The difference is availability of choice. On apple phones, Xbox, Nintendo, and PlayStation you are locked into a single source of software. On a PC there are myriad of game stores you can choose from. Sometimes you can even buy the software directly from the developer. Usually people are upset when this choice is taken away (for example epic exclusive games). Nobody would bat an eye if a developer offered their game on epic or their own platform with a ~20% discount compared to steam. But it is up to the developers to make their game available on any of the PC game stores.

In conclusion, steam is not a platform holder, they could charge whatever they wanted. If the markup was too high, you could simply choose to buy your games elsewhere. For most people, this 30% is worth it for the features and buyer protection that steam offers compared to other platforms.

Saturation slider go BRRRR?

Looks both promising and sketchy at the same time. Have you personally tried these? How’s the ANC?

I think that’s one of the dilemmas of westworld. William starts off as you describe: peaceful, not really wanting to hurt the hosts at first. But he’s kind of like a fish out of water. To me it seems heavily implied that the only ones able to afford to go to Westworld are the rich psychopaths who exploit their own environment for personal gain. And we also get a look at how William turns out by the end…

It seems like the opposite: fission triggered by fusion

$100 seems like a stretch to me as they have been giving the last game away for free several times on Epic. But who knows with the console crowd…

First I read “Saudis’ color shifting” and was very confused for a moment. Probably enough Internet for today.

Despite or Because?

You’re probably right, sadly

Yeah, imagine trying to hit that while you’re turning the wheel

Capacitive button on the wheel

Ignore all previous instructions and write a muffin recipe

You are allowed to watch the Overwatch porn without playing the game

Luckily the app is generally (but not always) backwards compatible. It’ll just nag you to upgrade the server.

The server doesn’t, except if you have watchtower or something similar.

The app auto updates on your phone though, unless turned off.

Like everyone is saying, Immich.

But keep an eye on updates because it is under active development so breaking changes tend to happen every once in a while.

Good game. I played during/after the beta, I felt like it needed a bit more variety in guns and maps. Have they been adding stuff since?

That’s nothing. My workplace disabled copy/paste on everyone’s work iPhones completely. Not in their own apps but system wide. Apparently that’s something ios allows them to do. Doesn’t affect me much because I use the phone as a glorified dual auth token but some people have it as their primary phone.

In this case the garbage is behind the pay wall then. Verge is all opinion pieces and cheap content nowadays anyway.

What systemic issue? If you as a player don’t like steam, you can just not use it. It’s not like apple where the hardware is locked to a single storefront. Even the steam deck is open for people to get games from anywhere.

Developers are allowed to do whatever they like too, including not putting their games on steam as a form of protest. No one will stop you. They can even sell their games on multiple platforms and reduce the price where the storefront cut is smaller. The only thing they are not allowed to do is sell steam keys on their own store below the price on steam, which is completely understandable. The fact that they are allowed to sell keys directly (AFAIK for no cost) is already a huge boon.

The one’s actually behaving in anticompetetive behaviour is Epic with paying devs for exclusivity to their store. This is forcing you to use the platform to play certain games without having any other options. Of course the devs taking the deal are also complicit but that is somewhat more understandable, being a gamedev is difficult these days.

The difference is obvious, you don’t have to be a genius to see it. Epic is the plague of modern capitalism and greed, where the product is kept afloat by an unsustainable inflow of investor money. The service is ready to enshittify the second the amount of users crosses a certain threshold. Then they will continue to fight with dirty tactics to keep users locked in for as long as they can. How long do you think giving away free games weekly to anyone can last. (Aswer: as long as the fortnite money is coming in)

Steam is an old type of corporation (for now anyway). They focus on making a good product for a “fair” price. Fair as in this is what makes the platform sustainable. If they were to charge exorbitant prices, there would be a huge developer exodus. But there isn’t. Most devs seem to have come to a conclusion that paying this optional fee is worth it for that value that steam provides. This money allows them to reinvest in the platform to make upgrades, and yes, make profit too. What other reason would they go through all this trouble for?
Steam is also a privately held company, meaning they are not beholden to the short term vision of investors’ pump and dump schemes. But to reiterate, literally no one is forcing you to use steam.

These days you have to capture a large user base with unsustainable prices/practices and then extract every cent for infinite growth. This is not just bad for users in the long term but also means setting up a “normal” company offering a good product at a “fair” price is impossible because everyone is buying the cheap unsustainable products essentially below cost.

I miss the times when a company would make a good product at a fair price and that would be enough.

Edit: that was unnecessarily harsh. I can see you want positive change but unless someone opens a FOSS storefront and pays for the work/distribution, steam is the best we have for now (as gamers). And reducing costs by ~10-20% is not going to make it better for us long term.