And also largely nonsensical in how they occur and are written. It’s so boring. I mean I would love an actual intimate relationship to contact such a broken world but the devs of course won’t let me, instead I get fanfic writing.
There’s a lot of straight up porn games out there so who knows what kind of shit these actors end up in when they show up for a generic “motion/voice capture for video game” gig.
And on the other side we have the Baldur’s Gate actors praising Larian for hiring intimacy coordinators and not requiring themselves to mocap the sex scenes.
Edit: Ah, just saw that this is addressed at the end of the article.
Yes, quite. I’m a regular practitioner of touch-stimulated emotional relief aided by intimacy content distributors on the digital nexus of information.
Actor here. Doing intimacy scenes is surprisingly difficult, arguably more so than combat, because usually people train and get certified in sword and dagger, rapier, firearms etc to get cast
When working a job, putting your mouth on another person’s mouth is a very unusual act, and you want your actors - regardless of gender - to feel safe, comfortable, professional and not exploited - not to mention you might spend 2x 14 hours days on this sequence from multiple angles getting it the same every time
The issue is much bigger than this and much bigger than valve.
The underlying problem are nation state sized companies that are so vertically integrated that they profit from every step of the process they are involved in.
Through their huge size they have the power to profit on procurement, labor, production, sales, etc. compared to smaller companies. The concept of billion dollar companies (and individuals) is perverse.
The capitalist system was not designed to harbour companies that never make a loss and are sold or broken up just because they dont satisfy last quarter‘s predictions.
Everywhere where joe or jane average cant start a competing business (either through overzealous regulations like tiny banks or through monopoly inducing IP laws like the one allowing valve to infinitely hold games hostage) you will have overcharging, barely any progress in development and small numbers of people ridicolously raking in profits.
We need to get rid of the right to „sell“ limited licenses, billion dollar companies and shareholder primacy.
I’m fairly certain that applies to keys a dev requests be generated, so that any Steam keys can’t be sold elsewhere for cheaper than they are on Steam itself. Games that are sold on multiple platforms including Steam can absolutely be sold at different prices. I know, because I’ve bought games elsewhere because they were cheaper than on Steam at the time due to sales.
The lawsuit doesn’t imply that Steam forces their piece to always be cheaper than the competition. Sales can happen on different stores at different times, thus a game can be $50 on Steam and $40 on Epic today.
But Steam forces sellers to offer “the same offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time” - source (sorry, Shitter link) from this article, which is about a similar lawsuit from 2021.
And the language used means that, while this only applies to devs who make use of Steam keys, it doesn’t apply to the Steam keys themselves - if you want to use Steam keys, you also can’t offer discounts on competing storefronts. From the source:
Rosen said he ran into that issue when he decided to release Overgrowth at a lower price on other storefronts in order to take advantage of their lower commission rates. “When I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM,” Rosen wrote.
Like it’s fine if they sell their game on Steam for $40 and another store for $60 as long as the thing on the other store is for that platform and not a key to activate it on Steam.
They just want the price of a game that’s on your Steam library no matter the source to be the same no matter where you purchase it.
That is my understanding. Additionally I have seen no evidence that it is actually enforced either. You could get Ghost of Tsushima for $59.99 on steam and for like $51.xx on another site using keys. Same happened with forbidden west.
The agreement is only between the dev and Valve; 3rd party key sellers like G2A or Eneba usually obtain their keys through trades, buying them from the original seller, or by stealing them (which is an entirely different can of worms). They’re entitely user-driven marketplaces selling second-hand merch.
Doesn’t even have to be sketchy resellers like ones mentioned like g2a. Normal ones like fanatical and humble bundle sell cheaper. Those aren’t user driven market places.
Just have to take a look at isthereanydeals which anyone should do before buying a game.
It says Valve “forces” game publishers to sign up to so-called price parity obligations, preventing titles being sold at cheaper prices on rival platforms.
Ms Shotbolt says this has enabled Steam to charge an “excessive commission of up to 30%”, making UK consumers pay too much for purchasing PC games and add-on content.
This is actually the norm on a lot of platforms unfortunately. Apple. Google Play. Not at all unique to Valve.
Just because it’s the norm doesn’t mean it’s not excessive. In contrast, Apple’s implementation of a 30% cut is even worse, since with an iPhone you can’t just install an app from another source (and even when you can in the case of the EU, there are recurring costs for doing so). Since Steam accounts for the majority of PC video game sales, with AAA titles only not releasing on it when they have a clear financial motive not to, Valve’s use of a price parity clause effectively makes it the arbiter of what the industry standard markup on PC should be.
That 30% cut is also done on the Xbox and Playstation stores. I would assume Nintendo does the same thing.
It also sounds like Valve’s price parity agreement only applies to Steam keys. So, if a developer or publisher wanted to provide the game through their own storefront or on another third-party platform then they could charge whatever they wanted.
As for the 30% cut being excessive, I don’t know if it is or not, but storing data at the scale that Valve does costs a lot of money, not to mention the costs associated with ensuring the data’s integrity and distributing the data to their users all over the world at reasonable speeds. In all likelihood they are running multiple data centers on multiple continents with 100s of petabytes of storage each with some extremely high speed networking within the individual data centers, between the data centers, and out to the wider internet. Data hosting, especially for global availability, is damn expensive.
As I mentioned in another thread, if their running costs were close to the revenues they make then their owner wouldn’t be a multiple yachts owning billionaire.
Their cut is a %, which means that as games become more expensive they make more money. But their running costs actually go down as they improve their tech and code.
An internal memo was made public and they make more revenue per employee than Microsoft.
We’re overpaying for games but people just got used to it.
Forcing you to sell at the same price as on steam when customers will be downloading from steam servers anyway is not sketchy but very fair.
As a developer you could set the game price on steam to a high number and sell keys on your own site for cheaper. Anyone who buys a key then used steam resources to download it. The dev keeps the 30% since its not a sale through steam. Yeah id like free file hosting with terabytes of bandwidth too please.
If you sell the game yourself and provide the files, you can set lower prices. This is fair and valve doesn’t restrict that.
There was a indie dev, the Spiderweb games guy, who refused to use Steam for years and he sold his games on his website. I think it was from like 2008 all the way to 2022. Refused to give Valve a cut.
Then he finally released it on Steam and he wrote a blog post how his niche games sold extremely well and regrets leaving so much money on the table for years.
Instead of ending it, just address the problem. I’m no city designer, but seems like a button triggering a flashing light or something might be enough. It also seems like bikers would be pretty tuned into people crossing at the stops already.
The only difference I see is instead of crossing a highspeed car lane, one would cross a slow speed cycling lane designed with the intent to protect individuals on bicycles.
Cyclists travel at speeds they can easily slow down or stop if some blind person walks into the lane, sighted people do it all the time anyway. The typical long sight lines give plenty of time for a cyclist to spot someone sporting a red and white cane.
“We don’t have any evidence at this time that there is an injury collision problem."
I had no idea we could image exoplanets at a resolution high enough to be able to detect something like this, huh (and no I don’t mean the artist rendering)
bbc.com
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