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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • It’s actually getting kind of hard to think of new, stupider ways to ruin the economy and raise the cost of living. Parody is getting close to being indistinguishable from reality.

    • Blanket tariffs for goods with low domestic production? Done.
    • Imprisoning laborers who do domestic farming? Yes.
    • Deporting legal, tax-paying noncitizens? Yep.
    • Pissing off citizens of countries that contribute significantly to local tourism? Indeed.
    • Asking potential tourists to pay extra for the privilege of visiting a to-be-sold-for-industrial-logging park? Why not.
    • Cutting healthcare and replacing it with a bonus for the 0.001%? Might as well!





  • Which part of my comment was denigrating indie devs? Indie games are great. Android gaming is currently not.

    If I’m looking for a good non-mobile game, I don’t go looking in the mobile game store. I go looking on PSN or PC, where the focus is on the kind of game that wasn’t designed as a phone-first experience.

    The fact that Android has some good traditional games or ports of indie gems isn’t something inherent to Android. The overwhelming majority of those games were on PC or console first.



  • You’re comparing apples to oranges.

    The mobile gaming market is leagues larger than every other market combined. That doesn’t mean the games are even remotely comparable to console games.

    It’s an entirely different target audience. Mobile games are focused on quick sessions and design patterns designed to encourage spending money on microtransactions. Games made for the traditional gaming market are mostly designed for longer play sessions with more mechanically complex gameplay. I as well as many others prefer the latter.

    Nintendo’s store is full of shovelware, but at least you’ll find more traditional games than just ports of indie hits. Or, buy a Steam Deck and enjoy something better than both.





  • Steam will end up pushed out of the market

    This has been explicitly attempted 3 times already, and that really didn’t work out well for anybody who tried it.

    Epic Games Store still resorts to bribing people with free games to keep their monthly active user numbers up, hemorrhaging money to attract users who are rarely interested in anything more than freebies.

    EA and Ubisoft tried to forgo Steam releases in favor of their own stores and launchers in an attempt to keep 100% of the revenue. They eventually relented, releasing their games on Steam again. Even Blizzard joined in, adding Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 to Steam.

    And Microsoft’s attempt to dethrone Steam by releasing games through the Windows app store just ended up with Valve funneling considerable resources into helping Linux and WINE become a viable alternative to Windows for gaming.

    Unless Valve enshittifies or legal shenanigans ensue, they’re pretty unlikely to be pushed out of the market. No single game or game series is good enough to capture the entire market of Steam users and permanently drive them to alternative platforms. On top of that, Steam has a huge following of users who are loyal to the company, which is both insane and insanely hard to compete against.

    or they will also become Streaming Platforms

    Maybe, maybe not. I don’t see it happening, though. Valve makes money hand over fist from digital sales alone, and they have more to lose in pissing off their customers by selling subscriptions than they have to gain by selling subscriptions.

    I am concerned about GOG and PC hardware prices, though.




  • pivot_root@lemmy.worldtoBluesky@lemmy.worldred hats
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    4 days ago

    Modern Satanists are actually extremely progressive. The Satanic Temple makes a point of using legislation intended to promote Christianity to promote their own religious organization.

    It pisses off the reactionary religious zealots and shows them to be hypocrites, and there’s nothing legislators can do about it without blatantly giving preferential treatment to the “correct” religion.