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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Hooking a whole desktop to a TV is intrusive with most desktop form factors.

    Most people who want a console don’t care about upgradability or repairability, and that’s certainly not the main thing that “makes PCs so great.”

    Most people gaming on PC are equally “trapped in an ecosystem.” This has a desktop mode if need be, but hardly anyone does games outside of Steam.

    “It has Linux but most users won’t notice or care” is a double positive.

    “It won’t push the player base, only the devs” is a double positive.

    The point of a console isn’t to make people into more technical proponents of open source projects. It’s to play games.

    And if it’s competing in the console market, especially for people who aren’t terribly interested in the “Call of Duty” type AAA titles of today, it seems like a perfect fit.



  • The biggest thing with auto insurance isn’t covering your car, it’s covering the cost of whatever you hit sueing you.

    Your car may only be worth $3,000, but if you hit a pedestrian and they require a dozen surgeries and are wheelchair bound for life, you bet you’re ass you’re getting sued for a few million in medical costs.

    In a reasonable country, those medical costs would be free, but since they’re not you need some sort of protection against once accident bankrupting you in civil suits.











  • Sure, many games are tied to various Steam services, but that’s by the choice of the games developer. Steam offers various built in services that game devs can choose to use if they want. It’s not like it’s some kind of requirement.

    You might as well complain that game devs use Windows binaries, locking their games to only run on Windows. Sure, I prefer it when they target other platforms, but that’s 1000% not Microsoft’s fault that the dev chose to dev for their platform. I’m not mad at Microsoft for so many games being Windows only. I’m mad at the devs.

    And games that build themselves around Steam services are of course going to be tied to Steam. That’s a choice the devs made. If they wanted their game to run without needing the Steam client, they trivially could have built it that way. They just would have had to either reimplement all those Steam features themselves, or done without.

    And if people want those Steam features, every store client who wants to run those games would have to implement those features in an interoperable way. It’s easy to say “have interoperability between clients,” but that’s glossing over the potentially thousands of dev hours required to implement all of the features needed. And that’s assuming they could all agree on a spec.

    And to your final point about being open source. First, it gives very “any musician who gets paid is a sellout” energy. But more than that, it doesn’t actually solve the problem you have. Even if Steam open sourced their tooling, that doesn’t mean other players in the space could integrate it. Steam has grown organically for the past 30yrs, and trying to extricate the deep inner bits and then graft them on to your own solution isn’t as easy as it sounds.


  • But they aren’t tied to a store? When you download a game from Steam, it’s just an executable on your box. You could put it on a hard drive and move it wherever you wanted. You don’t have to launch games you bought with Steam through Steam. They aren’t streamed. They are saved locally to your computer.

    You can only download it from that store, sure, but that’s not apples to apples. If I buy a game from GameStop, they won’t give me another copy for free, just cause I threw away the copy they gave me. Once you download the game, that’s what they sold you, and it’s notionally your responsibility to keep track of it. Them allowing you to keep downloading new copies forever isn’t strictly necessary, and costs them money every time you do it.

    And if you can run the games you downloaded without Steam, all you’re saying is “there should be other places to buy your games.” But there are. Those exist. Less people use them, sure, but what do you propose? Kill Steam because too many people use it to buy their games? Legislate that people are required to shop at other stores?




  • Why do people care?

    Like, I think I’m in this picture, as I’m sure I’ve got at least a moderate bit of autism/ADHD, but it’s not that I worry it’s “not bad enough to seek treatment.” It’s just that I’ve built up solid coping mechanisms, and a formal diagnosis just doesn’t hold any weight with me.

    Like, I don’t understand why I would even want or bother with seeing a doctor about it.

    But maybe I’m just on the “less severe” end of people represented by this meme, or maybe I’ve just had more time to build up systems for dealing with it or something. Idk.