In my youth as a tabletop gamer I of course consumed vast quantities of ham-and-pineapple pizza. So much that I grew to hate the sight of it, and wholeheartedly joined the anti-pineapple faction. But decades have passed and I have mellowed, come to an accommodation with the sins of my youth, and now I don't mind a bit of pineapple-and-bacon pizza now and then.

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I will be pleased to see this when it comes out because chocolate.

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Quoting: pbIf valve's cut inflates the prices, then how come games that are not on steam (ubi/origin/nintendo exclusives) cost the same? $60/70 at launch? They're selling on their own stores, so shouldn't they be 30% cheaper or something? Or how about epic exclusives? Dead Island 2 was $59.99 at launch (one-year epic store exclusive), and a year later it launched on steam at the same price. Shouldn't they take advantage of epic's lower cut and give the consumers a better price in the first year, before the alleged steam price parity was enforced? No? Anyone?

Certainly pricing on things like software is tricky, because you have to charge for it like you would for a normal commodity where there is a unit price to produce, when for software, including games, there effectively isn't, copies cost zero. The cost of producing the game is basically a single lump, and you are trying to make enough money on (unit price * number of sales) to pay for that single lump and ideally a bit more. Epic store is not going to get you much number of sales, so I expect there's a need to get as much as you can per unit. On the other hand, I understand Epic store exclusives involve a payment up front from Epic. And then on the third hand, there is generally going to be some relationship between price and how many people will fork over that much money. On this, Steam's system with sales and discounting works pretty well to catch buyers willing to pay at different price points. But, so, pricing is tricky, sure--there isn't going to be an immediate one-to-one correspondence between the cut and the price.

But still, that 30% is coming off the top and it is real money; it increases the number of sales or the price level needed for a developer to break even on a game, and there's no way around that. If, say, the store's expenses are only 10%, both developers and consumers are ending up with less money in the end than they could have. I don't know how much of Valve's take is pure profit, because they play those cards very close to their vest. But it would be worth finding out.

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Quoting: wit_as_a_riddleI find the moral indignation over what others do with their own hard earned money to be performative.

That sounds like it makes sense, but it's ludicrous. So, Geoffrey Epstein spent his own hard earned money on sex with underage girls. I am morally indignant about that. Not you, though, that would be "performative".

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Quoting: wit_as_a_riddle

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.

Oh, sure, the drop in extreme poverty. So first of all, I've heard plenty about the supposed drop in extreme poverty, but I've never heard anyone mention a figure that extreme, that's just in the ridiculous propaganda realm. Don't know where you got it, but I'm pretty sure it's nonsense even in terms of the official stats that are generally bandied about.

Second, "extreme poverty" is defined in these sorts of statistics as "making less than $2 per day". That's in purchasing power parity with the US dollar. So then, if you're an American, and you make more than $60/month, you're not in "extreme poverty". Homeless people can starve to death in the US on way more than that. It's ridiculous. And since it's purchasing power parity, it is equally ridiculous everywhere else. Masses of people are, in real life, extremely poor, but the statistics claim they are not. They are quite simply statistics built to generate reassuring lies.

Third, much of this drop in "extreme poverty" represents the destruction of the peasantry. People are driven off their subsistence farms by various modern "enclosure movement" equivalents, they move to the cities and live in shanty towns where they are half starved, scraping by on whatever informal ways to scratch out a living they can find. But! Before, when they had adequate food that they grew themselves, decent shelter and generally were poor, but more or less OK, they weren't really in the monetary economy, so they made less than $2/day. Now that their lives are precarious and they can barely eat and their homes are made of cardboard or some damn thing, they make more than $2/day so they're not in "extreme poverty". Lucky them!

Fourth, another massive proportion of the drop in poverty is China. There was a period where China represented more than 100% of the drop in extreme poverty . . . which is to say, in the rest of the world extreme poverty was increasing, but it was decreasing so much in China it more than made up for it. This is not exactly a triumph of free market capitalism.

In any case, "markets" and capitalism are not the same thing. You can have markets without capitalism, it's easy, just replace all the firms owned by individual rich people and stock market investors with firms owned by governments and worker co-operatives, but leave the markets in place. Badabing, markets but no capitalism. And, you can have capitalism with no markets--we see this in US military contractors, who are often the sole source of a good which they sell only to their sole customer using cost-plus contracts which define the price paid as a function of how much it costs the firm to make the product, plus a percentage for profit. That isn't a market. And yet they are capitalist firms--private individuals own them, capital is invested in them for the purpose of generating a profit which can be reinvested.

Maybe you should talk about things you know something about. Nobody who, confronted with the term "capitalism", responds with the term "markets", knows much about either.

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Quoting: The_Real_Bitterman

Quoting: PaldinoXWhats wrong with Fedora?

Quoting: AsciiWolfWhy? Fedora is one of the best polished and easy to use distros nowadays.

The better question is, what is not wrong with Fedora. But also I am not willing to discuss this with random strangers in the GoL comments section. Sounds like a waste of effort.

That's real bitter, man.

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Quoting: williamjcm

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.

Really? What is it then? Monopoly money?

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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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Quoting: eggroleWhile pretending to be affiliated somehow is shady, I find it amusing that FOSS (built on other FOSS no less) is talking about IP and asking to stop using their logo and name.

Even if we lived in a world without copyright at all, we would still need rules against misrepresentation, such as by claiming that people said or wrote things that they did not say or write. If anything, our current laws about that are not strong enough, hence Bazzite being forced to approach the issue sideways by invoking misuse of trademarks and such.

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. . . There are things that still use OpenGL?

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