Minimum hardware requirements are likely to be performance (at relevant minimum resolution) and battery life at least on the same level as the current Steam Deck.
They constantly lie about all sorts of matters (progress, release dates, financial matters, state of the company).
Many of their senior community managers are openly disrespectful to their backers.
The founder, Chris Roberts, put his unqualified wife as CMO (she openly admitted to not knowing how metrics worked or what is SEO), while coming up with a fake last name for her and warning employees to keep their mouths shut about the fact they were married.
It is extremely hard. From what I’ve heard sales of ~10,000 units is considered a strong showing in the indie scene.
The whole market is extremely top heavy. You have have a few big winners that see runway success, a slightly larger group with modest “break even plus” type performance and 10,000 of thousands of indie devs that get no coverage whatsoever. In addition to having a well thought out and implemented concept (which is extremely difficult to do), you need a lot of luck.
IMO, the challenge lies in the lack of discoverability; an extremely difficult challenge for any consumer-facing marketplace. The major consumer stores (Steam, Apple, Google) don’t have any real incentive to work on discoverability since it’s so hard and they have a quasi-monopoly anyway. The topics-focused independent communities that were big drivers of discoverability (especially in mid-market and niche segments) in the 90s and 2000s are all dead or dying. You do have youtube which offers a modicum of coverage of niche segments, but then we are back to square one; discoverability of mid-market and niche channels. And Google is more focused on engagement (“the next quadrillion customers!1!11”) and competing with TikTok, there is simply not enough competition for them to care.
I mostly play economic strategy / tycoon games and the forums are pretty chill. The most “controversial” threads revolve around gameplay mechanics discussion or perhaps complaints about lack of updates.
I don’t think I’ve even seen anything approaching what you are describing in economic strategy game forums.
I would most definitely oppose shutting down the steam forums.
I’m just pondering the idea of if Russia just have their government magically replaced with someone else’s, would the culture you say persist for more than a decade.
I maybe wouldn’t phrase in that way, but I do agree that russians are capable of change. There is nothing inherent or unchangeable about their chauvinism.
I think their current situation (authoritarianism, broad support for genocidal imperialism) is a product of their own choices, not some sort of essential chauvinistic quality of russians.
But to get to a state where they can replace their government, they need to be frank about the root causes of their predicament.
They have to clearly and openly condemn imperialism (including their actions in Chechnya).
They have to recognize that the root cause of putin’s rule is not some external scapegoat. It is the russian people. They elected him in 2000 (widely considered a more or less free election). They elected him again 2004 even after he shut down all independent TV stations. They went with comical medvedev seat warming exercise in 2008, there was no pushback against their invasion of Georgia. They again allowed to him to come to power in 2012 and there was no pushback to the invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea.
You can’t both claim that the elections are illegitimate, while also partaking in them and calling to vote for openly chauvinist parties that are well know to be directly managed by the Kremlin as fake opposition.
But instead we get some fake platitude about how putin does not reflect the russian people and “What is the EU’s strategy on russia?”
I don’t see any real desire to take actions that would allow russians to nurture their own position on things. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it is.