A significant number of games on Steam can literally just be ctrl c ctrl v’d into another directory, snd still more or less work, or be made to work if you … configured Proton through Not-Steam,.for them.

Mostly only games on Steam that have some kind of always online DRM are going to throw a shitfit in that scenario.

People seem to forget that Steam and Source were built from the ground up to support what is I guess now the ‘old school’ way of modding a game: you just literally throw more shit into the game directory, edit what is already there, etc.

You can add /any exe/ external to Steam, to Steam, and run it via Proton. … /any exe/.

I’ve managed to get fucking Cascadeur working on Linux, via Steam/Proton, lol… there are a few games I tinker with where the model or anim ripper scripts only work on Blender 3.6 for Windows… So, download Win Blender 3.6, add to Steam/Proton, run, install Windows only plugin. Voila! Bit of jank, but it does work.

Any game that somebody has figured out how to do the equivalent of… some kind of script extender, to enable mods to do more kinds of stuff?

The way those work is they basically hijack or replace the original game exe.

Any game that has been reverse engineered to this extent, you can get to run independent of Steam.

I’ve done it with CyberPunk 77, NewVegas, etc, toying with my own mod making attempts. Its not too hard to futz with configs and launch arguments to launch straight into the main CP77 exe, just skip the launch/loader thing.

You can actually just do this kinds shit for quite a lot of games.

And he has actually been using his super yacht to do actual ground breaking research on the biology of extremely deep sea creatures.

Not even joking, that yacht has a deep sea submersible, he bought the shipyard so he could direct the refitting of the super yacht to be able to carry and launch it… they’ve been mapping a trench near Japan, have captured high resolution video and bathymetry… they even appear to have discovered a or maybe a few new species.

https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/gabe-newell-inkfish-unclassified-ocean-creature/

I mean yeah, having a super yacht is … pretty extra.

But, there are certainly worse ways one could be using it.

I’m fairly certain every platform offers an SDK with mostly the same things.

Just obectively, factually incorrect.

Making mods only available inside a closed ecosystem so it’s easier to charge for them and grab a cut isn’t actually a good thing for instance.

So you’re fed up with NexusMods bullshit too eh?

Err… were you talking about something else?

There’s also the fact that valve could easily offer all that and only grab like 3%. 90% of the cut is there to cover Gabens new boat purchase, not for the features.

Fact? You have detailed access to the internal financial records of a privately held company that is generally not obligated to report them?

You could be correct, but you’d need to provide… you know, evidence that that is the case.

I’m not trying to clown on you to be an ass, I’m trying to point out that you just seem to know a bunch of things that are false, that you almost certainly can’t know, that apply equally or moreso to alternatives to Steam/Valve.

… radio scanner swapping through signals, till it clears up and then…

Was it cast for the masses who starve and toil?

Or for the vultures who feast upon the spoil?

Yes a spectacle, monopolized

They hold the reins, stole your rye

All the pesticides, the bulldozers and chains

Who stuff the land with their poisoned gains

More for Monsanto and the corporate throne?

None of the above, fuck it, plant the sword

Gloves on! Guerrilla gardening!

Dig that shit up!

Gloves on! Guerrilla gardening!

Dig that shit up!

At this point it is extremely obvious that the corporate and government powers of the world are just big fans of ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’.

The rules are made up, and the points don’t matter.

Yep.

Used to be an expectation that this was an involved hobby where you would need to identify and fix problems, because computers are complicated.

Then that got eviscerated by a flood of doe eyed consumers that demand convienence and not having to be burdened with the cognitive weight of thinking about anything.

Which is ironic, given that original understanding of a video game is specifically that it is a kind of puzzle, a kind of problem, that is enjoyable to try to solve.

They can if they code on that physical DVD requires some kind of online DRM check to be passed before it allows the rest of the data on it to be unencrypted.

A box you cannot open, with a lock you don’t control… is not very much of a treasure.

Conversely:

A very large subset of Steam Games?

I can copy and paste them outside of the Steam Directory, run them, and they will still mostly to entirely work.

I can then burn those onto a DVD or copy them to a thumb drive or sd card or whatever, and they’ll be capable of working on any compatible system.

Honestly if you don’t see the inherent problem with:

I can pay money for a thing ->

Thing can suddenly vanish from existence ->

This is not theft, You are due no recompence ->

This is totally fine, actually.

… Just straight up, you have a mental disability if you think this is fine. You are cognitively impaired, you should not be trusted with any kind of decision making.

You’re just telling everyone you are a-ok with being robbed, in some certain set of conditions… any exploitative person or entity that has any experience exploiting people knows that you just have to construct a narrative/experience where the conditions of being robbed that you will accept, slowly expand and grow over time.

You are telling the world you are easy to scam and trick. And in a world where you need money to continue existing, in the vast majority of cases… this is functionally suicidality or at least self-harm/self-destructive behavior.

This is a subsection of the Great Filter. If you can’t pass this test, sorry, you’re fucked, you are too stupid to persist much longer in your environment.

This is such a logically dubious position to attempt to maintain and argue for that I very truly cannot see another explanation for it other than… the person that holds that position genuienly is cognitively diminished.

Brave is fittingly occupying the Achilles Heel position in the diagram.

We live in the digital attention economy.

We literally pay … attention.

Everything is a contest to get you to pay your attention toward watching, looking at, reading, whatever particular thing.

Outrage is the best way to get you to pay attention.

But when you’ve spent your attention on being outraged… your brain tricks you.

You’ve had the experience of being outraged… you felt it, you feel like you understand the thing, experienced the thing… contemplated the thing… even like you acted in some way about the thing.

But 99.9% chance… you did nothing other than absorb information and have emotions about it. Maybe you also posted a reaction comment or video of some kind… but you didn’t do anything tangible about it, something that might alleviate the conditions that led to this outrageous thing being a thing, or its likelihood of recurring.

You didn’t actually do anything about it… but you feel like you did.

This is why people get nutty about fandoms, have parasocial relationships with e-personalities, get legitimately fatigued from so much bad news.

There has to be a balance, you have to retain actual self control and self awareness. Otherwise, you’re a zombie that thinks you’re morally superior to other zombies, and you’ll sleepwalk toward what the algorithm wants you to…

When you could have, at some point, turned off the screen and… meditated, read a book, gone for a hike or jog, planted a garden, maintained your car… even gasp had a face to face interaction with a random person.

They want us atomized, exhausted, existentially despairing.

Such people won’t be capable of doing anything about anything.

If you want to stay Christian about it:

God grant me the serenity

to accept the things I cannot change;

courage to change the things I can;

and wisdom to know the difference.

… Not actually in the Bible. A Lutheran pastor came up with it in the 1930s.

Though I personally disagree with the less often quoted second part of it, which echoes your quoted verses of Jesus saying to more or less be right with God and focus on that… seems to imply that all suffering is unavoidable, and of course that you’ll be better off in Heaven… which I do not think is the case.

But, I can at least say that I think the first part is pretty close to spot on.

The entire company is somewhere between 300-500 people.

It literally fits into a few floors of a tower in Bellevue.

Meanwhile… Microsoft essentially bought the land area of a mid sized US city, and turned it into a sprawling corporate complex.

… and that is just their main campus.

Microsoft literally runs a private shuttlebus system in the Seattle-Bellevue-Issaquah area, to get people into and out of their campuses.

They then also have local private taxi services to get people from one building in a larger campus, to another.

There’s your scale difference.

Microsoft is essentially a semi-sovereign entity, occupies substantial territoty, got their own police too.

… Valve has something like 5-10 concurrent floors in a single building that is basically on top of a shopping mall.

Hyper-Capitalism? Nooo.

//RETRO//-Captialism? … significantly better by comparison.

Terrifying, but true.

‘Stakeholder Capitalism’ turned out to be approximately the same degree of bullshit as ‘Abundance Agenda’ is now.

They might be getting mad because Jesus is not saying the same thing I am.

He is saying do not worry about tomorrow because you can worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.

He is saying material reality is not the most important thing, your relationship with God is.

I am saying do not worry about things where the worry itself prevents you from actually acting to make tomorrow better… or where there genuienly is nothing useful you can do, when you have no realistic choice.

…and I would want you to fundamentally base your appraisal of your own situation in the material and practical reality, and in you trying to be as honest with yourself, about yourself, as you can be.

At this point, the shitpost comm is going to be able to just actually focus on literal shit related stories.

reality is enshitttifying aughguhah!

Grand Theft Auto 6.

No, its not about car theft.

Its about Auto-matically recurring payments, Auto-matic agreement to updated TOS that strip your rights and property, Auto-matic dynamic pricing.

Remember when the GTA series was a cutting critique of US society, caricaturing it?

The joke is inverted now: You’re the joke, if you’re stupid enough to pay to be robbed.

The commission/valve cut is tiered.

First $10m of revenue: 30% cut

Between $10m and $50m: 25% cut.

Over $50m: 20% cut.

Then you have all of the incredible things Valve offers to a game dev, beyond simply existing where most pc gamers are…

…here, use our achievement system, here, you can make in game items tradable, here, you can use our servers for multiplayer peer discovery and linking friends to friends easily, here, you have a whole storefront, news blog, and discussion board… oh you made your game for Windows? No sweat, you don’t need to port it to Linux, we got you there. Oh you wanna do DLC? We got a whole system for that. Oh we forgot to mention cloud saves, we’ll do that for you. And! If you want people to mod your game… we’ll host all their mods, and make it so users can just upload them and download them and such.

You know how many games I’ve seen start on itch.io, incubate, develop, then do an initial launch on Steam?

Way, waaay better plan than just jumping straight into Steam Early Access. You put a firewall between the people on Itch who know they are beta testers, and people on Steam who expect working product, and thus avoid the reputational damage of going through all or most of development on Steam.

Anyway… I’d call all that stuff pro-indie-game-developer.

I certainly agree that gambling, p2w loot drops are bullshit, and the Steam item market being able to convert into actual money is… not good, and should be changed.

(I will note though that a game dev can decide if their game’s items will be directly tradable, or marketable for basically SteamBucks, or both. You can just only allow them to be directly traded.)

But the rest of it? Yeah, a whole lotta games that start with little money can have a lot easier time developing and remaining financially solvent, with all the infrastructure that Valve/Steam provides… maybe the analogy would be they effectively help you up a few of the first rungs of the proverbial ladder.

Its also worth noting that Valve is not a publically traded company. They do not have stock. They do not have a board of investors or shareholders demanding line must go up.

They do things the old fashioned way, they build up a giant warchest of money, money they actually have, with no loan payment due, no strings attached… and then then deploy that money to do things like invent their own VR tech, fund Proton development, build the Steam Machine and Steam Deck, etc.

Every other company in the space that does anything like this is beholden to capitalist investors and the demi-gods of banking and finance in a way that Valve isn’t.

Its why Unity enshittified and then imploded, and why Godot hasn’t.

When you need to make line go up for somebody, when you very directly owe people money… shit comes out the end of the pipe. When you don’t… as long as you manage your own affairs well, you more or less are in charge of what comes out of the pipe.

Yeah… Terrestrial 5G towers with a fiber backbone for some proportion of them… are… stupendously more cost effective at getting a decent level of internet to a lot of people.

Also doesn’t cause Kessler Syndrome, which is, you know, good.

Now, such a system will still suffer in more abberant atmospheric conditons, but to a far lesser extent.

Literally the only actual ‘use case’ I can think of where StarLink ‘makes sense’ as a better solution is … you are a boat that is actually moving most of the time.

If you’re a house boat… terrestrial 5G probably exists near your mooring.

Either that or you truly, truly live far away from civilization.

… but we already had satellite internet that did those things.

I mean, yes, but specifying a more specific cause of the delusional thinking is useful.

Sorry I’m pretending to be a normal person, who is just like, trying to say and a remember a word.