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hedgehog, do gaming w Balatro is now available on mobile!

That makes sense, and that engine and some of the other games they feature look interesting.

Does that mean that Balatro (and presumably other LOVE 2D games) is packaged like Doom with its WAD files, where there’s an engine (a generic LOVE 2D one) that runs the game, interpreting the Lua game code, which is basically just packaged like an asset? Or is there a Balatro engine that needed to be built for each platform? I saw that BMM downloads a base IPA and an APK patcher, so I’m assuming it’s closer to the latter, but I could see it going either way.

hedgehog, do gaming w Balatro is now available on mobile!

There is a project to convert the Steam app to a side-loadable mobile app (both for Android and iOS): github.com/blake502/balatro-mobile-maker

I haven’t tested that out myself and I have no idea how it compares to their official mobile release, but I’m super curious about how it was implemented (it’s the first time I saw a tool that could convert a game to an iOS app), so I’ll be looking into it at some point.

hedgehog, do gaming w Balatro is now available on mobile!

Google Play was having payment processor issues (see status.play.google.com/summary for more details) but they appear to be resolved now, so you could try again.

hedgehog, do gaming w Balatro is now available on mobile!

I’m just happy it wasn’t an Apple Arcade exclusive.

hedgehog, do gaming w Balatro is now available on mobile!

Google Play was having payment processor issues (see status.play.google.com/summary for more details) but they appear to be resolved now, so you could try buying it again.

hedgehog, do gaming w Balatro is now available on mobile!

I read that Google Play was having payment processor issues, so for anyone experiencing this in the near future - that’s probably why.

hedgehog, do gaming w Horizon Zero Dawn Dev Addresses Criticism Over Aloy’s Remastered Look

Paired with allowing people who own the original to upgrade for $10 (and I’m assuming something similar in the UK) when they’re charging $50 for the remaster if you don’t have the original, that makes sense. They’re just closing a loophole.

I’d much rather they double the existing game’s price than for them to charge $25-$30 for the upgrade or to even just not have one outright.

It sucks for anyone who’d been planning to play the original and who just hadn’t bought it yet, but used prices for discs should still be low, so only the subset of those people who have disc-less machines are really impacted.

hedgehog, do gaming w Shmup suggestions

Which system(s) are you playing on?

hedgehog, do gaming w I Love That Dragon’s Dogma 2 Doesn’t Let Me Save Scum - Aftermath

For me the problem is that it just feels like a poor imitation of the way it’s done in Dark Souls / Bloodborne / Elden Ring.

hedgehog, do gaming w AITAH for pirating games before buying them?

With intellectual property there is at least (by default) a direct link between the work necessary to create an item and its ownership. With physical items the initial ownership is necessarily predicated on having controlled a means of production.

I can create an IP and I do not need to spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to do so. But I cannot create a substantial physical item without paying the people who own the materials and the factories for the privilege of doing so. Why is previous ownership such a critical factor in ownership of new items, separate from the work to create them?

Intellectual property laws have their own issues but at least with regard to them conceptually, intellectual property is more “pure” than physical property.

hedgehog, do gaming w AITAH for pirating games before buying them?

Totally solid option for some people, but not everyone. Depends on the game (some can’t be judged in two hours), your available time (can’t refund a game you bought a year ago that you only just now played), etc., and limits you to buying only from Steam. What if you’d rather buy from GOG or Humble Bundle?

hedgehog, do games w Dusk: Unpopular opinion: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly

It isn’t. If it were, that would mean that in practice, board members act to maximize shareholder value because they are legally obligated to do so, and that simply isn’t true.

In practice, board members and C-suite employees are incentivized to maximize shareholder value. They are not legally obligated to do so.

Fiduciary duty is a legal requirement, meaning that if you don’t fulfill your fiduciary duty, you’re liable. But nobody has been successfully sued for not maximizing shareholder value when their actions were in line with the business judgment rule (“made (1) in good faith, (2) with the care that a reasonably prudent person would use, and (3) with the reasonable belief that the director is acting in the best interests of the corporation”). Successful lawsuits regarding breach of fiduciary duty (in the context of corporate law) require the defendant to have acted with gross negligence, in bad faith, or to have had an undisclosed conflict of interest.

The closest instance of legal precedent that I know of (aside from “” of course) that eBay v. Newmark (Craigslist), which Max Kennerly took as meaning that corporations . In this case, Craigslist was found to have violated their fiduciary duties to eBay because Craigslist, in Max’s words, “tried to protect the frugal, community-centric corporate culture that was a hallmark for their success.”

Except, if you actually read the case notes, it’s clear that the issue wasn’t that Craigslist wasn’t maximizing their profits, but that they were diluting the percentage of stocked owned and flexibility of selling those stocks of other stockholders. The issue wasn’t that Craigslist wanted to spend half their profits supporting charities or anything like that - no, it was that they were trying to artificially limit, thus directly devaluing, the shares they had already sold. In other words, I agree that this was a case about minority shareholder oppression as opposed to being an edict to maximize profits / shareholder value.

And other than people threatening legal action, the most recent case we have (other than eBay v. NewMark) in favor of shareholder primacy is 124 years old - Dodge v. Ford. But the opposite is true:

Shareholder primacy is clearly unenforceable on its own term because the business judgment rule would defeat any claims based on a failure to maximize profit. 40 Corporate managers formulate business strategy. A rule‒sanction is antithetical to the core concept of the business judgment rule. In over one hundred years of corporate law, there is not a case where a state supreme court imposed liability for breach of fiduciary duty on the specific ground that the board, in managing operational matters, failed to maximize shareholder profit, though it made the decision informedly, disinterestedly, and in good faith.41 That case does not exist. In fact, many cases show just the opposite. Courts have held that shareholders cannot challenge a board’s decision on the specific grounds that, for example: the company paid its employees too much; 42 it failed to pursue a profit opportunity;43 it did not maximize the settlement amount in a negotiation;44 it failed to lawfully avoid taxes.45 There are classic textbook cases where courts have rejected attempts of shareholders to interfere with the board’s decisions on the argument that their views of business or strategy would have maximized shareholder value.46

The belief that a corporation is legally obligated to maximize shareholder value isn’t just wrong; it also:

hedgehog, do games w Dusk: Unpopular opinion: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly

Thanks for sharing that!

Steam’s “price parity rule” is a policy that ensures that Steam keys cannot be sold on other sites unless the product is also available for purchase on Steam at no higher a price than is offered on any other service or website.

IMO, it’s reasonable to say “If you want to sell Steam keys off Steam, you need to follow our pricing rules,” but it is not reasonable to say “If you want to sell your game, sans keys, off Steam, you have to follow our pricing rules to keep selling on Steam.” You’re talking about the former here, right? Or does that mean that the following situation is prohibited:

  • Your game is listed at $50 on Steam
  • You sell keys from your own site for $50
  • You sell your game directly from your site for $40

and if so, that the mitigation is to either stop selling Steam keys entirely or to raise the price on your own site to $50?

That’s somewhere in between the two but I dislike it. I suspect it’s more legally murky, too, like tied selling.

The article briefly talks about the latter (emphasis mine):

Wolfire’s David Rosen expanded on that accusation in a recent blog post, saying that Valve threatened to “remove [Wolfire’s game] 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.

However, it also says “Sources close to Valve suggested to Ars that this ‘parity’ rule only applies to the ‘free’ Steam keys publishers can sell on other storefronts and not to Steam-free versions of those games sold on competing platforms. Valve hasn’t responded to a request for comment on this story.” I wonder if the lack of comment was because of Wolfire’s lawsuit?

I’m also now curious if the reason for Steam saying that was related to the in-between situation I talked about above.

@Kecessa shared this ArsTechnica article from 2022 that covers an update on that lawsuit - I haven’t seen anything more recent. In it, Wolfire makes the same claim, in court, that they’d already made in their blog post, which was sufficient to convince the judge to re-open their case.

The ruling [to re-open the case] makes particular note of “a Steam account manager [who] informed Plaintiff Wolfire that ‘it would delist any games available for sale at a lower price elsewhere, whether or not using Steam keys [emphasis in original complaint].’” The amended suit also alleges that “this experience is not unique to Wolfire,” which could factor into the developer’s proposed class-action complaint.

Hopefully we’ll hear more about that soon.

hedgehog, do games w Dusk: Unpopular opinion: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly

Yes, that’s much more credible - thank you for sharing that. This part in particular is concerning:

The ruling makes particular note of “a Steam account manager [who] informed Plaintiff Wolfire that ‘it would delist any games available for sale at a lower price elsewhere, whether or not using Steam keys [emphasis in original complaint].’” The amended suit also alleges that “this experience is not unique to Wolfire,” which could factor into the developer’s proposed class-action complaint.

I wasn’t able to find any instances of Steam actually de-listing a game because it was listed cheaper elsewhere, but a credible threat to do so is almost as bad (possibly worse, really, since such a threat hints that Steam might have used other underhanded tactics when dealing with game devs). I wasn’t able to find any more recent news on the case, but hopefully we’ll learn if the issue was that particular Account Manager + lack of oversight or something more.

hedgehog, do games w Dusk: Unpopular opinion: I'd rather pay Valve 30% and put up with their de facto monopoly than help Epic work towards their own (very obviously desired) monopoly

“People like me” meaning “People who cite their sources and investigating claims before making them?” Yes, I can understand why you might find it difficult to convince “people like me” to believe something that’s trivially shown to be false.

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