GOG being pushed out of the market. They’re one of the only stores that actually give you ownership of your games, and they don’t have the same indomitable foothold that Steam does.

It would be all too easy for Microsoft to strangle one of their key markets by taking a loss on sales and offering publishers 150% sales price in exchange for exclusive distribution of 90s and 2000s era PC games or console ports.

Steam will end up pushed out of the market

This has been explicitly attempted 3 times already, and that really didn’t work out well for anybody who tried it.

Epic Games Store still resorts to bribing people with free games to keep their monthly active user numbers up, hemorrhaging money to attract users who are rarely interested in anything more than freebies.

EA and Ubisoft tried to forgo Steam releases in favor of their own stores and launchers in an attempt to keep 100% of the revenue. They eventually relented, releasing their games on Steam again. Even Blizzard joined in, adding Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 to Steam.

And Microsoft’s attempt to dethrone Steam by releasing games through the Windows app store just ended up with Valve funneling considerable resources into helping Linux and WINE become a viable alternative to Windows for gaming.

Unless Valve enshittifies or legal shenanigans ensue, they’re pretty unlikely to be pushed out of the market. No single game or game series is good enough to capture the entire market of Steam users and permanently drive them to alternative platforms. On top of that, Steam has a huge following of users who are loyal to the company, which is both insane and insanely hard to compete against.

or they will also become Streaming Platforms

Maybe, maybe not. I don’t see it happening, though. Valve makes money hand over fist from digital sales alone, and they have more to lose in pissing off their customers by selling subscriptions than they have to gain by selling subscriptions.

I am concerned about GOG and PC hardware prices, though.

https://amiunique.org/fingerprint

std::string doesn’t have a template type for the allocator. You are stuck using the verbose basic_string type if you need a special allocator.

But, of course, nobody sane would write that by hand every time. They would use a typedef, like how std::string is just a typedef for std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char>>. Regardless, the C++ standard library is insanely verbose when you start dropping down into template types and using features at an intermediate level. SFINAE in older versions of C++ was mindfuck on the best of days, for example.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not saying Rust is much better. Its saving grace is its type inference in let expressions. Without it, chaining functional operations on iterators would be an unfathomable hellscape of Collect<Skip<Map<vec::Iter<Item = &'a str>>>>

TypeScript […] only adds syntax, and doesn’t re-write it.

I believe enum, const enum, and decorators would like to have a word with you.

Swift also uses backticks and Rust has a dumb one in the form of r#thekeyword. Still much better than introducing a async as a new keyword in a minor version of a language and breaking a bunch of libraries.

Rust is verbose, but C++ might still take the cake with its standard library templates. Especially when using fully-qualified type names…

auto a = ::std::make_shared<::std::basic_string<char, ::std::char_traits<char>, MyAllocator<char>>>();

A reference-counted shared pointer to a string of unspecified character encoding and using a non-default memory allocator.

What’s next, leaded gas?

Actually, probably. It’s a good way to make people grow up dumber and more irrational, and that’s basically the target demographic of their party.

This means either them or more junior developers will be brought in as glorified prompt engineers.

Oh, sweet summer child. It’s not going to be junior developers; they still have self-worth. An un(der)paid intern or outsourced contractors, however? They’re fine working for scraps and no health insurance.

To be fair to Ubisoft, the newest Prince of Persia game was a great metroidvania game.

To be fair-er to Ubisoft, they can go fuck themselves for closing down the studio that made said game only a few months later.

They can make good games. They just clearly would rather rehash the same tired formula that they’ve been running with for the past decade while unreasonably expecting to make more money each time.

Ok, now suppose you want to release a game for any of the modern Nintendo consoles.

You need to get a devkit. To get it, you need Nintendo to approve your request, and you need to pay them for a license to use the devkit hardware. And, to actually use the devkit, you need a PC running Windows.

Sure, to develop a game for PC, you need a PC. But do you know what you don’t need on top of that? A devkit and a Windows license.

Edit: Two downvotes in two minutes? Oh my, the sockpuppets are angry today.

I think we should be subsidizing people’s poor reading comprehension.

Why should the poor subsidize their income with our labor?

the poor … our = us
their = the rich

This commenter was asking for someone to try and justify why we (the working class) should have our labor contribute to the income of people whose existence is based on exploiting others. A perfectly reasonable question.

It baffles me that pundits, researchers, political leaders and such ponder what’s going wrong when they walk to work and see every single human being doomscrolling this trash away, all while the companies hosting it become the richest on Earth.

One of those is not like the others. As long as lobbying and kickbacks are legal or no worse than a slap on the wrist, politicians are more than happy to be paid to not wonder or care why. Heck, some of them probably welcome it—the algorithms helped them get elected.

One instance? There’s at least two. But does that really matter? Reddit had r/TheDonald and r/conservative, and trying to get those people to fuck off and stop proselytizing elsewhere was like trying to play whack-a-mole against an anthill.

Here, you block the tankie instances and move on with your life.

Might be. It is definitely a thing, though.

When I used to work for a large American corporation that sold products to consumers, they took it extremely seriously and breaking it would result in disciplinary action. It probably had something to do with advertisement laws, but it also easily could have just been because it makes the company look very bad.

one place even asked people to write fake reviews on Trustpilot/job sites

That sounds unethical, to say the least. Did they verify if you actually did it, or just “suggest” you do?

Corporations drill it deep into your head that you do not positively promote your own products or negatively review competitor products without both making it clear that you (1) work for $Corp; and (2) are sharing your own, personal opinion.

Giving the benefit of the doubt to Plex, they suck at training employees about social media policies.

I’m totally sure it was an accident. I’m sure we’ve all made the mistake of opening Шет_Рцссу.mp4.exe after receiving it as an email attachment from Elmo. /s

Joke aside, that’s some pretty impressive incompetence. Not once. Not twice. Multiple times. The guy ran infostealer malware multiple times over the course of multiple years.

That’s not fair. Starlink is more than just a private enterprise—it’s a Russian intelligence gathering mechanism.

Buddy, quit while you’re ahead not too far behind. You’re just proving what @Tattorack@lemmy.world said: you don’t understand the difference between patents, copyright, and trademarks.