Valve doesn’t set the prices but they provide the venue. Just like how Vegas provides the venue but doesn’t run the casinos.

Lots of other places have casinos but Vegas is the one everyone blames for the epidemic of gambling addictions. Vegas creates the conditions for problematic gambling that are much more powerful than a single casino.

It’s not sales specifically that I have an issue with, it’s a business model based on selling people tons of games they don’t play. Is GOG doing that too? Well I don’t like that either, but at least I can take my games with me when I leave GOG because they’re DRM free downloads from a web browser.

I’m not a compulsive gambler either, but I have friends who are. Am I not allowed to be opposed to gambling?

I don’t think Steam is unreasonable, I just think they get way more goodwill from their customers than they probably deserve. It’s like with Apple or the Catholic Church. A lot of people love them but they do have ugly sides.

I think convincing people to buy games they never play is a scuzzy thing to do. Is it as scuzzy as gambling? No. But it’s not up there with something like a co-op bakery or coffee shop that sells products (and a cozy environment) at a reasonable price that people actually enjoy.

People have been saying “well they support indie game developers” and sure, yes indie game developers sell a lot of games during Steam sales. But there’s a problem there too: if loads of people are buying indie games but not playing them then that distorts the indie game market. It takes revenue away from less-well-known developers and gives it to popular/viral flash sale developers whose games people aren’t playing. That’s bad for anyone who wants to reward developers for making better games that we actually want to play but otherwise haven’t heard about.

No, it’s not the same as gambling, but it does exploit weaknesses in human psychology to get people to buy things they don’t need.

If you’re buying a game that you’ll never play just because it’s on sale, you’re not saving money.

Proton is built on the open source project Wine and private products from CodeWeavers. Yes, Valve has contributed a tremendous amount to the project but they aren’t deserving of sole credit for it.

I own neither an Xbox nor a PlayStation (nor a Switch, for that matter).

There are LOADS of other options besides AAA games on the big platforms. There are countless vintage games, freeware, shareware, and abandonware that can all be played on the Internet Archive. There are countless indie developers out there to support, including some that have been in business for more than 30 years.

It really bothers me when gamers act like the big publishers are the only game in town (while also complaining about how bad AAA games are now). I mean if you like AAA games, fine, no argument there from me. But if you also like games for their stories and gameplay and don’t need AAA graphics to have a good time then there are thousands and thousands of options out there. I just think most people are unaware of them.

I didn’t give my position.

I don’t participate in steam sales anymore. I don’t buy anything on steam because I’ve already got way more games than I’ll ever be able to play. If there’s a new game that I really want to play I’ll try to get it from outside steam if I can, or at the very least make sure it’s DRM-free so I can play it without launching the steam client (I hate the steam client but that’s just my opinion and I won’t tell anyone else what to feel about it).

Do I think they should be banned from having sales? No. I also don’t think gambling should be made illegal even though I’ll continue trying to warn people away from gambling.

I mean you can blame gamblers for losing all their money to Las Vegas too but that’s not a common opinion on Lemmy!

Done about what? I stopped using steam. I buy games directly from developers or from GOG or humble bundle as well as just supporting open source games.

Nothing I can do about GabeN’s yachts though!

It isn’t better though? GOG is a better service. DRM-free, web based downloads (galaxy is completely optional). They even invest development resources to get old games working better.

Steam is mostly the dominant platform due to first-mover advantage. They aren’t the best and most of the games on Steam aren’t even exclusives.

To get YouTube to work you need to curate your watch history. Any video you regret watching should be deleted from history so that it won’t be used for recommendations.

If your history is filled with these bad videos then you’re better off wiping your history entirely. Then start from scratch watching only videos that really interest you and your recommendations will all be based on those.

Like the internet itself, there is a TON of great content on YouTube. The trouble is finding it! For me, the internet has been gradually reverting to the situation I remember from the mid-90s (before Google existed). There were lots of search engines but they were pretty much all bad. I relied a lot on word of mouth (and site-to-site links) to find things.

Never thought I’d see the day when Lemmy has nice things to say about a billionaire who owns multiple yachts!

There’s a story recently about how a huge percentage of people’s steam libraries are never played. People just spending money on steam sales and amassing huge backlogs of games they’ll never get to. Valve has mastered the art of using sales to create FOMO and drive unnecessary spending!

I find the usefulness of a subreddit is inversely proportional to its size (popularity). There are still some good ones but they are quite small.

I had hoped Lemmy would fill this void for me but it’s still too small overall such that the smallest communities are barely active at all. Thus I tend to just scroll the feed of everything and see what catches my eye, admittedly a much less useful way to spend my time since I get sucked into ragebait instead of discussing cool hobbies.

You could say this about most standup comedians. The sober ones are the weird ones!

Too much eye contact can be threatening (predatory animals are really good at staring). There’s a fine line between eye contact with romantic/sexual overtones and aggressive/scary/creepy eye contact. If they’re avoiding your gaze then it might be the latter.

Yes exactly. What they really want to offer is an AI employee replacement service. If they could replace one of your employees who makes $40k/year then they could easily charge $30k/year for the service and you (the business owner and AI customer) could add $10k to your profits.

The fact is that they can’t do that. They can’t even make money charging thousands of dollars a year for basic LLM service that people use to write emails and the like.

The fact that they’re pivoting to full enshittification is the strongest signal yet that the AI bubble is collapsing. There won’t be an AI-driven mass-unemployment revolution this time around. OpenAI has given up on trying to build that.

The stat is for passenger deaths. People jumping in front of the train are not passengers, so don’t count for that.

I think what’s likely to be a big cause of train passenger deaths is the derailments they sometimes have in India. Those trains tend to be extremely overcrowded so one derailment can cause a lot of deaths.

I love VtM:B but I never had high hopes for this one. Direct sequels made by unrelated developers rarely work out.

I don’t even think it’s greed at this point. As far as I know, no one is making money on AI. Even NVIDIA is cooking the books by investing in AI companies and just making them use the invested money to buy graphics cards. They report those as sales but are they really sales if they gave them the money in the first place?

I think the real reason Microsoft is shoving AI down everyone’s throats is because they went all-in on AI and they’re hoping to keep the bubble going for now and somehow it will work out in the end. It’s literally a fake it until you make it strategy with zero guarantee of making it.

A lot of it I think is just driven by managers with AI FOMO. They really don’t know what AI is supposed to do but they’re hoping users will figure it out.