a professional developer to use. “Lets make our dev environment needlessly difficult, slowing down new hires for no reason will surely pay off in the long run”.

Lmao, devs who insist on using the VIM and the terminal over better graphical alternatives just to seem hardcore are the worst devs who write the worst code.

“Let me name all my variables with a single letter and abbreviations cause I can’t be bothered to learn how to setup a professional dev environment with intellisense and autocomplete.”

How is it at the expense of the game player? Even if they paid less, the publisher and developers aren’t going to pass the savings on to the consumer. That’s wishful thinking in the same vain as hoping Starbucks would make their drinks cheaper because their rent went down.

This is the most dumbass asinine defense. So now you’re pro landlord rent gouging?

Jesus fucking Christ how are people upvoting this flat out landlord simping crap.

It does not fucking matter if Ubisoft remains greedy. Every single independent self publishing dev gets 15% more money. If a landlord gogiges Starbucks, they’re also going to gouge the independent business, and the family needing somewhere to live.

If anything, one can argue that the 30% fee shelled out by the publisher pays for the various nice-to-haves that players get on Steam, like: a functional review system, free cloud save syncing, the workshop, game discussion forum, friends system, family sharing, game streaming, Steam input (which is a godsend for accessibility), etc.

“Oh my corporate landlord might be owned by a billionaire and every single one of his employees might be a multimillionaire, but he’s a good landlord because he gives us a washing machine. It might be old and clunky and never repaired, but hey that makes him a saint, right?”

The fucking fact that you brought up landlords rent seeking as a non issue is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. You need to go outside, give your head a shake, and do fucking better.

Lock-in != Monopoly

They asked if they did anything anti-competitive. Lock-in is inherently anti-competitive.

As it has been demonstrated when Epic tried the “developers pay less fees here” approach, the average Joe Gamer doesn’t benefit in any way whatsoever. Your premise of the savings being passed down doesn’t exactly pan out.

Oh really? Please do point me to the study you did where you gave 15% more revenue back to developers and then assessed their output quality.

Claiming that having the store take 15% less cut of revenue will have no effect is a quite frankly flat out absurd claim to make.

And the Linux Kernel which powers the whole thing directly effects them, so we should all praise Microsoft and IBM like we praise Valve right?

Is it a form of lock in or not?

It literally either goes back to the consumer or back to the game developer.

False.

We can’t have nice things because corporations and the wealthy take an ever increasing share of a limited pool of resources and waste them on nonsense for themselves.

Also, if you design and build something and then the suicide rate increases, and then you remove that something and the suicide rate decreases, it throws entirely into question how much free will actually exists and whether the idea of “personal responsibility” even makes any sense.

And regardless, suicide is an inherently somewhat transient and impulsive choice. All the stats show that suicides are more likely to happen when you give someone easy opportunity (think guns), and just because someone attempts to kill themselves, doesn’t mean they will again. Yes there are natural high points in a landscape that people will be tempted to jump from (look at the cliffs of Dover for instance), but that doesn’t mean we need to build artificial ones in the middle of a depressing concrete jungle with millions of people.

Personally I really like the vessel and the architect behind it, and do wish I could have gone up it when I was there, but I also do think that in hindsight, it is an inherently problematic design that should not have been approved.

Valve has ripped off every single game purchase to the tune of billions and billions of dollars (taking an objective 15% more than they need to from the total cost of every single game), for the past 20 years.

But let’s thank them for that! Thanks Valve for making every single working class gamer poorer. We all love the fact that every single Valve employee is a multimillionaire, at the expense of literally every single game player and developer. What kind generosity! /S

Ultimately, yes, everything they do is entirely for their own benefit. But, they’re also free to focus on their long-term growth and returns. As long as the leadership doesn’t get changed to a bunch of shit-for-brains golden parachute MBAs, they’re going to want to keep their customers happy. It’s good for them, and it’s not terrible for us. Everybody wins

No, they don’t. Literally every single gamer across the world pays 15% more on every single game purchase, for literally no reason except to make the 1% at Valve even richer.

And they don’t have to hire MBAs because gamers dick ride them like Gabe isnt a self serving billionaire and keep forking over an extra 15% and then thanking them for the opportunity to do so.

I don’t agree that they’re a monopoly, because they’ve done absolutely nothing to prevent competition. Other stores do it to themselves.

Yes they have. The steam friends network and the fact that you can’t transfer your purchases, friends data, or community data to other platforms is an inherent form of lock in. Just because you’re used to it because Facebook also does it, doesn’t mean it’s not.

So?

I’d like to see a Sankey graph of where Valve’s money goes before I praise them that much for helping out a Linux distribution a bit.

Lots of major companies like Microsoft and IBM also contribute to Linux, it doesn’t make them saints nor even necessarily compare to what they get for using the volunteer dev work inside Linux.

Gabe Newell is a billionaire, Steam is a defacto monopoly that objectively charges more than they have to, and literally everyone who works at Valve is in the 1%. Let’s not fall over ourselves dick-riding them.

It’s a pretty clunky, but I don’t think you understood the post, as I don’t think it’s intended to be pro Russian.

1: Someone says we should support Russia and oppose western imperialism

2. Someone else asks what Russia is doing to oppose imperialism

3. Smash cut to Putin telling Ukraine (and presumably everyone else) that he will invade them as long as they’re not in NATO (showing that Russia is imperialistic)

4. Ukraine says ok and asks US for money and weapons

5. US says OK as long as Ukraine give the US their (Ukraine or Russia?) oil.

It’s a jumble of a bunch of memes, and the last one just feels inaccurate given that the war has cutoff Russian oil supplies (though with the knock on effect of driving up the price of US oil and enriching US oil companies). More importantly this war really does not seem to be about oil in the way that every middle east and African conflict has been. It really seems to be more a proxy war to try and stop Russian (and Chinese) military aggression. But the overall point that the US is giving Ukraine money to further their own interests is accurate, and I don’t think this was meant to be pro Russian given that it attacks Putin for being imperialistic.

More just meant to try and describe the current geopolitical situation through meme mushing.

Allow them and if Russia strikes the West then have NATO impose a no fly zone over Ukraine and see how far Russia gets.

Honestly, what is the alternative? Allow Russia to take any territory it wants? It’s fucking absurd to listen to their bluster. At this point it seems literally no different than attempts to appease Hitler.

I would generally agree with you about the main macro plot beats in Dishonored 1 and leading into 2, but I would still argue that the writing is quite good overall.

In Dishonoured 1, you still have Daud’s storyline which I found a bit more interesting on a macro level (both in the main game and both expansions), but then I would also argue that the Dishonored series has great micro writing which is a large part of the world building and the fun of exploration.

They both know how to write good little interesting world building hooks and stories, and how to pace them out and not overload you with junk documents and writing.

The Outer Wilds, Bioshock, Subnautica, Remedy Games (Alan Wake, Quantum Break, Control, etc.), Obsidian (New Vegas, Outer Worlds, Grounded, etc.), are all masters of rewarding you with more story and world building.

Conversely studios like Bethesda (Starfield, Skyrim, etc.), and Ubisoft (all their RPGs), are pretty bad about trying to make the world seem realistic at the expense of having a ton of just hastily written uninteresting documents around that bore you as much reading real world documents at random would.

And while I would put games like Cyperbunk and the Witcher and even Deathloop, somewhere in-between, I would put all the Dishonoreds and Prey right up there at the top with the best.

In that vein, if anyone likes well written, story driven, stealth / action / immersive sim games, the Dishonored series & Prey (same devs, different universe) are incredibly worth going back for.

Made by former Bioshock / System shock developers, and they’re just some of my all time favourite games, and I only played them because of all the time I suddenly had with the COVID lockdown, but they hold up incredibly well. Dishonored 1 (2012) honestly feels and looks better than Dishonored 2 (2016) because of the Xbox’s auto HDR and auto FPS boost, but both are super fun and gorgeous games.