These dumb fucks sold 8 million as 8 billion

Even aside from stuff like this, things they claim to be saving tend to be cut contracts. Contracts that have already been paid, but will no longer have to provided what they’d been paid for.

The main thing is post more. Lack of content is the main reason people don’t use Lemmy more, and the only way to fix this is to share/produce more.

Its a bit of an unpopular opinion, but I think even (transparent, community-relevant) bots are a good idea at this point, given that 99% of interests have little to no activity currently. For example, if we had bots that post game update changelogs to their relevant communities, it would at least provide a baseline amount of content and make it easier to discuss for fans of those games.

The obvious answer is the other two casual classics: Space Cadet Pinball and Minesweeper. Possibly also some of the classic board games like Chess, or Go.

A “profit all the things” CEO would be running the casino themselves. IE: Many of the big mobile games. Hell, I don’t play many modern triple-A titles, but it sounds like they’ve largely gone that route too.

Basically, the same systems that allow Skin gambling also allow for trading and 3rd party marketplaces. You can’t just disable one without disabling the other. They could ban it on paper but enforcing those bans technically will likely just lead to users/victums lossing more as casinos would be unable to payout owed earnings.

That leaves legal enforcement, but Valve isn’t a government body - they don’t have the authority to investigate these casinos, and have limitted ability to enforce the law. They’re effectively manufacturing poker chips and releasing them into an open market where they don’t have authority (nor should they). Instead, illegal casinos should be investigated and prosecuted by the government - its supposed to be their responsiblity to handle exactly this sort of thing. They have the ability to seize casino property to investigate them or collect information, and the ability to fine them and enforce fines, unlike Valve which can do neither. As even noted in the video, the have sent cease and desist letters in the past, but casinos can changed names, changed owners, ect. and nothing changed.

Edit: For clairity, free trading is what allows these sites to work. Valve will disable account’s ability to trade in some cases such as where their services are directly abused on-platform, but they don’t have access to trade negotiations and things obviously get messy when it comes to trying to mediate bad or unfair deals (such as the case with these casinos.) That means Valve has four options to tackle this:

1. Do nothing.

2. Send cease and desist notices to the casinos and/or persue legal action where possible. This leads to individual casinos closing and then a new one is immediately re-opened to take its place as there isn’t any cost to then.

3. Disable the accounts of these casinos. The problem is that this effectively freezes their cashflow both in and out. Anyone waiting on a cash-out effectively immediatly loses everything, and given the long transaction times and sizes of these casinos, this will likely hurt a lot of victims. At the same time, while they lose some of their assets, casinos can still walk away with a lot of their current profits. This just turns it into a game of whack a mole, where casios pop up, make a small fortune, then get banned and effectivly rugpull their userbase.

4. Disable trading and possibly marketplace, which sucks for regular users and means all sales much go through Valve storefront with no room for competition or price negotiation. No more giving friends spare skins, and no more bypassing Valve’s 5% royalty fee on sales. This also has the same issue as #3.

I’m not educated enough to have an opinion on this, but is the EU different from other places in terms of requiring a lot of expensive campaigning to have any chance to win?

Ill double check the available documents, and edit this comment, but at least when I last checked like six months ago, they only had one example, and it was Steam warning a developer for giving away free copies (if I remember right, Steam keys) on their Discord. I never saw any other solid evidence.

EGS doesn’t sell Steam keys but games still can’t be listed for cheaper on EGS than Steam without violating Steam’s terms, for example.

But are devs allowed to sell for cheaper on Epic? I haven’t see any evidence that they aren’t. On the othet hand, I can point to multiple examples where games are cheaper, on other services like the examples I gave, which seems to disprove this.

Thats why I was asking for evidence. Because so far, there is quite a bit of evidence that devs are allowed to chose their prices on other distribution channels, and to my knowledge, no real evidence made available that it is written in contract otherwise.

Has there been any evidence provided yet that they have a most favoured nation clause for anything but Steam Keys yet? Last I tried to look into it, they had evidence (or claimed there was?) of a most favoured nation clause for Steam Keys, and an individual instance of a dev being asked to not give their game away for free but nothing for non-Steam keys. I know for the longest time, the common knowledge was that Steam allowed it for anything but Steam keys (IE dwarf fortress being free off Steam or GOG offering better deals for their own games). That said, its been a little while, so I don’t remeber details of the case.

Personally, the only games I’ve found that Im esspecially comfortable to “lock-in” are:

Factorio for Labour of Love, as its an absolute gem of a game that has continued to receive significant improvements even after launch and not even all bundled in to the (itself amazing) expansion. I also considered Stardew Valley or Dota, both of which are great for this, but Factorio really deserves it for Space Age and the updates that have come with it.

Balatro for Best Game on Steam Deck, for its addicting, fun gameplay, good for longer sessions or pick-up and put-down play.

Tactical Breach Wizards for Outstanding Visual Style. There are other games that might have pulled off their themes better, but the mix of military and magical is so cool and charming and unique, that its my absolute favorite right now.

And Balatro again for Sit Back and Relax, for the same reasons I gave for Steam Deck, and just how chill it can be once you’ve learned the basics.

Honestly, I think now is probably the best time in history for discoverablity by far. Things like YouTube have done a lot, but I think Steam has played a massive part. Compare it to most of the other options:

Physical retailers tend to just be a wall of products, with the exception of games with a large marketing budget (esspecially those working out deals directly with the retailer) that often get special placement in their own shelf. Marketing budget is king, and everything else is hard to browse.

Reviewers offer a bit of an advantage as they provide an easy way to assess if games are good or bad, but they are usually limitted in the number of reviews they can publish, and those reviews tend to go towards the games that get sent from powerful publishers or those with most hype, meaning it usually still comes down to marketing budget.

A step up from that is most online retailers. Here, you have easier access to information about the games on display, and often have ways to sort by genre, price, or reviews. That said, a lot of emphasis is always placed on either the top grossing, games directly connected to the storefront owner, or games that directly buy space on the front page. This offers far more discoverability than anything that came before, but still tends to massively over-push higher-budget and/or higher-return games.

Steam on the other hand, has put far more emphasis on featuring good games on their front page. You can’t buy the space, Valve doesn’t bias the store towards their own products as much, and revenue plays a generally smaller part in the algorithm. Instead, they have a much better personalized recommendation algorithm and more tools for customizing your storefront (such as blocking tags). On top of this, they have recognized that this isn’t enough, and introduced a myriad of (often half-baked) additional discovery tools, such the the Discovery Queue, Curators, and the various festivals like NextFest. Sure, its not perfect, but I can consistent find new games I’m interested in, whereas on other platforms its barely worth trying. I think this is a big part of Steam’s success that often gets overlooked.

Ahhhhh. 4 dozen.

Of course. Doesn’t mean its not nice to be able to avoid it though. Personally, it will have no real impact on my purchasing decision, but the less DRM, the better.

This seems really promising. Unfortunately, I expect they’ll still use Steam DRM, but everything I’ve heard so far is immensely promising so who know, maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll skip even that.

From my understanding, thats also very much not allowed on the app store, and is something they check for.

It is worth noting that unlike something like a League or Overwatch skin, and even a lot of early TF2 trading, modern CS and Dota skins have more emphasis put on their marketability and speculative value. For example, I’ve bought a few CS skins that I don’t use, purely because I expect their value to increase over the next couple years. Of course, thats not all of the buyers, but that influences the purchase, and allows for those valuations unlike a Fortnite skin with a fixed price tag set by Epic with zero recoupable value.

Just a few days ago, I wrote a comment about how you would theoretically try and become a significant competitor to Steam, and one of the points I raised was that Steam’s storefront and recommendations are very generous (compared to others). It makes a huge difference that even indie games can appear on the front page regularly, both improving user and dev experiences. Players find games that they enjoy, while devs pay a very small amount to get effective, targetted advertisements.

What do you mean still? So far as I can tell, its not even available for pre-order yet. Its purely closed beta for media.

In your Lemmy settings (probably need to use the web UI) there should be an option to select your languages. Lemmy will filter out content not marked as your language. Unfortunately, a lot of content is left without a language specified (AKA “undefined”) so unless you want to filter out much of the content you do want, you’re stuck manually blocking a lot still.

Personally, Im more of a creative-mode player at the moment so the majority of the problems don’t affect me. Its also been a couple months since I last tried Minetest (mostly on Mineclone). From what I remember, my personal dealbreakers were:

• IMO much uglier graphics, and more significantly, its harder to graphically customize with mods and resource packs. Maybe its more versitile than I’m giving it credit for, but at the very least, its not used as there aren’t enough modders and artists making content for the game to even remotely compete.

• Performance - Minecraft may not be optimized, but I was getting much worse performance on Minetest. In particular, I was getting massive frame drops any time I placed or broke a block, making it extremely nauseating to play.

• UX - There were a ton of small roadblocks to actually playing the game as I wanted to. First, customizing the graphics settings - the menu was disorganized and defaults were really weird for my hardware. Then, I had to find and edit the permissions file to be able to fly and sprint on my creative world. Even after that, if I remember right, the controls or flight movement were limitted or weird but in a way that couldn’t easily be fixed.

• Lack of world editting commands - Im sure theres mods for this one, but its more work to find, figure out, and set up and by the time I got to this point, having to put in even more work just to make the game comparable was a dealbreaker.