• 4 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 5th, 2023

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  • Buses cost money to run, and rural upstate New York (just like a lot of rural areas that are car dependant) do not necessarily have the infrastructure to implement them. Which is exactly why I said shuttles, not buses.

    Public transit isn’t going to pop out of the ether to fix the problem so that we can just take away people’s personal property because they broke the law as if they no longer own it. Civil forfeiture is already a broken law without us making it worse for poor people while rich people continue to get a pass.

    They’ll buy new vehicles. You can legally purchase a car without a driver’s license in most states. You just have to have someone who can legally drive it off the lot of deliver it. Which is simple for a rich person, but not for a poor person.

    Like it could be if we were willing to spend the amount of money it would cost to build and upkeep that infrastructure. But that would also likely mean civil forfeiture of land. Because bus stops and side walks and depots don’t just show up because you want to take people’s cars away.

    The cost of all that, plus the cost of implementing the ability to store or sell these vehicles is going to be problematic and more costly than the proposal, which is more fair than the alternative because it treats people regardless of the economic situation the same.

    I don’t like the proposal, but I can certainly understand why it’s being proposed as a better way to fix the problem.


  • Is the plan to store these cars they’re seizing in your plan somewhere? To sell them?

    How much is the cost of seizing and storing a vehicle? How much is the cost of building a place to house these seized vehicles?

    Who pays that cost?

    Where is such a facility going to be built?

    Even if you did sell the vehicles, who gets the proceeds? What stops the person from suing the state or municipality for selling items that don’t belong to them?

    That’s even before we think about the economic impact of these people living in a very car dependant place where that vehicle makes the difference between being able to have access to food and transportation to get to work.

    Is the state going to provide shuttles to get these people groceries and to and from work? Who pays for that?

    I have a lot of questions about why you’d want it to be okay to seize the property of a person just because they broke the law.

    Police can and do already seize and sell assets whether you have committed a crime or not. Usually people want to end such overreach but now you’re all the sudden siding with the gestapo in order to seize people’s assets because you feel self righteous?

    The math doesn’t math on this.



  • Didn’t Ford’s CEO just say they wanted highschool graduates who could do math to be automotive techs making $120K a year?

    Plumbers already make ridiculous amounts of money because there aren’t enough of them.

    The median age in my field 5-10 years ago was 55 years old and we aren’t getting an influx of new A&P licensed techs still. The main way the Aviation industry gets it’s techs these days is the military and that’s not even a sure fire way.

    Like. CEO’s doing trades when? Because he’s clearly mistaken if he thinks that it’s not going to be CEO’s and upper management people who get their jobs replaced by AI.

    They keep trying to replace engineers, software devs and so on with AI at all the tech companies and then having to back out of that decision to keep things running.




  • From what I read, that $4BN number could be taken two ways. I don’t know if that analyst excluded the games Valve developed, and that $4BN is games sales of everything else, or if that’s what they made from their own titles. I didn’t want to go through the rigamarole of Xitter to see the direct quote and I haven’t had a chance to find it in the internet archive.

    I also kind of want a good run down of what steam offers to developers that makes their platform so attractive because my understanding is it’s more than just e-shop services and that’s one of the reasons I have seen touted as why people feel the service fee is reasonable.

    I didn’t want to leave you on read, but I also am still looking up all kinds of random information to put together.

    Also, my confusion is because there are two different lawsuits involving the 30% cut of game sales.

    There’s a class action lawsuit in the UK involving all of steams consumers there, predicated on the idea that the 30% service fee makes games more expensive to the detriment if those consumers.

    And there’s a different class action lawsuit brought by developers Wolfire and Dark Catt every developer who uses Steam as an E-Shop platform, also over the 30% service fee and alleged anti-competitve practices (Wolfire say that Steam told them they couldn’t sell their game anywhere else for less than it was available on Steam (even if they didn’t use steams license keys)).

    I know I can come off as really terse, and tone is hard via text anyway. But thank you for addressing it.

    Sorry about yet another wall of text.






  • I’m not reading the Google summary. There is no Google summary for me. That shit is deep sixed. I don’t want it. I love it when people automatically assume that I must be using Generative AI to get some silly answer off the internet.

    The fact is any game store front is a money printing machine mostly because of the rampant price fixing, hard to enter markets and abuse from those that hold the lion share of that market (Steam, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo).

    If so then Epic should have caught up by now, no?

    That money is being sucked out of the companies that are actually making games, and is leading to a reduction in quality, layoffs and bankruptcies.

    Please back that up. The game developers seeing bankruptcies are seeing them because of gross mismanagement and a never ending attempt to deliver crap that their consumers don’t want. Pushing the “bleeding edge” of graphics while making games that sell poorly because they want to charge $60-70 for a game even 5 years after it came out.

    And that’s with the proliferation of crap like in game micro transactions, season passes, DRM, and internet sanity checks to even play single player games.

    Indie developers are caught in the lurch, but that’s generally the case with any small business, and on top of that the regulation will probably harm them more than it will help them because the percentage of sales pays for things that they use to market their game.

    What is the limit on what store fronts can charge going to be? How much is too much? What does that 30% pay for? Do you know? Does it scale by user base?

    Would other store fronts who charge less be more successful by a meaningful amount if they were charging the same?

    It literally doesn’t matter where your products come from. I own more computer games on disc from physical stores than I do from steam. I have paid for more than one game on both steam, switch, PS4, or physical copy. I’m not trying to call Steam the good guy here.

    But I do not trust the developer who originally brought the lawsuit because even now most of the other devs who have games for sale on steam have not attempted to make a statement, join the class action, or even make a complaint about what is alleged.

    On top of that, why sue only steam if this is a problem. Nobody is suing Nintendo, PlayStation, or Microsoft over this.

    I also never said “steam shouldn’t change”, or that steam shouldn’t take a smaller cut.

    I feel like you scanned right over half of what I did say so you could be snotty in your response. You have a good day dude.


  • That’s false. They do not allow steam keys (free to generate steam licenses of games) to be sold cheaper anywhere else for less than the game is sold for on steam. And in exchange, the profits on those game licenses sold elsewhere the developer gets to keep 100% of.

    It is alleged by one developer that steam told them they can’t sell their game for less on other stores even if they use a different company to generate the license keys. But that hasn’t been proven. And since only 2 other developers are backing the new class action lawsuit out of literally thousands of devs who would be effected this way if it were true, it logically doesn’t make sense. The dev who brought the first lawsuit that go thrown out? Their game is still up on Steam.

    The fact is, Epic is making half the revenue Steam is with 11 times less market share, and not gaining market share because customers don’t want to use their store. Customers don’t want free games they want services that work.

    You’re alleging that Valve is doing something anti-competitive to maintain their market share here and you still haven’t given me what I asked for.

    What regulations are you expecting to be imposed, and how will that detrimentally or positively effect the consumers?



  • Why is Epic insignificant?

    They launched with a 12% service fee, dropped that service fee to 10%, and then dropped the service fee entirely for the first $1Mn in sales per year.

    In June 2025, they released a new feature enabling developers to launch their own webshops hosted by the Epic Games Store. These webshops could offer players out-of-app purchases, as a more “cost-effective” alternative to in-app purchases.

    They provide developers with free to generate license keys, and keyless integration with other e-shop stores including GOG, Humble Bundle, and Prime gaming.

    They offer a user review system.

    They also added cloud saves in July of 2025.

    The thing is, they offer none of the other features Steam offers:

    • In-Home Streaming
    • Remote Play with Friends
    • Family Accounts
    • Achievements
    • Price Adjusted Bundles
    • Gifting Games
    • Shopping Cart
    • TV/Big Screen Mode

    Epic launched their service in 2018. It’s been 7 years. The only reason not to offer feature parity (for a company that makes $4.6Bn - 5.7Bn in revenue, and a shop that makes $1.09Bn, you’d think they would be enticing users with the services they want.

    What they have done instead is exclusivity deals that plenty of consumers complain about but devs don’t seem to care about so long as they’re getting paid.

    So, the excuse that Steam got there first (as if it’s just about that and the reason their market share is what it is is because they have refined, adapted, and improved their service offering over time doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when steam has a significant percent of the market share (79.5% to epic’s 42.3%) but is only making twice the revenue of their rival store.

    It makes sense for GOG or Itch.io who’s market cap is smaller by quite a lot to not offer the same feature parity. Each of those platforms has figured out they can offer other things to devs and consumers to make themselves competitive over time.

    Sweeny’s attack is basically just a pitry party he’s throwing for himself because he doesn’t want to compete.



  • We lived with that because of the technology of the time and cost. An e +nk display of the equivalent size of a TV is gonna be expensive as fuck. And not do better than it’s traditional tv counterpart at video output for viewing. The other person mentioned monitors and those make sense because you’re generally using them for computer stuff which isn’t traditionally movies, television, or games. And if all you want to do is scroll the web and use it for spreadsheets, you’re fine there.

    But gamers aren’t going to buy an e-ink display for gaming. And generally people who want to watch TV and movies won’t either.

    I’d watch a movie on my phone before I tried it on e-ink.