Quoting: ArehandoroMadrid isn't a city usually depicted in games, and lately Spanish studios are chucking a fair amount of point & click adventures of decent quality. It's on my wishlist 😊

Oh, Madrid, huh? I like Madrid.

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Quoting: Mountain ManWatering down milk and adding thickeners without disclosing this to the consumer is fraudulent, so of course it's illegal. That's not at all the same as a developer using existing cloud services rather than expending the resources to create their own online infrastructure.

There is certainly an ethical difference, but in terms of justification for regulation, an externality is an externality.

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Quoting: pb

Quoting: drenThe amount of corporate bootlicking happening here is crazy. We are talking about a company that effectively has a monopoly on game sales

A natural monopoly is not inherently a bad thing and does not make the company evil. As a rule of thumb, if the general public would be better after the monopolist disappears, then it's beneficial to try and bring them down. Would it be the case with Valve? I very much doubt it. The games would not get any cheaper, and nobody - for years - would provide players with the ecosystem on par with what Valve has built. That in itself is worth putting up with some idiosyncrasies. Which means that anyone suing Valve does not represent the interest of the consumers - ever.

I quite like Valve, as companies go, but there are some real issues with this.

So, first, a natural monopoly is one where most of the costs of a product are associated with the infrastructure required to provide it, and so multiple concerns providing the same product need to build multiple redundant infrastructure, making it far cheaper overall to just have one provider of the product. Internet service provision is a natural monopoly; so are utilities like electrical, water and so forth; so are roads. Natural monopolies are best dealt with through public provision, second best by aggressive regulation of the monopolist, to among other things control their profits.

Now, first, Valve's business is not a natural monopoly. Valve does not build the wires the games are transmitted to your house over. Sure, there are some capital costs involved in Valve's operation, but no more than most businesses that are not natural monopolies. Valve's business model takes advantage of significant network effects, but that's not the same thing.

But if Valve were a natural monopoly, or if it is a monopoly of any kind that is not going to get broken up, it is best for the public for it to be heavily regulated and its profits limited.

Moving on, your argument is that Valve's continued existence is good, therefore lawsuits against it are bad. But this does not follow in any way. Lawsuits against Valve, even if they succeed, are unlikely to lead to its destruction. The 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 might be better if, instead of a lawsuit, the determination was made by direct government action, imposing an auditor and going over the books with a fine toothed comb and deciding what cut was appropriate to leave Valve solvent but with a modest profit. But that is unlikely to happen, so the law is what remains.

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Quoting: Mountain Man3D renders do not a viable product make.

Ten times your goal in funding might, though.

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Quoting: Mountain ManYou really can't demand that software developers not take advantage of cost saving technologies like cloud servers.

Sure you can. Just like the Chinese were able to demand that milk producers not take advantage of cost saving technologies like watering it way down and thickening it with malamine. We demand that people not take advantage of cost savings all the time, if taking advantage of them would cause some disadvantage to their customers or the common good. We demand that factories spend money on scrubber thingies in their smokestacks so we don't get acid rain; that's why there is still maple syrup.

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They also say that Direct3D 12 support should now be on-par with Vulkan,

Yay!

and is the new default on Windows.

Boo!

authoring 2,001 (!) commits

Godot: A Space Odyssey

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Quoting: Bumadar/sarcasm

You just think that was sarcasm.

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Gaming as a service and AI. Definitely a company not much interested in "What do people want to buy?" and much more interested in "What do we want to sell people?"

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Quoting: Jarmer

Quoting: Strapinski

Quoting: JarmerNobody from the Bungie glory days are still around. The suits are running the show, and when this doesn't get instahit status, which it won't, they'll shut it down.

Nothing to see here, just a shambling corpse. Safe to move on.

Do you know where they went? I really played the game a lot and I still like many aspects of it. But over the last few years, you could just tell how little art, story, etc., mattered anymore. It became all about grabbing cash. But I’d at least be interested in seeing what the talented people who used to be at Bungie have put together now.

If we're talking the og Marathon, Myth, Halo, Oni ... the vast majority of those hyper talented people are either retired or dead. There are still a few I think related to some modern companies but not a lot. I don't even know if any originals are at 343 anymore.

The Microsoft acquisition (and then after that all the other garbage stuff with netease and sony etc) pretty much destroyed the company. There was no going back after the mass exodus from that era / layoffs.

Makes me feel old to realize that game developers from when I was young are probably mostly retired. Actually, it doesn't just make me feel old, it impresses on me how old the idea of personal computers is now.

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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.

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