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Latest Comments by scaine
Epic and Steam banned it but HORSES is out now on other stores
4 Dec 2025 at 5:09 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: kuhpunkt
Quoting: scaineAs noted in the article itself, it's the devs themselves that bemoan that this change prevents them from putting their older games in a bundle.
Yeah, but why lie about this? The change happened almost 3 years ago. If they can't be straight about this... why should anybody trust them?
How are they lying?? 3 years is recent in terms of a game's life-span. They had the rug pulled out from under them on this. There was no notice of it happening, just a sudden announcement that they'd changed how they issue keys.

Quoting: kuhpunktIf their previous game Saturnalia had sold well, I'm pretty sure that they would be able to generate more keys. The game had a peak of 15 players 1.5 years ago. It's got 80 reviews on Steam. It apparently didn't sell well... so why should they be able to continue generating keys? You can still buy some keys online, so at some point they must have been able to generate keys.
Putting a poorly-selling older game into a bundle is a huge deal for a dev, generating sales that simply wouldn't happen any other way. You still get 5000 keys under the new rules, but that's not feasible for putting the game into a bundle.

Quoting: kuhpunktYes... and that's known for years. I'm just wondering where Pete is getting the "developers can negotiate the cut" from. I'm not aware that anybody can negotiate that. Everybody has to earn it.
Not that well known, no. Most people still tend to quote the "30% of all steam sales go to Valve", I find.

Epic and Steam banned it but HORSES is out now on other stores
4 Dec 2025 at 5:00 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Cley_FayeCensorship is censorship, no matter how some people think they have the high ground.
Disturbing content in fictional media should not be regulated the same way we protect actual people, because those "in power" that decides where the line lays will change, and their decision is extremely dubious. I'm more annoyed by extreme violence, gore, and torture than nudity, but it seems that only the later is deemed horrible enough to warrant censorship.

As long as it's all fictional content, let it exist. If it can't find its public, then it will fail. But I am the one making the decision, not some random bureaucrat/employee somewhere. This kind of issue keeps happening repeatedly, and keep coming from countries that are usually against "nanny states", but quick to accept it when a boob is visible. The hypocrisy of it is stupid.
Hard disagree on this from me. Valve is a private company and isn't beholden to our views on right and wrong. There's a big distinction between government oversight (aka regulation) and a private company not wanting to host things it doesn't like. It has it's own reputation to consider, by association to the content it sells. Sure, that's a low bar for Valve, but it's their decision.

This reminds me of that ridiculous situation where a gay activist asked a bakery for a "support gay marriage" cake and the bakery refused. And the gay activist got up in arms about this, and it went to court! Madness. Sure, the bakery are bigoted scum, but they're a private firm, and they get to be bigoted about the cakes they sell. Thankfully the courts agreed [External Link]. But in summary, if I was selling pizzas and someone came in asked me to make a pizza in the shape of (insert something offensive here), I'd throw them the fuck out of my pizza parlour. My house, my rules.

Epic and Steam banned it but HORSES is out now on other stores
4 Dec 2025 at 4:35 pm UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: kuhpunkt
Quoting: Petethegoat
Quoting: kuhpunktAnd they have RECENTLY begun refusing keys? That change happened almost 3 years ago. It just comes across as disingenuous.
wanting to put their previous game in a bundle does not seem disingenuous.
I didn't say anything about wanting to put their game in a bundle. I just talked about the change... 3 years ago isn't recent.
As noted in the article itself, it's the devs themselves that bemoan that this change prevents them from putting their older games in a bundle.

Quoting: kuhpunkt
Quoting: Petethegoatthey are not good for developers in the same way they are good for consumers - especially smaller developers who do not get to negotiate down the 30% cut.
Which developers get to negoatiate the cut?!
It's not a negotiation, but bigger devs suffer from a smaller cut.

Here's the breakdown I took from a Reddit thread, so I admit I haven't verified this, but I have no reason to doubt it.
Valve's revenue share ceased being a flat 30% revenue share arrangement in 2018. Valve's cut is now:
30% of the first $10million revenue.
25% after $10million of revenue until $50million revenue.
20% on all revenue above $50million.

The Jingle Jam 2025 charity event is live with a new bundle of games
1 Dec 2025 at 8:06 pm UTC Likes: 1

Dunno about a lot of the rest, but Tactical Breach Wizards is practically worth £35 on its own merit. Throw in CoreKeeper, Ixion and the Warhammer title and this is a steal!

I need to get back to Dungeons of Hinterberg too. Fantastic style to it, but I got distracted by something else and never went back to it!

Arch-based distro EndeavourOS gets a new Ganymede release
1 Dec 2025 at 6:43 pm UTC Likes: 10

Quoting: MichelN86Arch or arch based is not meant for you. It’s not hard to use the terminal at all or do a package search online.

Also the article is about endeavour os, not about your problems about a store or cachy os.
Yeah, I should have said, I actually got into Arch because of Endeavour. It's a great O/S. I mentioned CachyOS here because it attempts to fix the issue of non-GUI software-centres by including Octopi, which isn't ditro-specific, but is pretty limited in what it can do address this lack.

Why do you say arch-based isn't for me? I've spent several years on Arch. But I'll ram home my point again, cos it looks like you missed it - powerful tools don't have to be obtuse and no-one befits from elitist attitudes that would prevent unlocking those powerful tools.

So it would be super-cool if someone took the idea of paman and actually presented the power of Arch in an approachable non-distro-specific way.

Arch-based distro EndeavourOS gets a new Ganymede release
1 Dec 2025 at 4:59 pm UTC Likes: 10

I'd LOVE to see an Arch-based distro that give us a store-like experience for updates and software installs. It's frustrating that Arch is so obtuse that even tools like Discover (KDE's appstore) is "not recommended for use with Arch-based distros".

I'm on CachyOS now and it ships with Octopi, but that has multiple problems - the interface is probably worse than Synaptic, a thing I didn't believe possible. It doesn't handle the AUR, and it doesn't know about Flatpak. CachyOS does provide a one-stop "upgrade" tool (open a terminal and type "upgrade", ha!), but no GUI exists.

It's a problem, and one that's hand-waved away by dedicated Arch users who say "just use the terminal". I'm fine doing so, but it means that I wouldn't recommend an Arch distro to anyone, ever. You try Arch, tentatively, after years of Linux exposure, and you might still bounce of it because of this.

So, yeah, so frustrating. Powerful software, like Arch, shouldn't be (this) difficult to use.

KDE Plasma going all-in on Wayland and will drop the X11 session completely
28 Nov 2025 at 12:54 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: EikeWorks For Me(TM) on KDE 6 on Debian stable, and worked on KDE 5 on Bookworm already. I'm using Nvidia BTW.
Yeah, it's frustrating. For a long time I thought it was a cable issue, but then Plasma 6 dropped for Siduction, and suddenly I was on a wayland session and boom - everything unlocked, like magic. I'm on an AMD 7900XTX, so for a while I thought it was a limitation with HDMI (AMD haven't licensed HDMI 2.1 for the mesa driver), but I've researched it, and 2.0 is more than capable, as is the DisplayPort cable I tried too. It's a top-end monitor I'm using too, so doubly frustrating!

But great to see it all "exposed" under wayland, so no going back for me now. Being able to control the brightness of my screen using the Plasma widget is amazing too - until now I had to manually control brightness using the monitor's shitty remote control! So much more convenient this way!

KDE Plasma going all-in on Wayland and will drop the X11 session completely
28 Nov 2025 at 10:49 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: tuubi
Quoting: scaineBut I wouldn't go back to X11 because a) no 120Hz support
Wayland definitely is the way to go, but what do you mean no 120Hz? I'm running an Xfce (X11) desktop at 120Hz right now, on AMD hardware similar to yours. Is that some weird KDE limitation on X11?

In any case, there are real (and compelling) reasons to migrate to Wayland, like HDR. No need to come up with imaginary ones.
Under X11, I only get the option for 60Hz. This is across three distros (Pop_OS, Endeavour and Siduction), so it must be a hardware limitation of some kind.

Launching a Wayland session immediately unlocks 120Hz, along with HDR, colour profiles, brightness settings, etc.

According to Epic CEO Tim Sweeney - game stores don't need an AI label as it will be everywhere
28 Nov 2025 at 10:46 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Technopeasant@scaine
Why is code generation trivial while "art, music and voice acting" is inherantly important?
Sorry, I wasn't clear. It's just as important. I just don't think that anyone other than the FSF would have the motivation to bring a case against the AI companies for code. It's also, as Kimyrielle points out, really hard to prove that AI was used in any given sample of code. It should still be disclosed, imo. It's still burning the planet and (probably) affecting jobs due to short-sighted, or over-optmistic managers.

Quoting: KimyrielleThing is that these tools DO make you more productive, if you're using them right (which is why they're getting adopted by coders).
As I said, this is currently not the case. I'm sure there will be further studies on this, but right now, this study from July this year points to the opposite. While you think AI will make you more productive, in fact you are less so. It's a really interesting read.

https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ [External Link]

According to Epic CEO Tim Sweeney - game stores don't need an AI label as it will be everywhere
27 Nov 2025 at 9:11 pm UTC Likes: 9

@Kimyrielle
Uh, that's not a great take, tbh. "It's gonna happen, so just accept it"? Nah.

Maybe you're right about the coding element. Despite evidence that using AI tools for development actually slows you down, that's only true for experienced developers. A lot of indie studios are probably using genAI tools built into their integrated development environments (IDE) and you're right, that ship has probably sailed. After all, who's going to champion all the GPL licenses they stomped on to train that model?

However, art, music and voice acting are a whole 'nother story. These AI assets are very much not only built on non-attributed, probably copyrighted work, but when they're used in a game, they're also actively putting artists, musicians and voice actors out of work.

I'm not having that. So these disclosures are extremely important (to me).