I’ll be a lot more open to comparing Valve with Amazon when I hear reports of Valve employees pissing in bottles

Steam also provides value by acting as an intermediary.

There were 21,503 games released on Steam last year. How the hell is a consumer supposed tk make informed purchasing decisions with all that? Steam is a discovery platform which connects a game with the individuals most likely to buy that game.

It is also a central launcher to organize and manage libraries, including non-steam games. It’s easy to move games between drives, and to use the various library tools to pick out what I want to play.

Then there’s Proton, a completely free comlatability layer for Linux that has allowed me to mostly stop using Windows.

There’s the Steam Workshop, which is far and away my preferred method to mod games. It’s so much easier to click a button to add a mod tk Cities Skylines or Civ 6 than it is to fuck around with Nexus Mods and a mod manager for Skyrim.

Steam is a centralized location for support from developers. It also is convenient tk keep track of updates.

Steam Remote Play is probably the single most umpactful thing to my gaming in the past decade. I just need my 1 gaming desktop and I find myself playing on my Shield in my living room, my phone in bed, my tablet on my exercise bike, my Steam Deck on the porch, or even over at my friend’s house on an old laptop. All for free, when I’ve never even be able to get Moonlight or Sunshine to work at all in my desktop.

Steam has social features like friends lists, chat, and even voice, which is relevant with how shitty Discord has been as a company lately. Support for family sharing and multiplayer is phenomenal.

It is not like Steam is just pocketing a bunch of money and not doing anything. They beat out not just their legitimate competitors, but even piracy, because they provide better value for the consumer. They do a lot of tasks that publishers otherwise would have to handle themselves, saving them costs.

And I’m sure there are more features that I’m forgetting kr that I don’t bother with, but other people find valuable.

I do think they should be heavily regulated, but there hasn’t really been much to regulate with them. They had a minor lawsuit in Australia early on relating to the verbiage displayed about refund policy. I don’t like loot boxes, but my solution is… I don’t buy them, and usually I don’t even buy games with them.

Steam was launched in 2003.

By that point the ships had already sailed. You didn’t own software, and micro transactions already existed. Steam did not “bypass” copyright laws- the facilitated a storefront that sold based on already established and litigated law.

This goes back tk the 1960’s with the origin of computers, when they were gigantic. Manufacturers like IBM would lease the hardware to institutions that used it, and the software was just included for free. This practice ended because of antitrust lawsuits in 1969, which led to IBM charging for software seperstely.

It’s funny you mentioned Apple, because one of the foundational cases of software copyright law was 1983’s Apple vs Franklin case that ruled against a company making Apple II clones, who argued that machines readable code was similar to machinery designs and thus not subject to copyright law. 20 years before Steam existed.

But I guess you can just ahead and make things up on the internet to jump aboard a hate train.

I’ve literally never seen any of these so-called “simps”

Like, the internet is a big place and I’m sure some of them exist, but you could make that argument about any view at all. I see way more hatred for these alleged simps than the simps themselves.

Steam, and Valve, operate in a capitalist system. They’ve been successful. They are similar to a handful of other companies, like Costco, that seem to understand that in order for capitalism to be sustainable, corporations need tk govern themselves and show restraint. They need to focus not on merely achieving profit for ownership this quarter, but on establishing long-term and stable business relationships with all of their stakeholders. Customers, emplpyees, suppliers, governments, lenders, the planet itself.

The biggest failure of capitalism is that the system does not incentivize for any of this. Which is why such corporations are so rare.

I don’t think motherboard manufacturers are askign that question. I think they’re asking “why aren’t the RAM manufacturers making enough RAM? Why aren’t the GPU manufacturers making enough GPUs?”

Consumer case manufacturers and power supply manufacturers too. These few oligopolies on key components are screwing over more than just their own consumers.

Both versions (original + Special Edition) were among the first games I installed on the Deck when I got it, and habe stayed installed for years since. I still go back and play one or the other a bit every couple months.

The only issue I can remember is just dealing with the stupid launcher screen before you get into the actual title screen. I think I might have had to change the launch options for one of them to be able to access the graphics settings?

Interestingly, the original version is still listed as Playable even though tbr Special Edition is Unsupported.

He was always this way. Born to upper-middle-class parents, growing up in the suburbs, cosplaying aa an urban poor black person to grift white people put of their money. Punching down on Mexicans and Asians, anyone he could to be profitable. Now it’s trans people, but the grift has always been the same.

I don’t mean to be out here defending credit scores as a concept, but mine never dropped. Not when I paid off individual student loan accounts, not when the US Federal loans came due after the pandemic pause and I paid them off in one lump sum either. Not when I paid off mybcsr loan either.

Technically the 3 companies that do these each have their own proprietary blend, but it is generally accepted that there are 5 C’s to credit. Character, capacity, capital, collateral, and conditions (“Character” woukd be better described as “history” but that ruins the memnonic).

Which one of these would be negatively impacted by paying off a student loan? None of them! In fact, it improves your Character to pay off a loan successfully, and it improves your capacity to reduce your monthly minimum payments. For stuff like a car loan, paying that off improves your Collateral.

Every single time I have met anyone claiming that paying off a debt hurt their credit score, their story falls apart when I start asking questions. Oh it was actually not them, but a friend of a friend of a friend. Or maybe they also got in a fender Bender and added $3k to their credit card balance that month. Or paying off the debt and the decline in credit score were seperated by months.

What CAN happen is that some accounts only report credit history upon closure. My wife used to work for an “alternative energy supplier” where this was the case. Due to state protections they could not turn off electricity during the winter. People would rack up electric bills for 4 months without paying, then get their electric shut off and suddenly see a huge drop on their credit score out of nowhere. I have heard similar stories of landlords not reporting late rent payments for years until the tenant moves out. This was all years ago though so I’m nkt even sure if that’s true anymore.

The go-to example I always think of for 2nd person is Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal, the boss battle against the Tyhrranoid Mother. You cycle through phases of the boss, and one shifts the camera’s perspective to the targeting system of the boss, while you still control Ratchet.

I’m interested, but I think the Dev woukd need to find a way to incentivize “normal” driving.

I think back to my youth playing Driver on the PS1, and it was a lot of fun just… Driving around. Exploring the world. Even dealing with traffic was fun when I was only a kid who could nkt drive myself.

I tried tk do similar in GTA3, and I even had a wheel and pedlas I would use for it. Unfortunately GTA3 is incredibly unlrealistic. The physics are cartoonish, the AI behavior is dumb, the pedestrians are dumb, the cops are dumb. The game incenvitcizes chaos.

The question is: how do we make things likr speed limits and stop signs and pedestrian crossings fun?

My instinct is to model off the real world to an extent. Could involve delivering things that are fragile and cannot handle a bunch of G’s. Could be fines or a karma system of some kind for rolling stops. Could be that a realistic damage modeling system makes dents and scratches look terrible and lead to rust, and repairs are just as expensive as they are in real life. Maybe a LOT of the car is consumable or wearable. Not just gas and tires, but all the fluids too, and brake pads. Maybe taking a turn too hard damages the suspension. Crashing into something means you not only need to repair your car, but also whatever you hit.

The more I list this out, the more this seems like a punishing and tedious slog. It seems really hard to design a game that incentivizes something like this, at least with most of the current mechanics in games today. Maybe a multiplayer social component would help? Like a virtual parking lot and drag strip for people to meet up on the weekends and check each other’s virtual rides out? I would not be interested in that, but my uncle might be.

Maybe it could be heavily story-based. I would go noir-style, where as you drive around either you see things or your driver character provides some narration. Something like “that abandoned building over there used to be an ice cream parlor. That’s where I had my first kiss. I wonder what ever happened to Suzie? I drove a '69 Cobra that night. Lovely car” and then the Cobra is available in the shop. Maybe there is a mystery about stuff going on in the world. Maybe it is a post-apocalyptic world and you’re scavenging, mostly alone and unchallenged, in the ruins of a city, slowly learning what led to this. I think about how Detroit’s population went from ~1.8 million to 0.6 million in ~50 years and what it would have been like to stay there and experience that.

Maybe a parody of Crazy Taxi called Sane Uber where the main priority is ride comfort?

The best way to win the game is to not play.

Reddit had a lot of issues and I am glad I left, but one sub I really liked and wish Lemmy had was r/anticonsumption. You make a great point about razors, but that already relied on the assumption that you have decided to shave.

That is not to say that shaving is bad, but to recommend that all individuals think about it. WHY do they want to shave, and how much time and money do they want to put into that? How much of it is mere societal expectation, and is that really worth it?

Look at the Got Milk campaign as another example. That was not promoting any particular company, just the concept of consuming dairy, and led to disastrous health, environmental, and economic consequences in the US today.

The problem is that downvotes do not work. They do not function as an incentive for these users to stop posting, because they do not matter at all.

It can work on larger platforms, where thousands, or even tens of thousands of people vote. There the users form roles based on how they sort the posts. People who sort by New are well aware that they are going to have to sift through a lot of trash, but their reward is that they get to have a more active role in setting the taste for the entire community. Because then you have people who sort by Hot or Active, which tends to be the majority of users in most communities (and is often the default). So in communities with dozens of posts, hundreds of comments, and thousands of votes every day, the things the community doesn’t like gets buried.

The Fediverse is too small for that system to work. There simply is not enough posts, comments, and votes to make any of that meaningful. The same users can just spam the same authors over and over again, and it doesn’t matter whether the post gets 100 upvotes or 100 dpwnvotes- the whole community is going to see it in their feed regardless. And it’s not as if having negative "karma"really matters.

One of tbr systems Reddit had to combat this was that karma occasionally mattered. Some subreddits would require karma to join, or ban if your karma dropped. I’m not sure if the tools exist for something like that here or not. There are a lot of different t ways you can slice up the numbers, but basically looking at post history, ratios of up/down votes, total down votes, etc. Effectively letting community feedback drive the moderation process.

That’s still not perfect because users can block/mute other users. Doing so would effectively be abstaining from voting, and that’s not the healthiest system. But we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

Similarly, what about wishing for another linear and stoey-focused 3D Zelda?

OK boomer

I liked it, but this was also the first Metal Gear game in ever played so I wasn’t as invested in Snake.

A while ago I read an article written by a college student going to school to create comic books. Unfortunately I can’t find it now.

They said that in the classes about drawing, those professors said it was perfectly fine to use AI to help with writing your stories and dialogue, but warned how incredibly dangerous it can be to use even as inspiration to draw.

Their writing professors, on the other hand, told them it was perfectly fine to use AI to help with their illustrations, but that it was incredibly dangerous to use to even generate outlines or rough drafts when it came to writing.

AI is only ever good enough when you don’t know better.

You’re just proposing a much more drastic and rapid change than I am. I agree that a wealth tax would be a more immediate effect. It is also much more drsstixnand far less tested. The idea is interesting and I am neither opposed to it nor calling for it. I do not think it it necessary.

Increasing income tax rates and corporate tax rates would be a much slower approach. I didn’t mention them, but I would also add in property tax rates and capital gains. Luxury sales taxes, inheritancd taxes. In the US, make OASDI a progressive instead of regressive tax.

For existing billionaires, there are plenty of laws they’ve already broken to get where they are that just need to be enforced. Wage theft, antitrust, union busting, fraud. The SEC should have buried Musk in a dungeon years ago. So I see the answer to eliminating existing wealth being fines rather than taxes.

Of course, there is also room to increase the minimum wage and minimum benefits. That would hell redistribute wealth too.

I don’t know Gabe Newell, or even anyone who works at Valve personally, but every account I have ever read about Valve is that they usually treated and paid their employees well. Investigate all of these megacorps and prosecute appropriately.

Taxing billionaires is not some new and untested concept. In the US throughout the 1900’s the highest income tax brackets were often in the 70%'s, reaching into the 90%'s at times, and we did not see what you are suggesting.

Increasing the taxes on Gabe Newell’s profits from owning Valve would not suddenly cause him to lose money, just to gain less money. If corporate taxes and income taxes were increased across the board, then it is not as if he would benefit from selling Valve stock to invest elsewhere, and Valve would not be a more or less attractive place to invest relative to other options either. I am not sure why you think this would cause Gabe Newell to back out or investors to jump in. Heck, these rates have all changed pretty frequently within Valve’s existence and have not had a significant impact.

Also just to say, there is also the matter of jurisdiction as he lives in New Zealand while Valve is a US based company.

1. Taxing those outside investors too
2. Taxing Valve as a corporation more, making them less profitable and less attractive to said investors.
3. I’m not even convinced this would be an issue at all really. Remember Valve is not publicly traded. I suspect Gabe would hold on to controlling ownership as long as it was profitable, and remember that taxes are usually on profits.
4. Even if outside investors move in and enshittify, the moment they start doing anticompetitive you hit them with antitrust suits. Not to mention the industry can also be regulated even before all this: a lot of governments are cracking down on lootboxes already.

Even if Valve’s offering sucked, I still have not seen anyone point out a business practice I would call anticompetitive. They are not buying up studios or publishers, or even paying for timed exclusivity. I have not seen any hint that they are colluding with competitors on prices or fees. I haven’t seen then accused of stealing IP or poaching personnel. They readily welcome Microsoft and Sony to release games on Steam, and they have released their own games on consoles including the Switch. They let you install Windows or whatever else on the Deck, if you want to for some reason.

Billionaires should not exist, and Gabe Newell is no exception. He should be taxed more. I don’t love one company having so much control of this space. But I also don’t want to have a dozen different crappy launchers from different companies to deal with. There are a lot of benefits to the user to having everything centralized in one place.