I guess now we know how Putin got the pee tapes.

I think devs actually get quite a bit for that 30%. Let’s present a hypothetical. What if Valve offered an option where you could list your game on Steam with no restrictions and they’d only take a 10% cut, but the tradeoff is, they won’t promote your game at all? Like, it won’t show up in any Steam storefront advertisements, can’t participate in sales, etc. - it’s still there if it’s linked to from off-Steam or if someone searches for it, but it won’t be promoted, period.

How do you think that would work out for developers? I’d argue not well, especially for small studios.

The promotion those games get applies to the game as a whole, not only through Steam - someone can see the promotion on Steam, then go shop around and buy it elsewhere. Why should Valve promote a game if they aren’t getting a cut of the sales?

This thing looks slick. How does it do with sleeping it mid-game session and resuming later? That’s the biggest make-or-break feature for me with any of these handhelds.

How do you think your son would feel about that when you’re on your death bed, if he knew? Knowing that he could have had you around for another year or more, if only you hadn’t used this power? Do you think those fleeting moments would be worth more to him than those extra years?

How would you feel if he, in turn, decided to spend decades of his own life to extend those last few moments with you?

“The only thing that can slow our Country down is another long and damaging Government Shutdown,” Trump wrote on Thursday evening.

Best pro-shutdown endorsement he could possibly have given.

We absolutely want to, and if having money was the only barrier to doing so, we’d sell in an instant, but unfortunately it’s simply not an option for a lot of people

And, you know, US Presidents whose families own real estate empires.

Here’s the thing that I think a lot of people don’t understand about home ownership: Housing prices going up is only beneficial if you plan to sell.

We were (very) lucky and were able to get in on the tail end of the early 2010s housing crisis and leverage the first-time homebuyer incentives that were offered at the time to buy a modest house. It cost $245k. It’s currently worth $550k, and people seem to think this means we made $300k in profit! Yay us! And technically, on paper, sure, we did, but in reality, no.

Housing prices across the board are up, and we still need a place to live, so if we sold this place, we’d have to buy something else (at the same grossly inflated prices), or we’d have to rent (at grossly inflated prices). If the $550k this place is worth on paper buys us something that would have cost $245k in 2010, we haven’t gained anything.

Either way, we have no intention of selling, so we will never see a cent of that increased value. What we are seeing, however, is increased property taxes since the property has, on paper, doubled in value.

What I’m getting at is, this doesn’t benefit homeowners, it benefits housing investors, who are the group Trump really wants to prop up.

And yet when we create a database of ICE agents, it’s terrorism… Hmm…

!patientgamers@sh.itjust.works

From my perspective, this is another reason it’s a bad idea to have an American company (even a somewhat user-focused one like Valve) be a steward of modern digital services. Local culture puts too much emphasis on the theatrical elements of morality.

Yeah, I hear you. It should be based in a sane country like Australia or the United Kingdom or China or Japan.

Point is, making this an ‘America bad’ problem is just ignoring that it could be so much worse if it was based elsewhere.

Antifa Ost in Germany

Aww man, I didn’t know there was an official soundtrack for Antifa! Germans get all the cool stuff.

This was from 2021, so prior to the Steam Deck… that was really their break-out moment, I think, with regards to hardware. The Steam Link and Steam Controller were neat but didn’t really capture their respective markets, and the Index was widely considered one of the best VR headsets on the market but that’s a relatively small market, and it priced out all but the enthusiast tier consumers. The Steam Deck on the other hand had mass appeal and basically ushered in a golden age of handheld PC gaming… not to mention the immense hype around their recent hardware announcements. Could be that their hardware team is making more now.

Sure, but the point I’m making is, it’s not Steam’s fault; they’re simply doing a better job than their competitors of making their storefront attractive to consumers. Rather than blaming Steam, you should be blaming the other storefronts for not being able to capture market share.

It would really help if the would-be competitors focused on consumer-facing features rather than… whatever it is they’re doing. GoG is doing a great job of this, but EGS is still missing even the most basic features years later, because they keep trying to get market share through buying exclusives and giving away free games and that’s sadly never going to work out. They just don’t understand what the consumers in the industry they’re trying to operate in want.

This actually seems like not a terrible spread. The average for the top earners is a little more than 10x the average for the lowest earners… Obviously outliers could be skewing that data (there could be one hardware developer making 30 million while the others work for poverty wages) but from the data we have, this isn’t nearly as wide a gap as I would have expected.

Unless I’m misunderstanding your question, the specific server is more important than the software they’re running; it doesn’t matter if the software is being developed long-term if the server shuts down in the short-term… your community will go down with it.

Couple years ago, lightning struck a tree on our neighbor’s property across the street. We didn’t see the strike, but we heard it; the tree basically exploded. Some of the branches fell onto the power lines and started an electrical fire, so it was a whole big thing. Bunch of people standing out on their driveways watching the police and fire department trying to deal with it.

Tangential to the point of the article, but this:

Mitchell described how preppers make ready for specific forms of societal collapse, based not on the likelihood of the event itself, but rather, based on how useful they would be in that situation. For example, a water chemist has made extensive preparations for an event in which terrorists poison the water-supply. When pressed, he couldn’t explain why terrorists would choose his town to target with an attack like this, but basically thought it would be really cool if the only person who could save his town was him.

actually strikes me as the best / sanest form of prepping, as long as everyone does it. Imagine a scenario where the water chemist has a plan to save their town from a contaminated water supply, the electrical engineer has a plan to save their town from a wide-spread power grid failure, the EMT has a plan to save their town from the collapse of the emergency response system, etc., such that no matter what disaster befalls them, someone is there who’s ready to step in and apply their expertise for the betterment of the community as a whole.

Ah yes, my favorite DOS games, Red Alert and Unreal Tournament.