Paradoxvoid

@Paradoxvoid@aussie.zone
1 Post – 53 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

Canberra local, lover of all things geeky

People saying Steam doesn't have a monopoly because other stores exist, is the same as saying Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly on PC Gaming because Mac and Linux exist. Technically true, but ultimately meaningless because its their market power that determines a monopoly, not whether there are other niche players.

While Valve and Steam have generally been a good player, and currently do offer the best product, they still wield an ungodly amount of influence over the PC gaming market space.

Epic is chasing that because they really want what Valve has, though no doubt they plan to speedrun the enshittification process as soon as they think it safe.

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Here's another example where trying to chase the live-service money train has just ended up with a subpar product that people abandon or avoid almost instantly.

Unfortunately I suspect the wrong lessons will be taken away from this as well - e.g. the console/PC gaming market is too fickle, etc.

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It's the lemmy hug of death now

Ok but who actually doesn’t know what a magazine is

Kbin devs, apparently.

You've got to give Microsoft credit for their dedication to backwards compatibility.

The people who this really affected - third-party app users, people affected by the poor accessibility of the regular app/site and the anti- 'hail corporate' types have already migrated or are otherwise disengaged with Reddit, leaving just the bootlickers.

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Well Google has recently been forcing through its awful Web Environment Integrity proposal so...

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Like legit, some of these comments are utterly deranged. YouTube has ZERO competition in the mass market consumer space, everyone else is a niche player, and it's debatable whether YouTube even turns a profit despite that.

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I really wish they didn't have to kill third party integration with smart speakers for this. Google bait and switch at its finest.

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I heard someone approached Christian with that idea already, but he is wasn't really interested.

Setting up the whole ecosystem is hard - most of the app developers are very good with front-end and user experience, but setting up a robust, scalable backed is a completely different skill set.

Yeah I hopped back over from Edge when the manifest v3 stuff came out, and the two main things I miss are proper profile management and vertical tabs - I've been using https://codeberg.org/ranmaru22/firefox-vertical-tabs to get around it currently, but having a native implementation to both issues will be a massive (and recently rare) Firefox W.

I'd also argue Firefox is hardly mainstream at ~3% usage. Edge would be a better replacement given it comes with every Windows install (and many corporate environments don't allow using an alternative).

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This is why I absolutely refuse to install Valorant (and now LoL) - I could somewhat understand if an anticheat refused to boot up the game in question if something triggered it, but it going massively outside of its scope and wantonly disabling or killing other processes is just nuts to me.

As much as we can (and should) lambast Facebook/Meta's C-Suite for terrible decisions, their engineers are generally pretty legit.

The far cheaper Galaxy Tab A series is a near equivalent competitor for where Google is positioning its tablet (an at-home media device, rather than a highly-performant professional device), and for a lot of people, trading the considerably lower price for no docking station and some older specs is worthwhile.

Google need to either make the docking capability a lot more appealing, or reduce the price significantly because at the moment it sits squarely in the home entertainment sphere, but with a price tag creeping up to match professional-tier devices - why would someone pay the premium for what is effectively an ebook and Youtube device?

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Holy shit, it's actually impressive to tank that hard - not cresting more than 1000 concurrent players in over a month, and hasn't been able to beat 5000 since November... I know people love throwing the 'dead game' meme around prematurely, but if this isn't dead yet, it's definitely got one foot in the grave.

The major point is not so much whether your browser could block ads - your point regarding the browser ultimately having to render each element is true. The problem is that if the web server gets a request from an unattested browser (such as an old version, or one that has an ad blocker installed), it will refuse to serve any content, not just ads.

Regular people will inevitably get frustrated and we end up in scenarios like "<x browser>is bad, it doesn't work with <y site>" because of this proposal, and more and more people end up switching until you have to use a compliant (Chromium-based) browser to do anything at all on the internet, and Google's strangehold on web standards solidifies even further.

Is there any reason to use the Bitwarden Firefox extension rather than the app?

Bobby Kotick is likely on the way out at least (probably via golden parachute).

Since you're posting to a lemmy instance (beehaw), you should probably use the lemmy style - i.e. !community@instance - I don't think there's any need to create an explicit link since I think most UIs will format it for you.

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Revenue, sure - I don't believe Google shares profit numbers for Youtube separately to the rest of the portfolio. I could be misinformed though.

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If I really hate front end, but still want a lot of the responsiveness of a SPA, I'd have to give ASP.NET Blazor a serious thought.

It's largely all back end driven, with the dynamic elements driven via webassembly that pretty much works like black magic.

Tbh it sounds more and more like it's a kbin interaction problem rather than anything you're doing...

Not sure if there's any way for you to resolve it other than getting a Beehaw mod to update it for you.

Except Microsoft is in a distant third place in the gaming market - Sony has had the crown for that for years, and has actually used its market position in the past to make things worse for competitors and for gamers in general.

Again, revenue. They report revenue because it's a nice big number, but it's different to profit (which is why a lot of people suspect they don't make much actual money, if any).

America really is an amazing country. I've never even heard of about half of this tier list.

No one's suggested it yet, so I'll say Fire Emblem: Three Houses - lots of gameplay hours, especially if you want to go through each of the four storylines, albeit can be a bit repetitive getting to that point.

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With GOG, you could theoretically download the offline installer, give that to someone else and then ask GOG support to remove BG3 from your account, and be fully abiding with the EULA conditions.

You could use Google-assistant smart speakers to add things to specific non-Keep shopping lists - e.g. Any.Do and Bring are two that spring to mind. Google killed this integration a few months back to force users into using Keep if they wanted to retain this functionality.

That may be so, but that's not the way that the initial tweet is using the term, and not the commonly understood definition.

I'm not denying that Valve as a whole have been a force for good in the PC gaming market, but it's pointless to argue semantics and make up definitions to better suit personal bias instead of debating the actual point that's being made.

Pretty sure it's a triple whammy - Steamworks, always online, and denuvo to top it off.

Too bad, you get a battlepass instead!

If you look at the source between your post and the OP of this chain, you can see that they haven't got any special link formatting, but the links will all work correctly for any lemmy user no matter their instance - not sure if kbin handles it correctly.

e.g. [!destroy\_my\_game](https://programming.dev/c/destroy_my_game) vs !destroy_my_game@programming.dev

I suspect it's just a convenience thing, since a number of your links point to kbin.cafe search results.

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Yeah I do understand the reasoning and honestly can't fault them for it - they are a for-profit company after all.

Doesn't mean that it's not a good example of them throwing their weight around (which is admittedly rare).

Blizzard aren't worth going out of your way to defend with a review, but the game is fun enough that people playing it are probably doing just that - playing the game.

For my part, my friend group have played pretty regularly since OW1 released, and continue to do so. The game has its problems but they're no more egregious than the ones in games like Apex or PUBG, and certainly not bad enough to put it in the same league as all the hentai crypto mining asset-flips littering Steam these days.

Also no Google connectivity

I wish people would see this as a feature, not a drawback.

It forces politics to the centre. Parties put a huge amount of effort into 'bringing out the vote', and do things to appeal to the fringe which is how you get characters like Trump finding success. When this isn't a concern, parties can focus on policies that appeal to the majority of people rather than fringe groups that they can use to guarantee voter turnout.

Ironically this is actually an example of Valve using its dominant marketshare to suppress rivals - Steam's ToS require devs to have equivalent pricing across all storefronts if they want to sell on Steam at all, so making it harder for cheaper storefront cuts to translate to lower prices to consumers, who might otherwise move to a different storefront.

Devs aren't going to drop Steam as a store, so they're stuck.

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I'm using 'didn't vote' to include submitting an empty ballot, which for the purposes of the Electoral Act, is the same thing.