GOG being pushed out of the market. They’re one of the only stores that actually give you ownership of your games, and they don’t have the same indomitable foothold that Steam does.

It would be all too easy for Microsoft to strangle one of their key markets by taking a loss on sales and offering publishers 150% sales price in exchange for exclusive distribution of 90s and 2000s era PC games or console ports.

Steam will end up pushed out of the market

This has been explicitly attempted 3 times already, and that really didn’t work out well for anybody who tried it.

Epic Games Store still resorts to bribing people with free games to keep their monthly active user numbers up, hemorrhaging money to attract users who are rarely interested in anything more than freebies.

EA and Ubisoft tried to forgo Steam releases in favor of their own stores and launchers in an attempt to keep 100% of the revenue. They eventually relented, releasing their games on Steam again. Even Blizzard joined in, adding Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 to Steam.

And Microsoft’s attempt to dethrone Steam by releasing games through the Windows app store just ended up with Valve funneling considerable resources into helping Linux and WINE become a viable alternative to Windows for gaming.

Unless Valve enshittifies or legal shenanigans ensue, they’re pretty unlikely to be pushed out of the market. No single game or game series is good enough to capture the entire market of Steam users and permanently drive them to alternative platforms. On top of that, Steam has a huge following of users who are loyal to the company, which is both insane and insanely hard to compete against.

or they will also become Streaming Platforms

Maybe, maybe not. I don’t see it happening, though. Valve makes money hand over fist from digital sales alone, and they have more to lose in pissing off their customers by selling subscriptions than they have to gain by selling subscriptions.

I am concerned about GOG and PC hardware prices, though.

Linux isn’t derived from Unix, just originally based on it. The BSDs and Darwin (Mac) would be the unfortunate casualties, but at least most of the country won’t be stuck with Windows?

Edit: And, I guess, Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4/5. The former “borrowed” the networking stack from OpenBSD, and the latter are based on some BSD variant if I recall correctly.

It’s not like they needed all 11000 of them. Half of them died from being submerged in boiling dye… Surely, it would have been easier with half a magnitude smaller quantity.

https://amiunique.org/fingerprint

To be fair to Ubisoft, the newest Prince of Persia game was a great metroidvania game.

To be fair-er to Ubisoft, they can go fuck themselves for closing down the studio that made said game only a few months later.

They can make good games. They just clearly would rather rehash the same tired formula that they’ve been running with for the past decade while unreasonably expecting to make more money each time.

Ok, now suppose you want to release a game for any of the modern Nintendo consoles.

You need to get a devkit. To get it, you need Nintendo to approve your request, and you need to pay them for a license to use the devkit hardware. And, to actually use the devkit, you need a PC running Windows.

Sure, to develop a game for PC, you need a PC. But do you know what you don’t need on top of that? A devkit and a Windows license.

Edit: Two downvotes in two minutes? Oh my, the sockpuppets are angry today.

Corpos are skilled at wringing any and all interesting bits out of something and reducing it to harmless, overdone slop that still sells. They don’t take risks because that may make them $5 less. But indies do.

I’m still amazed at how Gearbox managed to royally fuck up Risk of Rain 2. They had a great game with solid foundations handed to them, and they somehow managed to both regress the game logic into being tied to framerate and release a buggy mess of a DLC in one fell swoop.

It’s not that they’re allergic to money but rather the inflated sense of self-importance and ego. To rightsholders and executives, it’s unthinkable that fans could come up with something better and profitable using the intellectual property that they earned (read: bought) fair and square. And if someone somehow did, it’s a threat to the bottom line, not something to embrace and encourage.

The magic cable typically goes into ISP-owned hardware sitting in a box somewhere down the street. From there, it’s either converted into fiber optic signals or repeated until it reaches an ISP-owned building where the data can be exchanged with the wider internet.

How does so much data go through a single-pin coax cable?

It uses multiple channels (frequency ranges) in parallel, bonding (combining) them to increase throughput.

A surprising amount of bandwidth can be achieved this way. DOCSIS 4.0 can do 10 gigabits per second in download and 6 gigabits per second in upload.

One instance? There’s at least two. But does that really matter? Reddit had r/TheDonald and r/conservative, and trying to get those people to fuck off and stop proselytizing elsewhere was like trying to play whack-a-mole against an anthill.

Here, you block the tankie instances and move on with your life.

Their slogan should be:

No thought, just parrot what’s taught.

Might be. It is definitely a thing, though.

When I used to work for a large American corporation that sold products to consumers, they took it extremely seriously and breaking it would result in disciplinary action. It probably had something to do with advertisement laws, but it also easily could have just been because it makes the company look very bad.

one place even asked people to write fake reviews on Trustpilot/job sites

That sounds unethical, to say the least. Did they verify if you actually did it, or just “suggest” you do?

Corporations drill it deep into your head that you do not positively promote your own products or negatively review competitor products without both making it clear that you (1) work for $Corp; and (2) are sharing your own, personal opinion.

Giving the benefit of the doubt to Plex, they suck at training employees about social media policies.

Buddy, quit while you’re ahead not too far behind. You’re just proving what @Tattorack@lemmy.world said: you don’t understand the difference between patents, copyright, and trademarks.

Another great post as usual!

For people interested in what’s been going on with Limited Run, here’s a 90-minute video that goes into a lot of detail about the sketchy stuff they did before this latest controversy:

https://youtu.be/MvkZkgmpg2w

plus these are benches too it looks like

This part is the most surprising. For something meant to go in urban areas, where’s the hostile architecture? No railings between seats? No spikes?

I prefer removing the -french language pack on every install. The command comes with a typo though, so you need to fix that for it by adding /* at the end

If you do, better hope it’s not loaded.

Emulation is legal

Unfortunately, it’s not that straightforward anymore. Emulation of modern consoles exists in a legal gray area that may or may not be illegal under the DMCA.

With something like the Switch, the ROMs are encrypted in a way that they can only be unencrypted with keys that are derived from data baked into the console itself. Yuzu for example is still protected as an emulator for some hardware/software platform, but it wouldn’t be able to run retail games without being able to decrypt the ROMs.

And that’s kind of the problem. Creating tools for preservation and interoperability is permitted by the DMCA, but tools that are made in part or whole to bypass DRM measures is explicitly not. That conflict hasn’t been tested in court either, so the first ruling is going to be the one that sets the precedent.

This is my problem with your argument, you’re saying that because of piracy they’re entitled to crack down on emulation.

My argument isnt that they’re entitled to crack down on emulation because of piracy. My argument is that people blatantly and publicly using emulators to play pirated, unreleased games emboldens Nintendo.

I believe Nintendo isn’t willing to test that gray area in court without having something to support their anti-emulation position. What they want to do is bully devs into settling because it’s a low-risk way to kill development on the emulator without opening up that can of worms that could make Switch emulators unambiguously legal. But, the more evidence Nintendo gets to support their argument, the more confident they become in thinking they would end up winning if they don’t get that settlement.

Keep in mind that when they did finally go after Yuzu’s devs, they went after them for creating software to circumvent the Switch’s DRM (that gray area I mentioned) and not for creating an emulator. If they were actually confident in thinking the legal answer to “is an emulator that decrypts ROMs illegal” was “yes,” they would’ve just went after Yuzu a long time ago instead of waiting 7 years into the console lifestyle.