I wonder what will happen with Choice. Without it I’ll be down to a VPN and one other subscription (Peacock for wrestling for the curious). My VPN (PIA, you curious people) was bought out by a Chinese company if I remember correctly, and just recently announced a price increase. It wasn’t a whole lot, but it’s not a direction I enjoy, so I’m already rethinking that.
I digress, I know Humble of old already died, but it will be a sad day to see it gone for good.
Yeah, doesn't bode well. Turned into your typical greedy company with the IGN buyout, as much as they could within the limits of keeping old charirty values.
If you know your way around a Linux terminal, or can follow simple terminal instructions, I always recommend folks host their own OpenVPN server. $5/month for a digital ocean instance and now I never have to worry about some provider hiking my VPN prices or snooping on my traffic.
I was already planning on moving over to Linux, and can get around enough. This is amazing info, as I’ve moved more into self hosting and didn’t even realize that was an option. Definitely something to look into once I find a permanent residence. Thank you!
You are awesome friend! It won’t be anytime soon. We lost our place to a fire and are getting by in motels for now. Everyone survived and a lot more than expected was salvageable, so we keep moving forward.
At some point I’ll throw my old parts together into a Linux server. I was just hosting everything on my main rig, which obviously is not ideal. I’ve seen a bit of discussion on both sides of docker, do you have any input one way or the other?
Ah, I’ve generally run my VPN primary exit node in a public cloud infrastructure host like Digital Ocean or AWS in order to provide a separate public IP from the rest of my stuff, and not give out my home IP to public Wi-Fi and such.
I like docker, as long as you use a good orchestration tool it’s a good way to declaratively define what should be running on your server, using a compose file or similar. There are a lot of benefits to the overhead of learning it, including running multiple instances of the same service on one machine without conflicts, and the ability to force your hosted apps to store all of their data in nice neat packages you can easily back up with something like Duplicity or Volumerize.
I actually run my containers on a small kubernetes cluster using VMs running k3s atop Proxmox, with persistence handled by a hyperconverged ceph cluster. All probably very overkill but it’s fun to play with and performs incredibly. Most folks can get away with a single server running containers with simple docker compose.
That actually makes a lot of sense given the fact that i havent heard about massive steam data centers. I suppose they just rent their servers from data centers around the world. Which actually is very suprising. I imagine at their scale making their own data centers would save them money.
Actually i just think they must subcontract a lot of their daily operation. I refuse to belive such low numbers are enough to even handle the complaints from stolen shipments and broken devices not to mention all the other complaints. It is more than enough to actually develop the platform but surely not to handle day to day operations.
I suspect subcontracting is how they get around the lasseiz-faire nature of employment there. There’s a famously open policy where nobody tells anyone what to do.
But I imagine that policy can’t extend to subcontractors. There it’s “here’s money, make the servers happen”.
I remember reading that having a version keyword in your user alias would cause issues with steam, and it was actually because it was a blocked word on CloudFlare where they store/pull a bunch of steam data from
Valve is profitable because of the reputation they’ve built up over many years as being an incredibly consumer friendly storefront. Avoiding corporate bloat, and focusing their attention on the core aspects of their business consumers care about has allowed them to thrive where many others failed. Valve created and maintained a fantastic product. So yes.
They’re making their machine more and more efficient, storage and bandwidth just gets cheaper with time… Yet, they still need their 30% cut to make billions in profit.
If they make billions in profit and Gaben is a billionaire while 80% of the population of his country lives paycheck to paycheck then there’s a fucking issue. The same logic applies to all businesses.
Why are they not allowed to create a good service and profit?
Why are the competition unable to take marketshare with lower fees?
It feels as if you have this number, >billion, makes a company evil. Why?
I agree with you that no single person needs a billion, but having earned it doesn’t make them bad. They innovate and move everything forwards. I’d much rather see my money with Valve than with EA, Activision Blizzard or any of the other faceless giants out there.
Multimillionaires, billionaires, they’re all part of the problem.
They’re allowed to make a good product and profit, there’s no reason why we allow them to profit so fucking much, if they do it’s because we’re paying more for their product than they actually need to charge us, the fact that they consider it ok makes them bad people.
Stop defending the people profiting from you, you’re the cattle defending the butcher.
Right, but there’s nothing immoral about it either.
I live in a place where the rich pay their fair dues to the benefit of the less fortunate. That’s where I think you need to focus on getting, not slandering every successful company out of envy.
Thanks for the chat. You were nothing but respectful. Have a great weekend.
Yes there’s something immoral about it, it’s a choice they they consciously make to make us spend more than necessary on the products they have to sell so they can accumulate more wealth and we can accumulate less wealth.
The funniest thing is, there are billionaires out there that agree tax laws are messed up and think they should be paying more taxes. For them it’s just a stressful hassle to work out which charities should take their money.
I agree with you that there’s a problem, but I think you’re targeting the wrong villian here. I shop local whenever I can but there are a few things that are just… big. Video games are worldwide and getting them off the internet is nice. There’s no such thing as a local video game distributor. There’s local indie game development which I do support, but Steam is a product I like which does its job very well.
The problem here is scale, not necessarily who individuals are buying from. Take major league sports as an example. Salaries for indivudual players are in the millions because of the amount of eyeballs attached to wallets that are interested in watching those players. Less eyeballs, less money, and the players would probably be doing the same thing but not be making as much money. Same thing with music. It’s very hard for an artist to make a good living with music, but once they hit global awareness suddenly money will come rollin in from all over the place. This isn’t a problem with the people doing the jobs (although it could be said that major league sports should charge less, they are trying to maximize their profit) but is the result of the amount of people who are willing to pay.
The probelm you’re having is that a company is allowed to suck up so much money and keep it. That’s a problem for governments to handle. Individuals can choose who to give their money to, but sometimes there aren’t any other good choices.
It’s their choice to take a cut big enough that they’re making that kind of profit, no one is forcing them, it’s all greed, stop acting like they wouldn’t be able to lower it.
So he should get the address of every single person in the country and divide his money equally among every single person and have no money for himself? Maybe only keep the same amount for himself that each other person is getting? That’s ~342 million people. Give them $3 each and no more billionaire. Worth $10B? $30 for each person.
Elon Musk is the wealthiest person in the USA and is worth $251B. $750/person would help for rent for one month. You could take money away from babies and maybe get a full month, maybe two.
Jeff Bezos is next at $161B. That’s about $480/person.
Of course, this means that their money is gone. No golden goose. Do you think that they should subsidize every person in the country?
Or simply say "I guess 30% is more than we need, let’s cut that to 10% and see how that goes.
If billionaires didn’t exist we wouldn’t need to subsidize anyone, the majority of the world’s issues are related to the fact that a minority keeps a majority of wealth to themselves and just try to acquire more and more.
Perhaps 10%. Taxes at one point went up to 90%. Some companies do need more, especially small businesses. As for not needing to subsidize anyone, when the pandemic struck and the checks went out a lot of people paid bills (I managed to get rid of my student loan debt, with help) but many went on spending sprees and some of those still couldn’t pay rent. Wealth distribution isn’t as great as it sounds and I’m on SSDI.
“when the pandemic struck”… The pandemic that was caused by poor people hunting wild animals to sell their meat to make a living? Gosh darn, I wonder what we could have done to make it so these people wouldn’t have to resort to that to make a living… Oh well 🤷
The pandemic that was caused by poor people hunting wild animals to sell their meat to make a living? Gosh darn, I wonder what we could have done to make it so these people wouldn’t have to resort to that to make a living.
What the poor people were doing happened in another country and therefore there was nothing that we could have done to change their way of life. We can’t dictate to China how they treat their citizens.
You’ve got the proverbial “patience of a saint.” Shame about all’ the bootlickers around here, though. I’d thought/hoped better of Lemmy but still people’s brains turn off when they’ve chosen a team :(
Incredible how you look at the comment history of all these people and all of them have comments about not having enough money or being angry at rich people, but all critical thinking goes out the window when it’s for a hobby they like, suddenly whatever they’re told to spend is perfectly OK!
Tell that to people defending micro transactions in dragons dogma. “But you can earn it in game for free!” except it takes hours to get enough in game currency to customize 1 character (you have 2) unless your second character gets hired, which is unreliable. That same currency is also needed to unlock cosmetics like being able to use the red color in the character creator.
BTW, nioh 2 you unlock customising your character after the first mission and it costs nothing in game, you can do it as many times as you want.
But what are his thoughts about over promising a game and releasing it in an absolutely laughable state and then sell a dlc after almost fixing said game years later?
Gaben has the best PR of any billionaire. People think he and his company aren’t just as shitty as any other multi yacht owning billionaire and profit machine company out there.
Apart from exploiting gambling addicts and you not really owning most games, Valve are rather consumer friendly. Or at least they appear to be because their competitors are even worse.
Given human nature I find it hard to blame rich people for using their money on themselves. We need laws to change (aka much, much higher taxes)
Someone’s perspective on what’s an appropriate standard of living changes with what they’re used to. That’s just how the human brain works. I constantly hear people that make the same or more than me, that live in the same country as me in an area with similar cost of living, complain about how little money they have, while I feel like I have all I really need and more. They just consider different things as “necessary”.
Is it incredibly disconnected to consider owning even one yacht as anything close to necessary? Absolutely. But anything you want, your brain will take it for granted once you get it and make you want even more.
I don’t thinks that is greed actually, Gabe gaining more and more money is greed but spend that wealth in random shit is just like people do, if you have billions the random shit you can buy is more pricy.
Is that not greed? He holds on to his money and puts them in places that can’t be taxed. Speaking of taxes, he doesn’t pay his fair share by far. Are these not examples of greed? People are poor. Social systems are failing. These billionaires, even the ones people seem to like such as Gaben and Taylor Swift, are just holding wealth. They’re like dragons lording over piles of gold.
Billionares creating politics and buying politicians so they can continue to be rich is greed totally, but unless yatch is a scheme to avoid taxes that I don’t know they buying it is like me buying toys to put on my desk in a large scale.
Sounds cool and all but I heavily doubt they would do the work to implement it like that. Replay value doesn’t add market value in the view of the producers. So there is not much money to be made from the large amount of work this requires.
Of course if they ever do it, feel free to correct me, people from the future
The patent shows that the save states stream through an API, it’s likely this isn’t for local save but for people streaming games. It will open streaming possibilities like letting audiences pick up exactly where the person they’re watching is, or other audient interactions like “beat this section quicker than I did.”
In that case there is little difference to just sharing a save file, which everybody can already do. If this is everything that the patent covers, then I’m against them having a patent for it. That idea is so generic and nothing somebody should be allowed to have control over
Marathon was a bit before my time, but I definitely agree, the art style on the trailer for the new marathon looks really cool. But between cod dmz, marauders, the cycle frontier; I’m just a bit skeptical that anyone can properly replicate what makes Tarkov such an interesting and addicting game style.
That being said, definitely hoping for some proper competition to Tarkov as it has some serious issues that I don’t see getting fixed anytime soon.
“After five rounds of bargaining, it has become abundantly clear that the video game companies aren’t willing to meaningfully engage on the critical issues: compensation undercut by inflation, unregulated use of AI and safety,” said Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA national executive director and chief negotiator, in a statement. “I remain hopeful that we will be able to reach an agreement that meets members’ needs, but our members are done being exploited, and if these corporations aren’t willing to offer a fair deal, our next stop will be the picket lines.”
The signatory companies stated
“We will continue to negotiate in good faith to reach an agreement that reflects the important contributions of SAG-AFTRA-represented performers in video games. We have reached tentative agreements on over half of the proposals and are optimistic we can find a resolution at the bargaining table.”
insider-gaming.com
Ważne