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.

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.

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.

No, it’s focusing the conversation.

We’re talking about the relative pain of cutting off Chinese imports or getting into a trade war with them. In that context, the fact that we import far more from them then we produce domestically compared with decades ago means that it will be more painful to do so now than it would have been decades ago.

The reality is that while there is a tiny ‘buy American’ push from some people, the vast majority of the American economy and regulations are setup to allow private capital to trade freely abroad and import at will. And it was done intentionally so that rich people could benefit from cheap overseas labour, furthering wealth inequality when middle class factory workers lost their jobs to increase corporate profits with cheaper overseas factories.

The series of free trade agreements the US negotiated with everyone they could would say otherwise.

If you’re producing less per capita, and consuming more per capita, you’re producing less overall for the purposes of the discussion around relative pain of cutting off Chinese imports.

It has not been started in any serious way. There is basically no incentive to manufacture most goods in the US.

You literally can, it’s called construction.

Oh no, it would force us to fix our economy, how awful!

Oooh what a cool edge lord. You’ve definitely thought this through.

The public praises the police when they stand around and let an armed man be well enough alone in a group of civilians! Everyone loves it when police do that right?

Like Jesus fucking Christ, what would you do? Leave a guy with a knife getting onto a crowded train and have two dozen people stabbed? It is naiive to think that there was a good outcome possible once you start making police bust fare skipping, but it is also absurdly naiive to think that the police can let a man with a knife get onto a New York train with just a ‘hey, try not to stab anyone’.