sirdorius

@sirdorius@programming.dev

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sirdorius,

The price is the same because of a Most Favored Nations clause in Steam’s ToS. Publishers have to sell it at the same or higher price on other platforms to keep their product on Steam, which is the lion’s share of the market. This is part of the accusation in the lawsuit: programming.dev/comment/5159579

Now you could argue that even if it were removed, publishers would still sell at the same price and keep the extra profit, but that’s just hypothetical at this point.

sirdorius,

How do you compare it with other platforms if it’s exclusive to EGS? For timed exclusives, it would mean the price would have to go UP on EGS when the Steam version launches, which seems like pretty dumb marketing honestly.

I know I’m playing devil’s advocate defending Epic and publishers, but I don’t see how defending rent extracting monopolies is any better.

sirdorius, (edited )

I love the theme for it, but was expecting an actual city builder, as advertised in the description. Instead, it’s a pretty boring puzzle game with pretty graphics, very unrelated to something like Cities Skylines. I am hoping something like this with more in depth management comes up in the future.

I do like ‘cozy’ building games like Townscaper and Dorfromantik but they aren’t advertised as city builders, and the puzzle elements in Dorfromantik don’t get in the way of building pretty stuff as much as in Terra Nil.

sirdorius,

Yeah, I’m going to reserve my excitement for when I see gameplay footage or actually play it. Quake Champions looked really good in the beginning and then it ran like an internal pre-alpha. Tribes Ascend had so many OP hitscan weapons on release you thought you were playing Call of Duty. Waning general interest in “boomer shooters” and disastrous releases make these games more nostalgic memories than interesting future games in my mind.

sirdorius,

“Wow, personalized ads? That’s brilliant! Let’s patent it” said an Activision exec who had been in cryogenic sleep since 1995

sirdorius,

I’m also curious what the allegations are. The only ones I ever heard were from Epic, which was basically making a big fuss to promote their own competitive platform (which was so shit it didn’t gain any traction apart from the free games).

I’ve tried all the online stores ever since the cloudification (remember Impulse?) but none have ever been able to compete with Steam in terms of features and value to the customer. Steam didn’t get to the top by being anti competitive, it got there by being competitive and offering a better product to all stakeholders, not just to shareholders.

And as you mentioned, there is plenty of competition for Steam. Don’t like the monoply? Get it on GOG or Itch instead.

sirdorius,

Thanks. So TLDR:

  1. PMFN (Platform Most-Favored-Nations clause): Valve forces publishers to price games on other platforms at the same price or higher than Steam. This is an anticompetitive monopoly because publishers can’t sell the game at lower prices on platforms with a lower cut than 30%, which would improve competitiveness. Very valid point
  2. Keys that publishers can sell on other storefronts are limited. This point is moot. The fact that Steam allows you to activate a product that was purchased elsewhere and then use their infrastructure to download the game is way more than they have to do. They can completely make the rules here as this is basically a free service that you get from Valve.
  3. Some murky points about Valve policing review bombing that isn’t explained properly.
sirdorius,

Pros: Easier to learn (belt mechanics are a bit clearer). Belts have a Z axis which allows for even more spaghetti! Progression feels faster since you already start out with builder drones. Graphics are absolutely amazing. Multiple planets are pretty cool.

Cons: there are no trains. Logistics stations kinda ruin the late game since it makes factory planning much easier

sirdorius,

I wouldn’t be surprised if the board is just doing what ChatGPT tells them to.

sirdorius,

“Engineer” means you’re supposed to be licensed and you have a responsibility for the public good above your responsibility to your employer.

Good point. We definitely don’t, and it’s what’s causing huge amounts of trouble in the world, rather than using software for the greater good.

But engineer sounds better by some definitions, and it strokes the ego of employees, so companies like to use it to give more prestige to the role.

sirdorius,

And the easiest. But even if all animal products were eliminated worldwide tomorrow, it would probably still not be enough for the emissions target. So individual changes do not make a dent in the problem.

sirdorius,

Does this apply to all Chromium based browsers? I would like to switch to Firefox, but the touchscreen scroll there is terrible, and that is 90% of what I do in a browser.

sirdorius, (edited )

The deceleration is way too low and it’s hard to get it to focus where I want on the page fast. The deceleration is inconsistent between touchscreen and touchpad, which works fine. I tried looking around for configurations for it but couldn’t find any. Touchscreen support in Chrome is just generally better

sirdorius,

This is not a slight nuance, it literally makes touchscreen unusable for me. Touchscreen really helps with carpal tunnel and RSI, which is more important to me than an ideological war against Google.

sirdorius,

Sounds a lot like the French Revolutionary Calendar: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar#…

sirdorius,

All problems mentioned are societal issues

Exactly. This follows Marx’s theory of alienation closely. I found 3 out of 4 features described by Marx in the original article.

sirdorius,

I would say the rocket is ready for billionaires who want to beta test it.

sirdorius,

Here’s a crazy idea to make your population grow: how about not sending your people to die in a war?

sirdorius,

I really wish LinkedIn would add an anonymous cringe emoji. I would use it on like 90% of the content on that site.

sirdorius,

We are committed to creating value for our customers and shareholders.

Fixed a typo in the report

GTA 6’s Publisher Says Video Games Should Theoretically Be Priced At Dollars Per Hour (www.forbes.com)

While Take-Two is riding high on their announcement that a GTA 6 trailer is coming, its CEO has some…interesting ideas on how much video games could cost, part of a contingent of executives that believe games are underpriced, given their cost, length or some combination of the two.

sirdorius,

I’ve often come across this sentiment in Steam reviews and it’s very reductive to judge games based mainly on this metric. Getting older I have less time for videogames and I value shorter games more. There are games that are extremely valuable because of their high quality even if very short, like the first Portal.

This is why we have companies like Ubisoft trying to game the system constantly with low quality content to pad the game to 100 hours or whatever is fashionable in open world these days. I will take 6 hours of quality single player anytime over 100 hours of AssCreed grinding and ridiculous ‘story’

sirdorius,

And shorter games should naturally command a lower price

This is exactly the thing that doesn’t make any sense. Should The Last of Us be priced at a fraction of The Witcher 3 because it is shorter? What about Bioshock? It’s half the length of The Last of Us 2

sirdorius,

Fig looks really cool, but it’s Mac only

sirdorius,

Pretty cool when I need autocompletion, but it really messes with my zsh config so I won’t be using it all the time

sirdorius,

This year’s Unity story sums up my discontent with tech nicely. Impressive tech made by extremely talented people, botched by incompetent corporate parasites who care only about securing their millions.

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