That’s the general idea: they don’t shutdown games because “you can’t support/keep server up forever”… they shutdown games for the otherwise illegal planned obsolescence.

You shut down a game people is playing, people that were playing that game are out looking for new game to (buy) play.

Anthem may have different interest from EA because nobody was playing; but they may still be out there to normalize planned obsolescence (and thus “protect” Anthem from being repaired

“don’t use our tools to sell mods”.

I think there are still misconception: CDProject was smart, albeit dishonest, into presenting the whole thing as “Cyberpunk’s Mod”; so, you (as general and misguided reader) inclined to think the modder took something from CDProject and generate something from thin air… added games are just icying on the cake.

The framework was already setup and working for several games even before Cyberpunk addition.

What is CDProject doing here is just some PR magic to blameshift their actual responsibility: they didn’t ask the modder to remove support for Cyberpunk, they went on and sink down is whole business by addressing directly another company (Patron) which are more “sensitive” to business and discuss less.

It doesn’t need to be legal: Patreon, like Valve and any other big company, deem request from other companies as top priority over any commoner.

Patreon think “we may have extra business with CDProjeck, but mod authors are nobody that need to work for free at best”.

So they know who need to be sacrificed.

(Had to look for AI on this, sorry: I am not an accountant)

for the US: Yearly franchise tax( California: 800$ min per LLC).

Annual report fees (50-300$ per state (Delaware 300$ // New York 9$).

…and also there’s a percentage of the income (if it’s not exactly zero, I guess)

…then, if you’re not an accountant, and don’t want to mess with taxes, you may want to pay someone (an accountant) that make sure your reports are correct (even if they are 0)

A small check for moral consistency: what about Loseless Scaling and 3DSen?

Given that, I’m okay with this DCMA.

Just a small detail that doesn’t look considered, if you ear only one side of the story. The "Cyberpunk VR” mod is not actually a "Cyberpunk VR” mod, but a framework that came to support Cyberpunk after many other games (like GTAV). If you’re still okey, bear in mind the same logic may apply to Loseless Scaling (sold for ~7€ on Steam) and 3DSen (sold for ~13€ on Steam) or you need to take VR Injection Framework apart from Loseless Scaling and 3DSen.

They are paving the road for “Doom running on Minecraft-Hytale hybrid”

It’s never a good idea to fall in love with CEOs; a company may sometime “help” their customer, but when strategic partner asks for a slap in the face for the customer… there’s no “may”, only must.

Steam comes with Denuvo, third party launcher filled with ads and kernel level anticheat. None of these was required by Valve… yet… they still slap their customer in the face per strategic parteners requests.

Also, refund is not something in Gabe’s book: it was written in Australia’s laws (also EU and other countries) and only after lot of struggles he conceded it.

To collect money from sales you need to be a company or a single person who act as it. There are taxes for companies and people acting as such (amount of sales didn’t justify the tax spending as company).

As I am replying, you got 9 upvotes and 9 downvotes; looks like the perfect “storm” to put my hot take too.

We got psychotic people on both side, when you get this grade of polarization people usually lose the perspective.

AI is a technology, an human logical entity like math: AI works on very advanced (probabilistic) math. Math is not the evil… but an actual evil does exist.

There’s a difference between a LLM chatbot that runs on your local GPU… and one in the cloud.

The chatbot on your GPU is “trapped” by your questions, your needs, your choices.

Today the chatbot on the cloud will tell you that Elon Musk is a controversial person, tomorrow it will tell you Elon Musk is the savior of the Earth and you’re not worthy to kiss his feet.

People seeing absolute evil in AI, are against you running your chatbot locally, on your PC.

People enthusiastic about AI will accept any “gift” (or AI GF) Elon Musk will give them.

I understand what you mean; but Android isn’t even a regular proprietary either: you can’t build the like LineageOS or Amazon’s Fire OS with iOS or Windows Mobile (Apple or Microsoft will sue you; Google can’t).

Anyway, the point is not Android itself: but Linux’s opensource stacks access to the GPUs (with OSS drivers) beyond AMD, Intel and Nvidia.

If you observe the ARM gaming ecosystem, you see smartphone are the most common gaming device on the planet… “Android Linux” (quotes for emphasis) is not recognized, in the Linux sphere, mostly because proprietary driver (in the gaming context: GPU’s drivers).

If we accept “Android as Linux”, Linux is the most common gaming platform (beyond Windows), if we don’t… Linux is just a niche in the gaming industry.

You can see where the problem is: if every Android smartphone was capable to “install” any regular Linux distro, tides could change in a glimpse. If not Valve Gaming, there may be Samsung Gaming… and so go on…

Competition to Intel+AMD+Nvidia.

There may not be a problem of Japan itself, but the act of this specific company in Japan that’s responding to the “induced” PC hardware crisis. The induced doesn’t mean that’s some natural development (such as people is not buying PC anymore) but because critical components and materials (such as GPU/ram/SSD) are currently absorbed by the ongoing AI bubble eating and eating resources that are key for PC manufacturing.

The problem is “based anywhere”: no party based on a single nation should have censorship control on the global market of a technology (high-end gaming on PC in this case). The problem is not “America bad”, but the presence of America in control of many modern technologies (social network, AI, advertisement, media etc.) makes U.S. a recurring target for bigotry that mess with the overall market (this don’t mean that U.S. have a global-wise issue with bigotry, things could be worse is so many key market were in the hands of any religious zealot country (being Muslim, Christian, Hebrew etc.).

We’re are losing a world that was heading to technological decentralization (emails, websites, interconnected communities (such as forums, irc, bulletin boards), cryptocurrencies etc: this is going to screw with everyone, U.S. citizen themselves also.

…probably also a 400$/€ PC, but here’s the plot twist: it did cost 400$/€

After cutting the price to reach greater audience (originally too expensive) Sony had to remove Linux support from Playstation 3 because companies where amassing lot of those things to set up some sort of DIY supercomputers.

It needs to be cheap.

However, when comparing to the power of locked up device such as ps5, it never hurts reminds that the supposed GPU processing power of a ps5 doesn’t come for free… even if you’ve fully paid your console. Aside for demos or jailbreaked devices (piracy on console) the only way to run graphics at full potential on the locked ps5 is paying full AAA (which now is settling around 80$/€) for EACH product. There are alternatives in the spending (ie: the Netflix alike from Sony’s store)… but those are only options that Sony allow you to (you can’t run weekly free games from EGS, itch.io… or even web browser games!).

Whatever power you pay for any generic PC potentially cover you in any way: you can play arcade vector games as Asteroid at 4k (or even teorical 32K when the hardware will exists).

The difference Valve could make is showing the topical console gamer customer an easy to use access to it: once they’ll see the light… things may go different also for console-only customers (Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo wouldn’t want to lose more customers to Valve’s better deal)

I doubt that the Steam Machine outperforms anything made in the last 5-10 years.

It’s all about the price… and the very recent years weren’t exactly kind in relation for price per performance

It’s mostly a poker game: you need to call with money to keep playing, otherwise you “fold” and they win… even if the winner got shitty (“no papers”) cards.