Okay, slow your roll there. Protecting pedophiles is not nearly in the same category as directly facilitating pedophilia and engaging in human trafficking.
Downvote all you like, but a murderer is still guilty of a greater crime than their friend who is helping them bury the bodies.
TF2 had a long and prosperous life. It’s 18 years old at this point. There are a few live service games (usually with subscriptions) that have survived longer, but TF2 had its run, and it was a good one. I bought it as part of the Orange Box and I absolutely got my money’s worth and then some from it.
As for physical media - I don’t know if you were around for it, but there was a period before Steam took over the industry when most major PC game releases had CD keys you had to input and validate before you could play the game. Do something the publisher doesn’t like? The key gets revoked and you can’t play the game any more unless you buy another license. There were entire underground communities devoted to cracking the CD key validations in games. Now you just use Luna or Steamless and call it a day.
All it would take for Valve to lose their effective monopoly on PC game distribution would be for someone else to make a better product.
Every other major PC game distribution platform (besides GOG, and they’re far more niche than Valve) has essentially started their attempt to unseat Valve with enshittification baked in, and it was obvious.
Amazon is a service. That service is becoming materially worse (I have a harder time finding what I’m looking for because of the flood of substandard products and Amazon’s preferential search treatment practices, and even when I do find what I’m looking for, there’s a sizable risk that it’s a fake). This is very much enshittification; they captured the market share, and now they’re squeezing it. Anything that makes them more money but is worse for the consumer, they do. Anything that is better for the consumer but costs them money, they don’t do.
There are two factors necessary for a truly free market that prevent any capitalist system from actually being a free market. They are:
Consumers need to have perfect information about the products and the companies that make and/or sell them - in other words, companies must not be able to hide their sins.
There needs to be zero friction for new entrants into the marketplace, whether that is from costs to start up a business, or anti-competitive behavior from other companies with money to throw around.
It is impossible to achieve either of these in the real world.
Okay, that’s actually kinda great.
The word that always comes to mind is ‘literally’ which has come to mean ‘figuratively, but with emphasis’ and it drives me nuts - because it removes the word we have to say ‘this is a thing that you might assume is figurative, but it’s not, it actually happened’.
If you own it on GoG you don’t need a pirate copy - just save the offline installer.
Personally, I wouldn’t include Proton in the costs of the Steam Machine. The Deck already is benefiting from it immensely, and I would consider it to be a cost of expanding into Linux gaming in general - especially with the Lenovo handheld and other devices starting to jump on the bandwagon as Microsoft continues to take repeated dumps on their userbase. Its R&D costs are being won back by the market % Steam takes on any games bought and played in Linux, which means that it can benefit from that continued revenue stream rather than the one-off hardware sale.
The hardware has to break even. The software already has.
Agreed. The distinction is between ‘millionaires’ and ‘multi-millionaires’ imo.
They’re buying the parts directly from the manufacturers though, so cutting out the retailer middle-man could offset the R&D costs.
Millionaires don’t count as ‘rich’ any more. One million is no longer enough for stability.
I have that and an ‘OnLive founding member’ T-shirt that I wear to tech events. Especially when I suspect there’s going to be something tone-deaf getting launched.
I got both for free.
Since when has breaking the rules stopped this administration?
You’re thinking of SUV’s, which typically have the flat, giant grill that is hard to see over and is far more likely to kill people on impact.
Minivans typically have a short, sloped front which not only provides good visibility, but also is less dangerous to pedestrians in accidents.
Your standards are weird. Several of these games are considered the current pinnacle of their genres.
It’s not just Microsoft any more though. Practically any time you have a prompt for something in software/web pages that benefits the company, the only options are ‘yes’ and ‘maybe later’. It’s become so ubiquitous that I’m genuinely surprised when a prompt like that actually has a ‘no’ option.
The implication is that they’ll have to jump ship to Linux, and thus become a member of the unixsocks community.
If the server runs a significantly cut-down rendering model, you can do things like culling player models when you can’t see them. No more wallhacks.
I like to call it a ward against boredom.
If I don’t have one, then I’m going to be bored. If I do have one, I’ll be busy enough that I won’t need it.