Rose
@Rose@lemmy.zip
- Comment on [Update: Valve Responds] Mastercard Denies Pressuring Steam To Censor 'NSFW' Games 3 weeks ago:
Not necessarily. Valve says they haven’t heard from Mastercard directly. Is there evidence of Itch.io having been approached at all? It seems to me that they just made the move to delist and investigate to be safe in the wake of Valve’s rule changes.
- Comment on Epic Games just won its antitrust lawsuit against Google again 3 weeks ago:
it’s not great for consumers.
Not in the short term, but having an alternative to Steam (or anything with a lot of market share) is great for the long run. Moreover, at least everyone knows that the majority of the contracts would expire in 6 to 12 months. For all intents and purposes, Steam exclusives are a lot worse because there are many times more of them, and you can’t mark a date on your calendar when you can buy them if you can’t or don’t want to buy from Steam.
Keep in mind that, as an example, just recently Steam just decided to no longer support the local currencies of Argentina and Turkey, resulting in no regional prices for the regions on Steam. If Epic didn’t exist and didn’t support regional prices for those regions, all those users would have for third-party titles is GOG, which has a much smaller catalog and seems to support fewer regions. Microsoft Store is also an alternative now, but I’d argue its rise was spearheaded by Game Pass, which relies on the “paid deal” model pioneered in the PC space by Epic.
No, it was created so they could keep all the money from Fortnite.
I think you’re confusing the launcher with the store. The origin of the store itself can be traced back to Sweeney arguing about Valve’s “junk fee” of 30%.
they merely want their game engine and anti-cheat to sell.
How is targeting niche operating systems helping the anti-cheat sell?
- Comment on Epic Games just won its antitrust lawsuit against Google again 3 weeks ago:
Yes, I’m not implying Epic is forcing game devs into anything Whether a business partner wants to be exclusive should be 100% their decision
This reads as mutually exclusive to me. How can it not be 100% their decision if it’s their decision? Moreover, it’s very common for a publishing agreement to also be legally binding, so everyone in this and other industries is used to that (or guilty of it if you view it as negative).
that’s textbook anti-competitiveness.
Not if it’s done by an underdog. Much of the US antitrust law for example revolves around monopolizing. Challenging what is argued to be a monopoly in a currently ongoing court case ripe with evidence isn’t monopolizing.
Would they retain that policy if they or GOG became #1?
The reason the Epic store was created is Valve’s unwillingness to lower their store fee that was way above the operating cost (7% still being profitable in Epic’s internal calculations made public by a lawsuit).
Epic has a lot more power in the anti-cheat and game engine spaces, but still keeps their software open, whether it’s by keeping the source code available or making the software compatible with Linux.
- Comment on GOG is fighting back censorship - Freedom To Buy Bundle 3 weeks ago:
Same. Clicked and shared before I had a proper look. 😔
- Comment on Epic Games just won its antitrust lawsuit against Google again 3 weeks ago:
An exclusivity deal is signed by both parties, so it’s just as much of a choice developers make. By the way, like Valve, Epic seems to favor Wine over native ports, given their donation to Lutris. Unlike Valve though, Epic isn’t iffy about others not using their launcher, so there’s an official GOG Galaxy plugin for Epic endorsed by Sweeney.
- Comment on Epic Games just won its antitrust lawsuit against Google again 3 weeks ago:
Steam is full of de-facto exclusives that cannot be purchased and played elsewhere, meaning that you have to accept the Steam price, policies, practices, and their launcher in order to play those. Borderlands 2 was de-facto exclusive to Steam from 2012 to 2020, when Epic effectively rescued it from the exclusivity by paying 2K to give it away and add to the Epic store. If anything, Epic rewarding developers for doing what they’ve been doing on Steam is better than them not getting paid.
- Comment on Epic Games just won its antitrust lawsuit against Google again 3 weeks ago:
Allegedly? There is plenty of evidence of that in the Wolfire lawsuit. See for yourself from page 160 here.
- Comment on Epic Games just won its antitrust lawsuit against Google again 3 weeks ago:
That was a side effect of them upgrading the game from DX9 to DX11 and from 32-bit to 64-bit. Also, are you consistent and dislike Valve as a company for doing the same with CS2 for Mac?
- Comment on Steam Users Rally Behind Anti-Censorship Petition 4 weeks ago:
As much as Steam is free to host what it likes, Visa and the others are free not to work with Steam. You could argue the options available to Steam would be significantly limited by that, but the same argument is being used against Steam now in the Wolfire lawsuit. The argument is that Steam violates antitrust law via illegal tying and other means, making it hard to a user who doesn’t agree with their content policies to switch to a different platform, like Epic, which has always prohibited porn games.
- Comment on Steam Users Rally Behind Anti-Censorship Petition 4 weeks ago:
Well, some people do want that.
There should be a separate platform for that, similar to how you wouldn’t go on YouTube expecting to see videos from PornHub.
- Comment on Epic Games Unreal Fest News 2 months ago:
Just realized that I was a little gaslit there, as Epic has already had bundles since 2019, with one of the most recent being the STALKER bundle that costs less than the individual games combined. As with its game editions, a bundle can even be wishlisted, a feature lacking on Steam.
- Comment on Lemmy.zip 2nd Birthday Giveaway! 🍰 2 months ago:
Thank you for hosting this. Many users have alts though. Would you be able to send the gift via email? At least with game gifts, that is possible on Steam.
- Comment on Lemmy.zip Turns Two! 🎂🎉🥳 2 months ago:
Happy birthday, .zip!
- Comment on Welcome to Lemmy.zip 2 months ago:
I like that it’s done that way rather than by defederating, as it lets each user decide, as opposed to someone having decided for them with no way to change that.
- Comment on Welcome to Lemmy.zip 2 months ago:
Out of curiosity, is there a way to see the communities included in the default blocks? I must have registered here before those were introduced, as I don’t have them.
- Comment on Epic Games Unreal Fest News 2 months ago:
The OP says global preloading and gifting are going live soon. Bundles are also on the roadmap. At the end of the day though, what’s the main benefit of a bundle? It’s the discount, right? I’m not sure the discounts offered via bundles on Steam are an overall better deal compared to Epic offering cashback of 5% on everything, sometimes increased to 20% (like now). For some countries, Epic also offers significantly better base prices compared to Steam. It still supports the Turkish and Argentinian currencies and presumably has specific price guidelines for those as well, compared to Steam having removed those options. I also remember Epic talking about supporting more regional currencies compared to Steam. From looking at the documentation now, it’s 37 on Steam and 43 on Epic.
Regarding the app, I disagree. It was very convenient to have everything in one place (which Steam fans should understand, given their reluctance to use a different launcher) and I used the chat feature all the time, but after Valve separated them, I just got tired of switching and ended up not installing the chat app after resetting my phone OS. Sometimes I need to message a friend, but I feel like the effort of installing it and logging in is not worth it for those occasions.
- Comment on Epic Games Unreal Fest News 2 months ago:
People love to bash Epic and list all the (often redundant) things Steam is ahead in, but nobody mentions the ways in which Epic is ahead. Something as simple as being able to chat with your friends is no longer a feature of the mobile Steam client, but if Epic sticks to the roadmap, their app will allow that. It also makes me think of how despite so many years of existence, Steam still doesn’t allow to add game editions to your wishlist, while Epic has allowed that from the start. It was also the first to introduce a custom value field for downloads throttling, before Steam followed suit.
- Comment on Lemmy.zip Server Update June 2025 2 months ago:
Thanks for the detailed and honest explanation!
- Comment on Valve CEO Gabe Newell’s Neuralink competitor is expecting its first brain chip this year 2 months ago:
Valve enabling Nazis on Steam is about as good as being a Nazi. If this is the first time you’re hearing about the problem, search for “steam nazi” via your favorite search engine and you’ll get some pretty good results among the first.
- Comment on Valve CEO Gabe Newell’s Neuralink competitor is expecting its first brain chip this year 2 months ago:
I’m not even sure if it’s love. When something is all you’ve known, you just view everything else as strange and inferior. When you have so many games and have had so many experiences on Steam, the cognitive dissonance of accepting that Valve is quite problematic could hard to bear. Knowing that everybody around you praises Steam, with many turning to rage and harassment when they see competitors like Epic, the fear of being ostracized and ending up in the same position as those competitors is also a strong factor at play.
- Comment on Valve CEO Gabe Newell’s Neuralink competitor is expecting its first brain chip this year 2 months ago:
I even got to downvote that back then!
- Comment on Valve CEO Gabe Newell’s Neuralink competitor is expecting its first brain chip this year 2 months ago:
cultivates chill working culture
- Comment on "You can't just have Geralt for every single game" says his voice actor, and if you think The Witcher 4 making Ciri the protagonist is "woke," then "read the damn books" 2 months ago:
Let Doechii do it for you 😛
- Comment on "You can't just have Geralt for every single game" says his voice actor, and if you think The Witcher 4 making Ciri the protagonist is "woke," then "read the damn books" 2 months ago:
If it does “flop”, they undoubtedly would chalk it up to it being inclusive and diverse though. Otherwise they just quickly move on to the next target.
- Comment on "You can't just have Geralt for every single game" says his voice actor, and if you think The Witcher 4 making Ciri the protagonist is "woke," then "read the damn books" 2 months ago:
Very true. I have its history tracking disabled, but it still suggests those videos or creators even when I’m watching something that has no relation to outrage, like a movie trailer or a GDC talk like one on Unreal Engine.
- Comment on "You can't just have Geralt for every single game" says his voice actor, and if you think The Witcher 4 making Ciri the protagonist is "woke," then "read the damn books" 2 months ago:
just agitators who don’t even play these games.
Duh, however, they get millions of views across YouTube and X and hundreds of thousands of followers on Steam.
- Comment on "You can't just have Geralt for every single game" says his voice actor, and if you think The Witcher 4 making Ciri the protagonist is "woke," then "read the damn books" 2 months ago:
Searching for Dustborn on YouTube is the best way to get introduced to those channels.
- Comment on Lemmy.World no longer participates in this community 4 months ago:
The main maintainer of this instance and PrivacyGuides, Jonah, was last active on reddit just days ago, but a year ago on Lemmy. Clearly it’s not a priority for him.
By the way, it’s the same website that scrubbed the section on alternatives to the big tech social networks like Twitter and Reddit, making the wild claim that there’s no practical difference between them and the alternatives. They argued that the public nature defeats the point of privacy, but refused to account for the fact that the amount of personal and other data collected and sold by the corporations is multitudes more than what is collected by the likes of Lemmy.
- Comment on Downtime - Apologies and what went wrong 4 months ago:
I definitely felt that! Trying to check the feed and getting a 502 was not nice. Good thing I had an account with another instance for the interim. Anyway, no service is bulletproof and things absolutely go wrong when running a server, no matter how good or prepared we may be. Having working backups is instrumental and I’m glad you have that going.
- Comment on Mozilla is Introducing 'Terms of Use' to Firefox | Also about to go into effect is an updated privacy notice 5 months ago:
Is there something like GitHub Actions that builds straight from the code?