It becomes a problem once others see this is permissible. It’s not that much now but once everyone realises they can put ads here for free how do you imagine it goes from there?
You’re mostly here to self promote from what I can tell. It shows in your post history and the fact that you though it’d be more important to link to Steam and not the article itself.
MS prevented you from using other browsers by using vendor lock-in. It was a prime example example of now misunderstood concept of embrace, extend, extinguish. You could download Mozilla Phoenix but you couldn’t use it for everything because CSS rendering in IE was so detached from standards. On top of that you had ActiveX which meant you HAD to use Windows for some websites.
Adding gambling to video games without verifying user age is targeting children with gambling. There’s a lot of convenient combinations of circumstances that Valve is fully aware of and profiting from. I don’t care about plausible deniability because Valve employees were visibly smug and amused when questioned about it. There is no absolving Valve after this.
You blame others for Valve monopoly. Yeah, I said they missed the ship. We have a private monopoly in PC gaming storefronts now and that’s not good. It doesn’t matter if they won fair - they are a parasitic middle-man that makes everyone lose.
Ask yourself and be honest about it: if Valve had a true competitor would their cut be as high as it is now? This is the only thing you should be concerned about, not that they engage in Linux philanthropy or that they make cool games.
Pressure on their web browser monopoly was necessary because IE6 was stifling entire industry. From a legal point of view it’s not illegal to be a monopoly but to abuse that position so there isn’t that much you can do about it, especially in the US. Going after operating system or office suite monopoly should have been done but matters less and less these days.
Valve runs a couple of online casinos that target children specifically, not sure we should be arguing who’s worse here. I think Steam is a clunky piece of software that’s popular mostly because everyone else missed the moment to start competing and Valve gained monopoly unopposed. Other viable competitors tried and failed at even gaining a foothold and are relegated to small niches because it’s impossible to move people who amassed content libraries over the years. Valve skims 10-30% of an insanely large volume of transactions and should be held to a much higher standard. You’re ignoring all of the warning signs because they didn’t screw you over yet.
Probably same reason Sony keeps releasing their games on PC before they release their sequels on PS5. They’re no longer getting sales on original platform so they’re not losing much and they build up the taste of the franchise because someone might like it enough to buy their hardware. It feels very weird to do in this case though.
IF 2026 was a real date that wouldn’t matter that much. Microsoft wants to be the first one to sell you the last console you will need be able to afford to. People will get it for generationally better experience but there’s not much else to look out for on the horizon. Hardware got too expensive for the consumer and games beyond certain budgets are much too risky. Consider upcoming trade wars and overall bleak economic outlook and you have to assume every player is looking for a survival strategy. Market analysts say that Microsoft is going to become software publisher primarily again but this makes no sense to me. Game Pass Cloud and Xbox are the only places where they don’t have to share the spoils with owners of other platforms. Obviously they’ll want to keep it going regardless of circumstances. Microsoft could be banking on getting high-end market for now and transition with revisions of the same hardware into lower segments with time as market conditions improve.
I’m very stoned currently so I can’t vouch for the quality of my analysis long term but I will stand by it for now.
PS5 Pro wanted to do RT at smooth framerates but turned out to be way too undercooked. We’re seeing glimpses of that on XSX too with Indiana Jones and Dragon’s Dogma 2 (that 40 FPS VRR window makes it work). It’s working as a tech demo that’s building appetite for more because of how transformative to the experience in both games that is. If Microsoft could deliver it at this timing it would be extra awkward for Sony who need to keep on going with current hardware for a couple more years not to look like Sega with 32X and Saturn. Even if Nvidia shows something revolutionary with new line of GPUs it will be prohibitively expensive in the context of consoles anyway.
They made FSR vendor-agnostic for reasons that turned out to be irrelevant in the long run. It was just couple of years ago when games supported DLSS only and engines weren’t ready for plugging multiple different upscaling solutions. Nvidia and AMD tried to get exclusivity deals and things seemed fire for a moment. AMD hoped FSR would be enough for smaller players to adopt it but being vendor-agnostic handicapped them so much that everyone developed their own solution anyway (PSSR, XeSS). Not that it really matters that much because in the end modern AA gives similar results to old FSR and game devs will use what works best.
People 18-39 vote predominantly for Konfederacja (far right), KO (populist centre-right), PiS (populist right). I could dig some more precise sources with gender data but I think it’s telling that these are the results even with women in the mix. Coincidentally even among young women voting for far right is more common than for centre-left. I’m not mentioning left since their popularity is within a margin of error.
Yeah, artists skew left but you won’t find a more bigoted libertarian than a young polish programmer. Most of them are also pretty spoiled too because of the degressive tax system that favours them so much.
Please stop blaming those things on everything except people. I’m Polish. Polish people drink homophobia with their mothers milk. We didn’t need to import it from US or Russia (it’s still better than in the 90s). Average developer is a young male who predominantly votes for outright fascists. The reason CDPR appears progressive is because they calculated it to be more profitable.
Is that correct? Kojima bought full rights to the IP couple of months ago and released Death Stranding on everything immediately. Seems like it’ll be timed exclusive at most.