There's where your mental model is just wrong. The game server is in the domain of the seller. Some hardware breaking due to wear & tear or abuse is NOT. That is an incredibly important legal distinction.

What EXACTLY do you mean with "the game shuts down"? That is the whole point. The game SERVERS shutting down is not the same as disabling the game. If it's an online-only game, there could still be OTHER servers, not run by the seller. Official or unofficial. That is the whole point of "stop killing games".

Again, this is relevant for online games only, and is not about the game at all, but about access to a specific community or server. Even if I am the biggest asshole on the planet and every ban was absolutely justified - why should I not be able to set up my own server, invite my equally assholish friends and play there? There is no reason to disable the GAME, only the access to a specific server. These can be two distinct things. You buy the game, but you subscribe to a server.

They shouldn't create the need to refund. You're making up a problem here. Every refund ever was done at the point of sale for the price you paid. That's why invoices and receipts exist.

But that's not what it says. Every shop ever treated games as a SALE. Steam doesn't label the button "buy" anymore, but most other shops still do, and even on Steam everything else is handled exactly like a sale of a product. Shopping cart and all.

Because they want to eat their cake and have it, too. I'm sure players would be more hesitant to part with 60 bucks if it clearly said: "temporary, revocable at any time for any reason, permission to play".

I don't think that would matter in practice. This law wouldn't let them specify what *news* is allowed, only what news sources, and there would be a huge stink if they tried to block the major real news outlets. They'd like to, I'm sure, but I really doubt that they'd succeed.

Russiagate was absolutely not "proven false". Mueller's report and both the House and Senate reports (from committees led by Republicans) thoroughly verified it.

L3 is not used as direct communication would be impossible with today’s technology. A relay satellite at L4 or L5 would be required. There are no L4 or L5 satellites right now but L5 is being planned for a space weather satellite that monitors solar activity.

"Hateful virtue signaling" by using her full name?

So I take it you will not explain anything you mean. We are supposed to read your mind about your grievances then.

Only if it wears a toga.

From what I can tell at the places I've worked: Macs cost a little more; however, they are only slightly more than business PCs. Remember large companies do not buy the cheapest consumer models from Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc. They get the business models. They are cheaper when it comes to maintenance. Incidentally one coworker with transitioned over to a Mac in one day. She had a Dell laptop and was visiting our offices for a meeting when her laptop just died. To fix her laptop would require a week to get the parts. It was a few years old, and she was due for a new laptop. But they only had Macs or the largest Dell laptops readily available at our offices. So they copied everything over to her new Mac.

[sarcasm]Yes because Steam 100% controls all the software that they sell. No one else sells this software at all like GOG, Epic, Microsoft, every publisher themselves, etc. Also no one makes PC hardware that plays games. No one at all.[/sarcasm]

It's $300 for 1.5TB more. Without part numbers we can't really tell it that is slightly more than component cost or not. A Gen4 or Gen5 NVMe SSD is around $300 though. Also performance and reliability is better if the SSD has a small RAM cache which adds to the cost.

I priced out a similar build for over $1,000 today. I probably could have saved some money by bargain hunting and waiting. That's the sad state of PC parts due to the current situation. Unfortunately the $1049 price is a deal today.

If you can buy those components and build this for $500 these days, good luck to you. Also why is it Steam's job to subsidize your gaming habits?

This is the actual problem with nuclear power. And by the time it comes around, the people who made the decisions have already safely moved elsewhere or into pension.

I guess by your virtues means we do not call people by their legal names, then sure. However like HST, JWST, etc, abbreviations are used by everyone to soothe your hurt feelings.

Correct. Breaking is entirely irrelevant to this discussion.

If something breaks, it's on me. This is about companies being able to take something away that isn't broken at all, at any time they choose, without any refund.

For any other item that'd be theft and would land them in jail.

My company uses lots of Macs. Some of the users are software developers. The main reason I did not get a Mac during the last refresh was one application was Windows only. That system was retired so I do not have that limitation anymore.