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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • But the store piece is the only problem.

    For community, there’s tons of different communities for every game and Steam is usually one of the least active anyways.

    For mods, as far as I know there’s no exclusivity there. In fact, it’s kind of a pain to mod Bethesda games because they don’t go through Steam. It’s similar to DLC in that it’s just a better experience to have mod support included in the launcher.

    For the launcher, that seems like once again a huge blow to consumers to have a separate steam store vs steam launcher. You can already add non-Steam games to the steam launcher or launch games without the steam launcher.

    The problems identified in the article, and what they are getting sued for, are solely related to the store. So I don’t see how breaking out these supplemental features would solve that.



  • Break them up… How?

    You can split off business units like their hardware sales or dev studios, but that isn’t going to reduce their storefront market share at all.

    Are you suggesting that they just split users up randomly? That would be probably worse for consumers- suddenly the friends and communities people have built up through Steam would be fractured, and users would look to find ways to get around it.

    Split up by what publishers they have deals with? Well then those new companies would only be indirect competitors, not to mention that would also be worse for consumers as I’d have to suddenly make a new account with each new platform just to keep accessing my current library.

    Like… How do you want to split them up in a way that doesn’t hurt consumers and publishers more than it helps?


  • So what solution do you propose then?

    Ideally I’d like to see media distribution be nationalized. Video streaming, audio streaming, videogames, e-books. There have been multiple cases of companies selling digital goods, then ceasing to provide those with consumers left holding the bag. Multiplayer games whose servers are gone. Movies “purchased” on Amazon that become unavailable when their agreement with the publisher expires. I am concerned about what Valve will look like when they inevitably get new leadership.

    But I suffer no delusion that nationalizing that is realistic. Certainly not in the US where I live, where even libraries are under attack from conservatives. I’m doubtful that would happen anywhere else either. So what’s the next-best thing?

    Seems to me like the capitalist response would be to try to encourage competition. A lot of companies have tried and failed, so I’m not sure what else can be done on that front.



  • Monopolies are often great for consumers… When they’re nationalized. Obviously that’s not going to happen with Valve any time soon.

    What would the benefit be to breaking up Valve? How would you even go about doing that? The obvious choice is to break out different business units- break things like the hardware sales and game development into separate companies. But that still doesn’t address the issue of them having too much market share for software sales.

    The next beat thing I can think of would be to have some sort of regulatory body just to place restrictions on the industry. Which, of course, would vary from country to country, and would probably have to include all of their competitors: Epic, GoG, and the various publisher-specific stores, maybe even other storefronts like Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Google, and Apple. It would be hard not to also hit the mobile games industry too (which, to be fair, might be a good thing). But this kind of thing is usually reserved for things like utilities, communications, financial markets, etc. Such an organization for a luxury recreationak market… I have to wonder how much political appetite there really would be for that? Is that really what people want their governments to be focusing on?

    Do you have a better solution to propose?


  • Just looking through my HLTB at things I’ve done recently:

    The Ace Attorney series Sucker for Love Coffee Talk Haven (good for co-op)

    If you want a bit more gameplay, but still chill:

    Paradise Killer Braid Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

    More gameplay focused:

    Control Portal Wargroove Cat Quest Knack (I know it’s a meme, but the games are actually pretty fun)


  • Gomes then sued, alleging absentee ballot mishandling and supplying video footage showcasing Geter-Pataky, a member of the Democratic Town Committee, repeatedly dropping absentee ballots into drop boxes or handing them to others, who then did the same.

    If I’m interpreting this correctly, it sounds like a couple of election officials just put absentee ballots in with regular ballots instead of… I assume they should have been set aside for vetting? The article doesn’t say what should have happened. The article doesn’t really go into the impact- seems like they just really, REALLY wanted to print a headline about Democrats meddling in the elections process.

    When I think of “stuffing” I think of people creating wholly illegitimate ballots, which does not seem to be what happened here.

    Also worth noting that this was for the Democratic primary for a mayoral position in 2019, and some of that info probably should have been in the headline.






  • Is that a sourced quote from Biden or the administration, or are you just making up a quote to get mad at?

    There’s plenty of room to criticize Biden for his actual actions in the Israel-Palestine conflict. No need to make shit up.

    In fact, the only reason I could think to do so would be if you were his political opponent. Like, hypothetically speaking, if I were a conservative on the Internet trying to undermine Biden’s support and also draw attention away from the fact that it’s Republicans in the House doing this, I might (hypothetically) post this article with a purposefully vague headline and a picture of Biden on the Internet. Seems doing something like that would serve GOP goals rather nicely, wouldn’t it?


  • Do you mean Scarlet and Violet? I largely agree, but the Blueberry Academy DLC was pretty good. It is set in Unova with a lot of Gen V pokemon added and references to those games.

    In general, I’d say that the SV main game is one of the worse ones, but the post-game is among the best.

    Gen 5 is still the best though.