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Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe basic question is whether the 30% cut generates windfall profits. If it does, then lawsuits that successfully reduce that cut will leave Valve in place but reduce costs for the consumer.

It most definitely will not. It's not a "tax" that gets added on top of the game price like Tim Sweeney would want you to think. And developers/publishers won't lower their prices because why would they pass up extra revenue ?

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i swear by this distro after mostly using endeavour for years. i still like eos, but I lean toward installing cachy on everything from now on

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: wit_as_a_riddleCopyright law is very outdated for current technology.

So is capitalism. But if we're going to insist on capitalism, then within that framework I'm not sure what's going to stop anyone who creates anything from starving without copyright. We can fix copyright if we fix the overall system it's in.

For me, the strongest case for sticking with markets is the historic drop in extreme poverty: from high 60s–80% globally in the 1970s down to under 9% today. That's real progress in human well-being that I'd hate to reverse. I find inequality to be irrelevant when compared to the absolute gains in living standards — health, longevity, basics — people have realized. That just matters a lot more than relative gaps or resentment toward the ultra-wealthy. We can tackle the flaws (like price fixing) without abandoning what’s lifted so many.

I don't worry about creative people, creators adapt, they'll find creative ways to sustain themselves. Direct fan support models like Patreon or similar patronage systems and the massive access to consumers that is the internet will continue paying more and more artists. Not saying that's the end-all and be-all, just an example of artist prosperity not reliant on copyright - and a reason I don't worry about what will become of artists amidst the rise of generative AI.

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and I was just beginning to build a library on their platform. Not purchasing from them again they hard pivot away from this sort of slop.

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Quoting: CaldathrasAnd I've been holding off on 580.126.09 because someone here mentioned problems with XFCE.

Do you happen to have any more info on this? I'm running LXQT, which uses Xfwm, and I've also avoided the last couple of updates because of general weirdness.

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Quoting: wit_as_a_riddleI'm sure there were people complaining about the jobs of sled makers when the wheel was invented - ultimately fruitless.

There were math teachers protesting against introducing the newly invented calculators in school classes, because apparently not doing math with paper and pencil makes you dumb.

I am the last person to adopt every change without questioning it, and not every change is progress. But I will never understand their desire to fight literally ANY change, until they have no other choice left.

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I find the moral indignation over what others do with their own hard earned money to be performative. Good luck with that authoritarian desire to control the choices of others, maybe you can bring bureaucracy in to regulate, spend some of your taxes on that. I'm sure there were people complaining about the jobs of sled makers when the wheel was invented - ultimately fruitless.

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Quoting: hell0

Quoting: KimyrielleMy feelings on that are clear: As long as people find it acceptable to use AI for coding (and they seem to), it must be okay to use it for everything else, too.

The biggest difference with coding is that AI is rarely used to generate the end product. It's used for snippets or a starting point and then people iterate on it.

The code is in the end product, too. And we have moved past snippets a while ago. Yes, you have to review AI generated code. You have to do the same with AI generated art.

People try to find any imaginable way rationalize why they defend artists against AI, but not coders. But in the end, it's the same thing, no matter how hard people to try to argue it's not.

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I'm still going to keep buying games on GOG because the anti-DRM stance is more important than 'oh, they used an AI-generated image' (we don't even know whether the model used is an ethically trained model or not) or 'oh, their launcher doesn't run on GNU/Linux' (you can just download the game from the website and there's Lutris and Heroic and Minigalaxy). I also buy games on Steam and Itch because I know any and all of those bastards will stab me in the back when the mood takes them (and seriously, fuck Valve, fuck GOG, and double fuck Itch for stiffing the fucking devs out of the money their fans pay).

Is AI bad? Well, Adobe Firefly is apparently trained on specifically licensed content where Adobe paid the creators for making the materials the model was trained on, there's also Vaisual and Tess and Mitsua and gods know what else. Maybe whoever provided the banner art for GOG used one of those? But no, AI = bad, so let's not use our brains and just condemn; that's always worked out best.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy. . . There are things that still use OpenGL?

Lots? Outside the API translation layers, Vulkan is not popular at all. It's orders of magnitude harder to use than OpenGL.

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"Chinese company from veeery different culture and time zone... They definitely misunderstand something in our Western, over-complicated world..."

Oh, God, people! Don't be so naive! They "poor Chinese people" are clever enough to know what is Bazzite... They are clever enough to use it as advert of their product. And yet, they ignored Bazzite officials comments...

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As long as no one is being defrauded or physically assaulted, "There Is No Such Thing As Bad Publicity." So, a high-spirited verbal match is likely only to lead to more people finding out that Bazzite is the gaming phenomenon that they'd never otherwise have heard about.

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They could have simply paid one of the million starving contract artists on Fiver or whatever forums 20 bucks to get a cool banner. It's insane they chose not to.

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That melting SNES is truly a work of art 🤮

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FeelsMeltingNESMan

But honestly, I barely ever look at those banners, so I guess I can at least understand why they'd use AI art there of all places.
Put something there? Yes.
Spend actual money on real people for something practically no-one will even look at? No.

But then... why have any art there in the first place? Just have text. Or stock art.

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Quoting: Cley_FayeIf someone felt they needed an image to describe their sale, they should have put some effort into it. Just look at how Steam handled this. People are still attached to a random sales mascot character way after it ended.

Background art for Autumn Sale 2024 is still masterful.

I am totally invested in this girl and her cat just out there delivering video games by scooter. What will they be up to next? Where will they go? 😃

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Quoting: KoopaSeems their proprietary driver is quite prone to vulnerabilities, glad I am red team.

Mesa also has its fair share of security fixes across different releases, this isn't unique to NVIDIA.

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Seems their proprietary driver is quite prone to vulnerabilities, glad I am red team.

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Quoting: CaldathrasThe "you can back up your Steam games after they're installed" argument is spurious at best. It overlooks the fact that the game still requires the Steam client to install those games in first place.

It doesn't, you can download the game with steamcmd. It only requires a steam account, just like it requires a gog account to download the game.

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamCMD#Downloading_an_App

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To be honest, I wouldn't notice. I am not really into searching every single image on the internet if it's AI generated or not (unless it's obvious).

As for the art: at this point with complaints about AI slop everywhere, I care less and less about that. Stress and anger does no good to me.

It's not cool that they use it in that way, sure, it's hard to agree that it's a good thing, but I'm not going to either condemn or praise them for that anymore.

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OK, aside from me not liking AI (and no, I'm not a fan in programming either), there's a basic stupidity here if GOG in particular does it. It's against their brand.

Look, GOG is Good Old Games. They're the store that's all about nostalgia for things like the games of yesteryear and your ability to own them like you did back then. All about reaction against new impositions of tech-bro-nology. Doing this breaks their theme and their customers' expectations of what GOG is suposed to be. If there is one company whose customers are going to react badly against AI, it is GOG. What are they thinking?

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I'm wary of Netflix these days as Trump has bought around $1m in bonds in Netflix.

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Quoting: KimyrielleMy feelings on that are clear: As long as people find it acceptable to use AI for coding (and they seem to), it must be okay to use it for everything else, too.

An equivalent number of people don't find it acceptable to use AI for coding as find it unacceptable to use AI for image generation. There's already been a lot of ink spilled on how AI coding causes problems, especially long-term.

AI codebases tend to have maintainers who don't know how the code works and cannot write updates, especially since the LLM is less competent at understanding the program's source as a whole as it grows more complex and especially outgrows its context window. Using it for documentation scraping tends to generate hallucinated entries, and the machine has a 50/50 chance of arguing with you that it's right if you decide to correct it. Studies show that AI chat coders believe they're working faster, but in reality are working slower - it's not even useful as a productivity tool.

On the ethical side, use of AI generated snippets has caused concerns over users accidentally violating the GPL by using regurgitated-but-correct code without properly licensing its source. When GitHub changed their TOS to grant a permanent license to all uploaded code for AI training, it experienced a mass exodus of programmers who didn't want their work being used as free unpaid training data for corporations who were subscribing to Microsoft.

So I don't disagree with your statement, but I do disagree with how you've framed the situation.

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I liked the demo! Will buy!

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Quoting: KimyrielleMy feelings on that are clear: As long as people find it acceptable to use AI for coding (and they seem to), it must be okay to use it for everything else, too.

The biggest difference with coding is that AI is rarely used to generate the end product. It's used for snippets or a starting point and then people iterate on it.

The artist equivalent would be using AI to generate a sketch and then drawing over it until happy with the result.

I personally think that's an acceptable use, but also that the result is usually of worse quality.

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And I've been holding off on 580.126.09 because someone here mentioned problems with XFCE.

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Annoying that the only way it is available on Ubuntu Linux derivatives is flatpak, snap or compiling. None of which I am going to use. I don't need a DEB file, but what about a binary?

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Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: CaldathrasThat's your opinion (one that I happen to agree with, mind you) but that doesn't make it right or wrong -- which is, after all, a value judgement.

Eugh. Spare me that relativistic stuff.
Having an opinion does not make that opinion valid.
There is such a thing as correct and such a thing as wrong.
Is 1+1 2? Are there clouds in the sky? Would fulfilling minimal end-of-life plans be expensive for publishers/developers? Etc.

Most opinions around this topic can be rather easily proven right or wrong - and honestly have been, plenty of times. Certain people just choose to ignore that and continue doubling down as if their opinions had not been proven wrong dozens of times over.
Maybe some day this will be known as PirateSoftware syndrome.

Quoting: CaldathrasHe may feel strongly that their strawmen have validity. Can you show him how those strawmen are not valid?

Engaging with strawmen or even validating them is pointless. They may well be valid, but their entire substance is not even being relevant to the actual topic.

The classic here is the "it would be too expensive for publishers to keep the servers infinitely".
Is that a correct statement? Yes.
Is that statement relevant to the initiative? No.

So, basically, your comments about his reaction to the cool-aid snip could just as easily be applied to yourself. Showing how they are irrelevant to the actual topic would be addressing their validity. Your example did this brilliantly (although more details would clarify it further).

As to the first half of your comment, a response would stray to far into esoteric philosophy than I suspect either of us would care to pursue. 😊

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Quoting: CaldathrasThat's your opinion (one that I happen to agree with, mind you) but that doesn't make it right or wrong -- which is, after all, a value judgement.

Eugh. Spare me that relativistic stuff.
Having an opinion does not make that opinion valid.
There is such a thing as correct and such a thing as wrong.
Is 1+1 2? Are there clouds in the sky? Would fulfilling minimal end-of-life plans be expensive for publishers/developers? Etc.

Most opinions around this topic can be rather easily proven right or wrong - and honestly have been, plenty of times. Certain people just choose to ignore that and continue doubling down as if their opinions had not been proven wrong dozens of times over.
Maybe some day this will be known as PirateSoftware syndrome.

Quoting: CaldathrasHe may feel strongly that their strawmen have validity. Can you show him how those strawmen are not valid?

Engaging with strawmen or even validating them is pointless. They may well be valid, but their entire substance is not even being relevant to the actual topic.

The classic here is the "it would be too expensive for publishers to keep the servers infinitely".
Is that a correct statement? Yes.
Is that statement relevant to the initiative? No.

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Quoting: SlayerTheChikken

Quoting: eggroleAs everyone has said, I see no issue with the 30% cut, but I think the more important part, that has a bit of merit IMHO, is the off-platform competition restriction. If my game is for sale on steam for $50, why can't I sell it direct on my website (or any other platform for that matter) for $40?

This *feels* very anti-competitive, but what do I know.

This part is true, I can agree on that.

I disagree. It is hardly "anticompetitive". Sellers are free to take their product to any other online store if they don't like Valve's policy. Contrary to apparent belief, Valve is in no way a monopoly. Other online retail options exist. The seller just won't get the level of exposure that Steam can offer.

Maintaining price parity on all stores is just good business. To paraphrase from my other post, if the seller is undercutting their own prices, it impacts their sales through Steam. This makes it somewhat pointless for Valve to provide their time and resources making the seller's product available on their store.

Besides, all evidence that I've seen is that price parity is not happening. The regular price is often very close ("Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price", anyone?) but I have never seen a matching sale price across all digital storefronts at the same time. For example, Fanatical sold a game I purchased on discount for lower than Steam has ever discounted that game. Green Man Gaming has done the same. GOG too. So where is the forced parity?

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