IIRC, it’s actually based on donkeys, or something like that. Basically, this is just misleading marketing once again.

Another good example for Unity is Escape from Tarkov. Yes, EfT is a Unity game. It’s hard to believe.

Yeah, I would say the way to make this work would be that you have to promise that it doesn’t use AI tools. If there’s evidence, beyond a reasonable doubt, that you did, then you lose all copyright, from the past and future. Everything you’ve made becomes public domain.

Yeah… no. That was VE day only. Also, Hitler dying did not end the war. An agreement still had to be made. WWII ended with the surrender of Japan. Some soldiers were actually fighting for many years after, but still, the average one didn’t get the news until after it was done.

Meanwhile, WWI fighting ended with an armistice which, while not a full peace agreement, is a declaration to end hostilities. This did happen in a day also. That wasn’t a temporary ceasefire leading into it.

Again, I’d wager this is how the majority of wars end, especially when communication was slow. The ceasefire seems like mostly a modern thing from my understanding. It’s only really possible with instant communication.

Actually, often, yes. For example, there were people fighting and dying “in WWII” after a peace agreement had been signed. They didn’t stop for a ceasefire and then negotiate a peace agreement. I would wager this is the norm, rather than a ceasefire while peace is agreed to.

The last bit was there to say there’s no reason for this to be a question, except for people who hold that opinion. I agree, it doesn’t really make sense. I would mostly group them in with the bigots.

Yeah, dark in the same meaning as “the dark ages.” It’s referring to a lack of knowledge, not a lack of light. Both these terms have fallen out of favor though.

Well, it is a pretty poor indirect source. Just like the moon lighting things at night by reflecting the sun, Earth does the same.

I find this is a weird question. Everyone is going to be different. If the person is straight, then obviously they’re going to be more attracted to someone who presents on the feminine side. It’s all personal preference though.

As a straight man, I prefer my women to be more towards the tomboy side of things usually. I like really feminine looking women too, but I find the ones I’m most attracted towards look feminine but present more towards the masculine side.

Obviously all these terms are made up though. I would say anyone who isn’t a bigot would date a non-binary person if they match what they want. Genitals are obviously part of this, but presentation is made up. Your presentation just has to be something they like. If they like it then tbey like it. It shouldn’t be more complex than that. Someone being non-binary has nothing to do with that.

All this said, personality is obviously important. Someone can be attracted to you and not like your personality. I guess someone could not like the personality of people who are non-binary?

I’m not expecting a business to always act in the best interest of everyone, that is just completely unreasonable. I’m not even expecting individual people to always act in the best interest of anyone but themselves.

Clearly you aren’t doing the last bit, though you should. If you’re excusing Valve, for acting in their best interest, you should at least have the backbone to ask for your own best interest. You’re giving them your money. Demand the best outcome possible for yourself. Either that’s cheaper games (if they just decrease price by 10% but still take 20% of what they currently do, you save money) or better outcomes for developers, which means more games, and niche games that can afford to make fewer sales.

And the fact that valve has never raised prices…

Steam is a marketplace. They don’t set the prices. They provide a place for games to sell their product at whatever price they want. There are plenty of $70 games, and quite a few much higher than that. What are you even talking about?

never tried to shaft anyone and in general never attempted to extort their presumed “monopoly”…

But they have. You aren’t allowed to sell your game cheaper someone else. If you want to distribute on your own website and sell on Steam, you have to charge the same price, even though you could sell for ~30% less and get the same amount of money. You essentially have to sell on Steam though, or you get far fewer eyeballs. There are also other ways they’ve extorted their market control.

Maybe you heard of don vultaggio, the founder and CEO of arizona ice tea…You’re not going to see me ask him to lower the price because clearly he “can afford it” (his net worth is 6 billion. Not quite gabe, but still extraordinarily wealthy). The man is doing everything I can reasonably expect from a business: Not squeeze consumers, not treat staff shitty and not worsen their product for profit. Valve is doing the same thing, just on a much much larger scale.

Yeah, these aren’t even remotely similar. His tea is priced incredibly low for the market. Yes, he makes a lot of money, but it’s through volume of sale. Their margins aren’t that large. Steam has insane margins. The operating cost of the server infrastructure is pretty cheap (we can’t have specific numbers, as they’re private, but servers aren’t expensive). Their margins are absolutely ridiculous and they have high volume. If we’re going to make the comparison of these totally different markets (selling a product VS providing a service), Valve is incredibly greedy. If you like what Arazona Tea does, you should be asking for far lower margins from Valve.

I just think that, in a realistic world view, while your intentions may be good, your expectations are unreasonable.

Consumers should demand absolutely everything for what they purchase. Expecting to get everything you ask for is not expected, but you won’t even ask. If you actually have this capitalist mindset, where we shouldn’t be asking them to do good, then we should ask them to do whatever we want as consumers. Without us they’re nothing. Demand that they do better. It’s your money.

I very clearly do. Them giving away a bunch of money that isn’t required has nothing to do with their distribution service not making a profit. Valve doesn’t do this, so it obviously is not required to run a games distribution service. That’s the part that’s subsidized by Fortnite, not the distribution. The distribution is pretty cheap. All it requires is having servers that can store the files and an internet connection.

Again, there isn’t a choice (for developers).

There’s plenty of choice. You can choose not to sell your game on steam, put it on the EGS exclusively and accept that you’re never going to reach the audience you’d do with steam. Now you just gotta figure out if the lesser sales at 12% are more profitable than the more sales at 30%.

Yeah, it won’t be more profitable. It isn’t a choice. There is a small choice for some games of distributing it yourself. This is incredibly cheap (which proves Valve’s profit margin is insane), but 99% of players won’t leave Steam. This means it isn’t a choice for all but a few niche games. Starsector, for example, distributes it on their own, so they get a 100% cut. The players who want to play that are generally more intelligent and can get it off of Steam. For something like CoD, that’s marketed towards mass appeal go the absolute minimum of technological literacy, you have to be on Steam. There isn’t a choice.

You make defending sound like I’m a company white-knight that’ll defend a company from any wrongdoing ever, which simply isn’t the case. Valve does some shitty things and I have called them out for it. I just don’t think the 30% cut is bad in any capacity.

You’ve already agreed it’s worse than it being lower. You don’t think it’s bad enough to be upset over, but you agree it’s worse than it could be. That’s the difference. I won’t stop at “better than it could be.” I’ll always argue for more from a company, and you should too.

I’m not defending them. I’m saying that a service has to be financially successful…

No, the comment above brought up the stupid argument to defend them. You implying they need to to remain solvent is defending them too. How many yachts does Gaben have? How generously are the employees paid? Clearly they’re making more than enough money with 30%. Where that number would need to be to not make a profit is unknown, but it’s certainly far lower. You can understand this, right?

But the value they are providing is just worth a great deal to devs and I just don’t think that giving up 30% of your sales is a bad deal for handling the entire distribution.

I said this already, but this is assuming the sales wouldn’t happen if Steam didn’t exist. I doubt it. The sales numbers would be approximately the same, provided by someone else. They just have almost full market domination, so you don’t have a choice but to sell on Steam. It isn’t because it’s so great for the developers. It’s because they don’t have a choice.

I’ve worked in E-Commerce for over 10 years now and 30% is like the standard fee for this kind of stuff - in many industries, the fees are way higher.

“Thats just the way things are” isn’t an argument. “Slavery is just the way we do things! You can’t say it’s bad! We wouldn’t make a profit otherwise!” Not a good argument, right?

So, COULD they charge less? Very likely. But I don’t really see why.

To help developers. It seems like you’re purely capitalism brained. My argument was that it’d be better for developers. I didn’t say they’d make more profit. There’s a lot of bad things you can do to make more money. It doesn’t mean you should. It’d be good for the industry if they charged less. It’d allow smaller studios to make a profit for more niche games.

The service they provide is just worth that much.

Again, there isn’t a choice (for developers). It makes it worth it in the same way it’s worth it to hand over my wallet when someone points a gun to my head. It doesn’t mean it’s the best outcome for the developer if other options were equally viable.

Afaik, theyl aid off people across the entire company. The reason was a reduction in fortnite money, but the layoffs were even across the UE development teams.

IIRC, no. It was Fortnite specific.

And yes, you can also criticize the 30% cut. That’s your right. However, I’m just not agreeing with that stance. That isn’t defending a company, even tho you’re trying to frame it as such.

What do you define “defending” as? You’re making arguments supporting the behavior. Who in the world wouldn’t define that as defence? I’m not framing it as defence. It just is.

Remember how they just laid off 1000 employees?

Again, that was from the Fortnite team. It’s like if Valve laid off people working on DOTA, it doesn’t mean the storefront is doing poorly.

Also, ever notice how nobody was complaining about Steam’s cut before that?

Yeah… you weren’t paying attention then. People have been complaining about it before their storefront existed. This has been discussed a lot. Steam actually doesn’t take 30%. That’s the default. Big games, despite making more money, actually pay less, as dumb as that sounds.

Or the fact that much of the 30% cut is getting reinvested into Linux and FOSS to keep PC gaming an open ecosystem…

Citation needed. Some is. How much is going towards Gaben’s several yachts?

Them giving away a ton of money does not mean the distribution alone isn’t profitable.

They both lie. That’s an insane take to think that (I assume) Iran doesn’t lie. There are no governments that don’t lie. Hell, there are no people who don’t lie. If you can’t see what motivation either party would have to lie here than you’re really out of touch with reality.

Only if we assume a sale not made on Steam is a sale lost. If Steam didn’t get the sale and the purchase was made somewhere with a higher return instead, the dev would make more from the sale. Odds are, if Valve didn’t have almost full market control, people would still buy games, they’d just buy them somewhere else.

Ultimately the EGS has shown 12% is not profitable…

Citation needed. They’re still operating, while paying games for exclusivity, and giving away games for free (at their own cost). Sure, a lot of this is likely funded by Fortnite, but to say it isn’t profitable when they’re giving away this much money is a big claim. Also, Valve would be significantly more profitable at the same rate, because they have almost total market capture. Even if Epic isn’t profitable (I’ve seen no evidence of this) we can’t extrapolate to say Vlave wouldn’t be.

This is why I don’t get why adults play Pokémon. Even as a young child playing the original Pokémon, without any guides or any other resources, I was able to trivially make a party where I didn’t have to think. I just spam one move and win. I know you can optimize the hell out of the games, but there’s zero need to outside multiplayer. I thought the games were really fun as a child, partially because of a lack of options and partially because it’s made for children. I know people in their 30s who still play them when they release though. It’s so confusing to me.

There’s a lot of types of sex. Every one of them has a name. Even the “default” of PIV sex has a name.