Yeah I don't think it's quite a hundred bucks but I spend a good $70 a month on streaming services now and it would be 80 except one of my credit cards pays for one of the services.

I can justify that because I've got my kid still using the streaming services even though they don't live with me anymore. As long as you don't make heavy use of the services they'll generally look the other way for the most part. I was going to cancel Netflix when they locked my kid out but they just never did. They are selectively enforcing those rules to prevent people like me from canceling it because there isn't enough value.

There are lots of people who curate lists of games for free because nerds like to obsess over their hobby and share it with other people. So a curated list of games isn't really a huge selling point.

What makes steam so dominant is the tools they have for doing stuff like that are really easy for users to use and encourage that kind of engagement without being overbearing.

It's extremely hard to compete with steam. One of their competitors, good old games, offers games without DRM but they have a tough time competing with steam because of the feature set steam has and general gamer inertia.

There's another store that the guys who make fortnite run called Epic and the way they compete is they basically just give away tons of free games every week. The cost of giving away free games purchased from other game companies often independent studios is cheaper than actual marketing. But it's still millions of dollars that they can pour into it and they still have a tough time competing with steam

We are rapidly making "to unlock drink verification can" a reality.

I buy games on Steam and then do all this stuff to make them work better on Linux. But I also buy games on GOG. And I have games on Epic and EA too, and Lutris does all those too.

I initially got ProtonUp-Qt specifically for use with Steam, because it is the best (easiest) way to install steamtinkerlaunch.

Bingo, there's nothing illegal or fundamentally unethical about a monopoly, it's the anti-competitive and anti-consumer actions that are at issue and as far as I can tell Valve has never really engaged in that. They don't even advertise and they don't even undercut the competition with a 30% commission. As you said they got here by being a good storefront even in the face of their competitors really throwing everything at them (Remember Origin?).

And as a developer at least have access to quite a lot of features as a developer besides just hosting and transactions. You get very active forums if you don't want to do that yourself. You have it handle mods and act as a mod repository and achievements.

And the one that's really the monopoly keeper imo and a very smart move, you can still sell the game on your own website, keep all the money from the sale and still give the customer a Steam key.

How far back are we talking? Her high school sophomore yearbook photo has it hyphenated.

I approve of this campaign, which I'm just now hearing about. I have complained about their intentions regarding side loading here previously. I am frankly boggling about it, as it is really the most meaningful difference between the platforms.

Steam is definitely not literally a monopoly. Most people don't seem to know either of the most important things about monopolies, which is 1) what one is and 2) that it's not necessarily relevant whether they are, because antitrust doesn't require a monopoly. It only means you're abusing a somehow dominant position in a market.

With that said, I've been using Steam for a lot of years. I've had many technical problems with it, but I'm not aware of any way in which they are abusing their position. I haven't exactly been looking for this information either, though, and I do see that the article mentions a lawsuit I seem to remember something about.

I think 30% is a lot, but I don't think Steam is really doing anything to prevent anyone from releasing anything else anywhere. They also allow a whole lot of content that is frankly surprising for a mainstream game site, they are ultra-liberal about permitting whatever and I think that's pretty amazing. I do worry about the whole thing packing up one day, but that's a whole other discussion. Are there really any complaints about Valve that have legs?

That they have a completely dominant position in the market. They are probably 90% of the PC game sales market so it's fair to call them a monopoly.

Monopolies are only a problem when they illegally abuse their position. Typically to prevent competitors from getting into the market.

Sometimes you have natural monopolies like how you have power companies because it doesn't make sense to have multiple power companies trying to run their own lines.

And sometimes you have monopolies that form because of single company is just plain out competing everyone. That's steam.

Most of the grumbling is from studios that are big enough that they could probably go out on their own except users prefer to stick to steam because the features steam has. It's difficult for game studios to compete with steam on features because they're focused on making their game and not on making a platform to distribute and maintain and manage their game.

There is also a risk which is that the reason steam is being a monopoly isn't a problem is because the guy who runs it used to work for Microsoft and hates abusive monopolistic business practices so he doesn't do them.

He's not going to live forever and when he dies who knows what's going to happen to steam. It's basically like a fiefdom or a monarchy at that point and if you know anything about the history of monarchies when the King dies there is usually a huge mess as people scramble for power and the peasantry takes it into shorts

I hate to be a broken record about this lately, but Lutris is a great interface to your GOG library. So far it's successfully installed and run everything I've tried. I'm gonna have to try this Heroic thing that seems to be more popular than it is now, but last time I looked everyone was telling me to use Lutris — when at the time I was happy with PlayOnLinux, which was then being maintained. On Linux you can very reasonably use the web for GOG (and it's easy enough to get Steam reviews there) and then install the games with Lutris.

While I'm advocating for software you want for playing Windows games, you will also want ProtonUp-Qt if you don't have it already.

It's just a digital distribution platform for video games and occasionally some productivity applications.

Basically it's an app you install on a Windows PC or a Linux PC that lets you buy and install PC games from the makers of the app, Valve.

It got its start as the application you were required to install if you want to play Half-Life 2 which was an extremely popular PC game from the early 2000s. Virtually every PC gamer at the time had a copy of Half-Life 2 so every PC gamer ended up with steam installed. Before long valve was using the steam software to distribute other games they made and not long after that they started to distributing other people's games. The rest is basically history.

Steam does a very good job of providing useful tools and services to developers for doing things like supporting multiplayer, installing game modifications and finding new games you might be interested in. The last one is extremely important because there are literally tens of thousands of games released every year from Indies. Most are pretty terrible but there are inevitably some great games in there that are basically impossible to find. This is especially important because video game journalism has never been great and has only gotten worse with the end of print magazines.

Steam has overwhelming market share so they are a de facto Monopoly. In general they are a relatively benevolent Monopoly but they still do take a 30% cut. If you are a larger developer that's not really a good deal for you. For smaller developers steam does a good job of finding your audience for you effectively becoming your marketing budget.

So for example I like 3D platformers and steam introduced me to one called Penny's big breakaway that I otherwise wouldn't know existed. That's a sale to company probably would not have had without steam.

Marketing budgets can account for as much as 50% of the cost of a product so for small companies steam ends up being a fairly good deal with 30%. But larger companies still need their own separate marketing in order to drive the kind of sales they need so steam isn't nearly as valuable for them.

Then that's going to start conversations about the future of work without jobs.

We count all be plumbers.

Unlike the bullshit you get from the Vinyl / Tube crowd there is actually a technical reason to preference film in many situations. It has a smooth saturation curves when over exposed that don't result sudden loss of colour in highlights. It's something that has yet to be truly replicated in digital and is the reason why so many filmed lighting effects look off in modern films and why so many are still shot on film first and then digitised.

Actually the Tubes crowd isn't quite wrong. It has a similar benefit, but just not for your home hi-fi, rather the smooth effect when you overdrive a tube vs the harsh clipping of a transistor leads to distortion effects that can't be electrically copied with transistors (but can be with complex DSP, which adds delay). This is one of the reason why tubes are still so commonly used for guitar amplifiers.

Nothing? No dialler? No contact list? No Messaging? No Calendar? No function to add NFC cards? And with the messaging what if SMS isn't the default system used in your country? Wouldn't it make sense for WhatsApp to be preinstalled in places like Brazil? Android phones are modular by design, every function is an app. Bonus points if you release a phone without a Store app installed on it, what do you do then? You have no browser right? You said no additional software. So you expect every user to use Android Debug Bridge to setup their phone?

No sorry I disagree with you. There should be a number of applications pre-installed so the phone is actually functional out of the box without doing the Playstore dance. But most importantly you need to have the ability to uninstall / disable apps which you don't want or intend to use. The problem is as always, people will disagree what features they deem essential.

Yes. It's a feature Tesla use quite actively during test drives. Tesla claims to never apply it to a purchased car once the title is transferred though.