While I’m no fan of Epic Games for bribing companies to keep games off of Steam for a year or more, Valve’s market dominance in PC game sales isn’t a good thing for developers or consumers.

Not if the admins of an instance want to maintain their echo chamber by shepherding discussions towards extremist viewpoints.

Wanted to put Proton VPN on my Steam Deck, so it’s quite frustrating that even a distribution with millions of users doesn’t have a version of the program released for it, given that the alternative methods of using it don’t allow for easy server switching.

“We should instead impose a $6,000 annual tax penalty on childless cat ladies!” -J. D. Vance, probably /s

Because the cartel was letting everyone live in peace and harmony before the arrest?

In her place, Trump would be lauding how great he thinks the US-Israeli alliance is and commit twice as many resources to Israel in the process. Acting like Harris is anywhere near as bad as Trump on the issue of Palestine is either being grossly naive or intentionally deceitful, while not voting for her just because she isn’t pro-Palestine enough is counter productive when Trump is far less so.

I’d hardly count something like a simple Solitaire clone app that could be otherwise played for free as a full game release… In terms of actual games, I’d much rather support mobile ports that can be bought for a one time price tag than those that are locked behind a subscription in perpetuity.

The worst culprits though are the EAs and Paradoxes of the world that sell dozens of DLCs for games that cumulatively cost far more than the base game itself.

Unless he were also forced to divest all his shares in the company though, he’d still profit if the company’s stock price continued to grow after his departure. Not likely given how much sway his involvement seems to have on its value in the minds of Tesla shareholders, but still a possibility.

With the electoral college though, it’s especially important to get people from states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Georgia to vote for Biden instead of Trump.

We really need users like that on Lemmy to replicate the positive aspects of the Reddit community that are worth bringing over. Something original to here, hopefully.

Legislation like that might happen in places like the EU, but in the US at least, unless lobbying rules are amended, consumers stand next to no chance against the commercial interests of advertisers.

If you’re the one paying for internet access, you should also have the right to determine the content that you’re paying to have access to. While something like pi hole could be used to metaphorically take down most of the billboards without impacting the ground below it, even everyday users should be informed about the data advertisers are getting from them, whether it is anonymized or not. Hiding an important setting about data sharing near the bottom of a page in settings doesn’t help anyone but the advertisers.

The communist leader in Germany before Hitler took over said that failure of the nazi government would help convince people to vote for communism in the next election; he was subsequently killed in a concentration camp.

Admittedly I did need a guide at times for Quern too; I think the best compromise is what Cyan did for Firmament and just include an optional hint system in the game itself. By avoiding the need to consult walkthroughs, not only would excessive spoilers be avoided, but the experience would remain self-contained, something especially important for a VR game.

Something they didn’t fix for the Myst remake that the Myst-like Quern is much better at is not making puzzles so obscure as to essentially require a guide to complete the game. Was anything done about that problem for the Riven remake?

Given the economic imperialist policies Chinese Communist Party in South America and Africa, let alone the lack of democratic institutions when compared to Taiwan, the CCP’s interest in Taiwan has far less to do with ‘liberating’ it than taking control of its substantial economic base.

Good on the EU for supporting consumer rights over corporate profits.

While it would be great if the US weren’t unilaterally supporting the actions of the Israeli government, unfortunately a major shift from that foreign policy position would likely only receive substantial support from the people already likely to vote Democrat, or anti-Trump at the very least. It would likely be spun by media outlets that are either generally conservative or simply biased in favor of the Israel government in such a way that would push moderates towards Trump. As Trump would only increase the country’s support of the Israeli military, it’s more important to avoid him being elected to avoid a worse situation in the long run.

Just because it’s the norm doesn’t mean it’s not excessive. In contrast, Apple’s implementation of a 30% cut is even worse, since with an iPhone you can’t just install an app from another source (and even when you can in the case of the EU, there are recurring costs for doing so). Since Steam accounts for the majority of PC video game sales, with AAA titles only not releasing on it when they have a clear financial motive not to, Valve’s use of a price parity clause effectively makes it the arbiter of what the industry standard markup on PC should be.