I don't think the US actually enforces anything approaching the spirit of robust anti-trust law now. The goalposts have been moved back so many times, they're on another field now.

In an of itself, that's a perfectly cromulant opinion to hold, but I doubt it's going to be shared by a bunch of people with Robinhood accounts paying electronically for the delivery of "freedfrom from techy surfdom". :D

This seems like the regulations working as intended? Apple's no longer taking as much of a cut, developers get to keep a little more.

"The study was done on behalf of Apple, and it wasn't independently produced"

What a surprise that the sponsor of the study still wants to keep a larger cut of sales.

Low quality PC to console ports have always existed (and vice versa for that matter.) Define broken - crashing your console?

I'm a game programmer, 20 years in the industry shipping dozens of games across the entire history of consoles starting from the PS2/GC era up to and including the consoles of today. Take it from me, the fact that console hardware is fixed ensures the experience of running games designed to push hardware to their functional limits is far more stable/hassle free.

If you don't wanna play games that do that, then this might not be as big of an issue. But the fixed hardware of a console simply cannot be discounted. Valve is not stupid for making a "verified on our console" program. The console platforms spend OODLEs of money ensuring that console games are by and large rock solid. (Counter examples not welcome, I'm just saying in comparison to the arbitrary hardware landscape of the Windows PC install base)

Also console OSes are designed for their main purpose - turn it on, play the game, stop playing the game whenever you like, come back to the game whenever you like. They're optimized towards that experience in a way that a general purpose PC struggles to do (admittedly Steam's big picture mode is pretty good, but you can't totally handwave away the fact that Windows is running in the background)

I'm not against gaming PCs, I have a nice one, it's my main daily game driver. (Also have a PS5, because I'm not only a developer, I'm also a customer!)

there are 5 billion Roblox accounts created

5 billion more accounts than you have brain cells, apparently

wait, which restaurants require an ID scan??

No man is an island. It's basically impossible to do anything that affects nobody else. If you kill yourself, you might have kids than then needed to be provided for by the state. If you harm yourself, even if nobody is obligated to help you, you can do emotional/mental damage to others who observe your suffering. If you decline protection of infectious desiese, you out others at risk. And so on and so on. Libertarians hate this one weird fact ...

"Almost nothing in the real world is a 2-player game"

That's quite untrue if you ignore rounding-error players in a substantial number of markets.

Gracious of you to make a joke that illustrates that you actually understand how braindead your original analogy was.

It boggles my mind that somebody could write those words while presumably entertaining the thought that they were making a cogent point.

They don't want to take money that can then be demanded to be returned after having spent it. It's quite simple. What constitutes discrimination is subjective - don't look at me, every nation has volumes of evolving laws and case law on trying to define discrimination, and in what cases it's legally permitted. Knowing this administration, the bar in the agreement probably isn't even legal - just, "When we say you're doing it, you're doing it." You'd be stupid to take money on those terms. They might as well take money that is only allowed to be spent on "super cool shit, although we can then decide later that something isn't as cool as we said it was the month before".

NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal anti- discriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott.

Hilarious. Hey, would you like to take on a massive economic liability? Take this money!

Where the definition of "discriminatory practices" is up to the NSF, subject to whatever day of the week it is, and the claw backs are retroactive to money already spent?

Independent of your (stupid in your case) politics, that's a poison pill. No rational actor should be expected to swallow that.

Then you would be wrong. Probably best to recuse yourself from weighing in on this dicsussion.