I never thought the words “the supreme court agrees to weigh in” would ever fill me with a sense of existential dread and despair but… Here we are. Yay.
I never thought the words “the supreme court agrees to weigh in” would ever fill me with a sense of existential dread and despair but… Here we are. Yay.
It was seven years ago. Unless he was talking to a ten year old, they’re not a minor anymore.
I would highly highly doubt it. He’s just the “science man” of memes so he’s used as a stand in for all scientists, or at least science communicators.
There’s a word for alternative medicine that works. It’s “medicine”.
I forget the attribution.
We can argue all day over when steam “got popular”. For me, I’d consider the launch of HL2 to be the most reasonable point in time to choose.
I think I just have responded to the wrong comment. My bad.
That’s a valid opinion. It’s not one I share but if you preferred that situation then that’s fine. I feel pretty confident saying you are in a pretty small minority though.
-edit I just realized what you said and if it’s true that you did most of your pc gaming before steam got popular, you may be out of your depth in this conversation. It’s been like 20 years. If you did most of your pc gaming more than 20 years ago, I don’t see how your opinion is informed at all.
No, the problem steam was originally created to solve was distributing updates for pc games. Before steam getting updates meant visiting shitty dev websites or ad farms that also hosted update files and manually patching your game.
It was awful.
Again, you are very naive. What you’re describe is cost-up pricing which hasn’t been a generally used method of pricing goods and services for decades at this point. The reason is that doing cost-up pricing is a really good way to go out of business.
The way pricing works today is that sellers set pricing based on what they believe the customer is willing to pay. From there you work backwards accounting for retailer margin, cost of goods, transport, discounts, etc… To find your maximum cost per unit. If you can’t produce the product for less than the maximum cost, you either need to scale back your features, add a feature that would justify a higher sell price, or abandon the project.
Your notion that companies would lower prices if they had to give retailers a small cut is not borne out by theory or by observed real world outcomes.
You’re wrong. Doubling down won’t make you less wrong.
Bullshit. Games on steam that hit sales thresholds pay less to steam and the prices remain the same. Games on EGS only pay 12% and prices haven’t dropped.
Reality does not comport with your argument at all.
I’ve been in product development and management for 10+ years. I know how pricing decisions are made. You’re very naive.
Literally all pricing is set by the devs and publishers. The guy you’re responding to has no idea what he’s talking about. The Steam store terms of service are public and easily available to read through. I know, I’ve done it. The only pricing requirement they have is keys sold off store can’t be significantly discounted under the store price. That’s it.
Valve doesn’t set the prices for any of the products you buy through their store. The game developers and publishers do.
The exception is valve developed games which are mostly free to play and make money on useless cosmetics. Most of their successful games are built on mods that are only possible because valve takes the very consumer friendly position of supporting and encouraging modding of their games.
Hell, they even allow and promote fan made remakes like Black Mesa and unofficial sequels.
If valve is a monopoly, it’s only because they’re the only corporation in the pc gaming space (OK maybe include gog too) that respects their customers. They’re not perfect but they’re orders of magnitude better than the competition.
You misread it. It was pretty clear, but you managed it.
People that watch the news favor Biden by 10pts. It’s people that get their info from social media and YouTube that favor Trump overwhelmingly.
The algorithm promotes attention seeking behavior and Trump is the god king of attention seeking.
The vote I cast in 2020 was against trump and not for Biden. I feel pretty good about that decision considering what happened afterwards. I’ll vote against Trump again as many times as it takes.
Also the fact that one bad year in your tiny part of the world means you and everyone you know die slow agonizing deaths. Fun!
The last season was fine. I won’t go as far as to say it was great, it wasn’t, but it was fine.
90% of the commentators that I see saying the last season sucked completely misunderstood what actually happened. And that’s the shows fault, to be clear,at least to some degree.
Software development is so fucking weird. If one bad (or even just mediocre!) product can ruin an entire company… The problems are way deeper than that one bad product.
A preference cascade by consumers leading to a death spiral.
Watch for tesla to spin off the vehicle business soon and refocus on batteries / energy going forward.
The richest people in the world aren’t on the richest people in the world list because they own entire countries. Putin is probably the richest single person in the world. Kim Jong Un is up there too.
If you can have literally anything you want within your own borders that’s a lot more than having shares in some company that could lose value overnight.