Thanks. Whenever I raised the issue of homophobia or his general support of right-wing causes that threaten people's privacy (see the aftermath of Roe v. Wade for example), I got downvoted, be it on the PrivacyGuides sub where they adore the browser, or right here just weeks ago.

I have no idea why this is newsworthy. Epic's own 2019 documents and testimony in the Apple trial showed that the company did not expect the store to be profitable until 2024 or even 2027. The strategy of heavy investment and operating at a loss to turn a profit later worked for Spotify, Netflix, Microsoft, and many others. Even this week, there are headlines like "Elon Musk Says SpaceX's Starlink Achieves Breakeven Cash Flow".

Look up the paradox of tolerance.

You don't have to be a researcher to understand that. Just don't be Elon Musk.

Sure, but Valve essentially reserve the right to no longer sell your game if it's offered cheaper elsewhere. See the quotes on pages 54 through 56 of the complaint.

“Impairment means something is there, it’s being used, it just isn’t as good. Prevented means you shut it down.”

Epic’s expert Bernheim argues that Google’s expert Gentzkow “ignores four critical aspects of Google’s conduct,” including:

1. Google impairs competition without preventing it entirely

2. Google’s conduct targets comeptition as it emerges

3. Google is dominant

4. Google shares its Play profits with its competitors

“When push came to shove, he talked about whether competition is prevented” rather than impaired, says Bernheim.

The upshot of that: Bernheim believes Epic doesn’t need to prove Google actually blocked competition entirely. In his opinion (for Epic), Epic only needs to show there were no good alternatives to Google Play and Google Play Billing. It doesn’t need to show there were no alternatives at all.

For example, says Bernheim, Gentzkow presented a chart titled “Was Fortnite Blocked?” showing that revenue tanked on Google Play after the app was kicked off the store, but didn’t tank for Android phones that got Fortnite a different way.

But “If off-Google Play was a good substitute for Google Play, you’d see when one drops, the other goes up commensurably.” That didn’t happen: demand stayed stable outside of Play, according to the bar graph we just saw. “There’s no indication that any of the people here are substituting to off-Google Play.”

It's offensive to the animals to be comparing them to humans. No non-human animal would have been this cruel.

I run a community of over 11K almost by myself on reddit and I can't say I struggle to moderate it. Here on Lemmy I post to one I set up, but I'm the only one doing it. That said, I saw virtually no moderation tools, so it would definitely help to have something. However, I don't want my posts to get lost or be spread across two or more communities, as opposed to having everything searchable in one place. What would be the technical obstacle in copying the posts and preserving the dates? If size is an issue, they could be capped to a specific size, only with the metadata transferred in those cases.

Not only keeping but returning en masse.

In the future, please do not ignore clear cases of abuse. The logs you published fully support the report reasons given by me in the case of one individual using 6 accounts, all newly made and going straight to grief as their first actions and throughout.

Games reach Game Pass via deals similar to those offered by Epic. Microsoft pay the publisher a fixed amount, so if it is believed that it beats the proceeds from the projected sales for the given period, there's no reason not to agree to it. In other words, it's all about how much they would offer and how long it would have been since the game release.

Has Russia's morality ever been above that? Apart from some minor glitches in the system seen as chaotic, its history goes from one dictator to another.

You can hope for that or you can become vegan today to no longer contribute to those industries.

Some people previously saw Vladimir Putin as being an incrementalist, certainly aggressive, but careful within that. And you could say that the invasion of Ukraine was certainly not incremental, except perhaps by some crazy logic

It was incremental in that he first tested his strength inside Russia, in Chechnya. Then he moved on to Georgia, then Syria, then Crimea and the Donbas, and finally the rest of Ukraine.

This was a jury trial.

Putin doesn't like transformers, so hopefully that's fine by him.

Yes, my reddit activity is pretty much limited to that now. I don't want to abandon the community.

Worth trying first. In my experience, almost every app works without the Google store. You can also block the internet access for any Google service or app via its settings.

The main problem with the Steam awards is that they don't respect the actual release dates. For example, Red Dead Redemption 2, a 2018 game (or a 2019 game if you go by PC only) was named the Steam GOTY in 2020.

Steam also had little to offer in the years that were heavy on Epic exclusives and great games like Kena or Control, resulting in it being hard to think up a nominee.

Moreover, if I remember correctly, they also bar prior winners from their "most supported game" type category, which makes no sense because some games, like Euro Truck Simulator 2, get regular content and technical updates to this day. On the other hand, The Witcher 3 recently won in a category despite having been untouched for years.

Edit: Fixed a typo.

Epic actually invested in Godot with their MegaGrant. Godot is also available on the Epic store.

They won't. For most of its history, Russia has been ruled by dictators. Democracy is viewed as chaotic and unpredictable.

It wasn't published by some rogue and inexperienced entity. Accepting Epic's offer meant that it beat the projected sales figures. The game also ended up being a top seller on Epic, possibly adding to that revenue. On Steam, a negative score would likely bury the game, though we can only speculate.

Not from the perspective of someone whose only strength in the war in Ukraine is the number of people.

If Epic had required developers to, say, sell games 15% cheaper

Epic cannot do that because

In response to one inquiry from a game publisher, in another example, Valve explained: “We basically see any selling of the game on PC, Steam key or not, as a part of the same shared PC market- so even if you weren’t using Steam keys, we’d just choose to stop selling a game if it was always running discounts of 75% off on one store but 50% off on ours. . . .”

(source)

However, Epic regularly offers coupons out of pocket. Right now you can get 33% off any game above $14.99 or the regional equivalent, as many times as you want, even if the game is already discounted by the publisher. You also get 10% as cashback.

The closer equivalent existed since 2005 and did a lot to prepare the Russians to the invasion, as they would often paint Putin's opponents as Nazis controlled by the West and attack them.

That's just untrue. Games like Immortality, Citizen Sleeper, Unpacking, and Planet of Lana are complete, highly-rated, and on Game Pass.

Murdering people with fire extinguishers while levitating, of course.

The barrier troops, as with the convicts in Wagner.

You can read the complaint in full here.

Edit: Updated with a more recent version.

The source is also based in Venezuela. Isn't Putin friends with Venezuela?

We don't. My ultrawide mods get thousands of downloads and I haven't uploaded a single one to Nexus.

Why vegetarian, not vegan? Cows are a major contributor to the emissions, and people tend to increase their dairy consumption when going vegetarian.

I feel that ISIS actually won in that they made people hate Muslims even more, making it much easier for terrorists to justify their attacks and for regular Muslims to hate the West for hating them or even get radicalized. The divide is much greater and it's precisely what they wanted.

What was the outcome?

No wonder the "gender change" wording of their new rules is so similar to the new Russian law that essentially bans transitioning.

There are multiple factors that make this trial different. Most importantly, it's a jury trial. There are also internal conversations and memos between Google employees that might paint them in a worse light compared to Apple, though you never know. One thing that might work in Google's favor is indeed the trial against Apple that was mentioned in this case. The jury might have been instructed not to read about it to know its outcome (though pending appeals), but they don't live in total isolation or necessarily stick to every instruction.

Many of the games are DRM-free, as evidenced on PCGamingWiki.

Sure, there are neo-Nazis in Ukraine and there's no denying that Azov has that past. The Russian Volunteer Corps fighting for Ukraine is composed of neo-Nazis and there are multiple other Russian neo-Nazis now on the side of Ukraine.

There are also neo-Nazis fighting for Russia. The Wagner and Rusich groups for example.

More importantly, at the helm of Russia, there is a real fascist with a track record of countless acts of murder committed to further his idea of a great nation. Any ideological Nazi is like child's play in comparison, so I see no issue with Ukraine choosing the lesser evil and using those dreamers to fight another Hitler wannabe, just as they did Stalin in the years of Bandera.

Are you a centrist by any chance?

According to a Valve quote from the complaint (p. 55), it applies to everything:

In response to one inquiry from a game publisher, in another example, Valve explained: “We basically see any selling of the game on PC, Steam key or not, as a part of the same shared PC market- so even if you weren’t using Steam keys, we’d just choose to stop selling a game if it was always running discounts of 75% off on one store but 50% off on ours. . . .”