cybernihongo @ cybernihongo @reddthat.com

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6 mo. ago

You're welcome!

I'm not sure of any more examples, just like you I've only heard about it lately after Epic spawned. I'm NOT hoping to find more of this scummy behavior from Valve, but I wouldn't be surprised if I did.

They certainly are paying tax money to the Trump-Epstein Administration, as is every other American company, further enabling all those things. You have GOG as the European option that won't pay tax to the Epstein class. Also you don't really get to be a billionaire without also having substantial political influence...

But no one actually uses anything but steam.

Skill issue. Literally. See, unlike US politics, you don't have to choose between lesser evil and pure evil, because there are more options not vetted by two political parties and their donors. And in fairness to US politics, the lesser evil is recognized as a lesser evil, whereas here every single time I call out the pure evil, someone shows up and goes "they're not pure evil, they're GOOD GUYS"

Valve has done bad guy things, and I will call out the fact they've done things and their owner has been rewarded with seven yachts for it. You can come back to me when the hypotheticals with EA become reality.

Billionaires bad? Boo, get new better material!

Whatever. Go get your shilling paycheck from billionaire Gabe. Again, I hope it is more than $0, cause nobody deserves to defend a rich asshole for free, everyone deserves a paycheck for doing things well. <3

That said there's one point I noticed that's making me feel very icky.

How many artists and modelers started out from submitting their works for tf2/dota2/cs:go? How many animators started from SFM? How many people became indie devs thanks to the existence of the Steam greenlight? How many people switched over to linux thanks to proton?

Wow. You're saying this as if level designers haven't started their careers by making custom levels for Doom, literally one of the earlier indie games by creator id. Hell, you're giving the discontinued popularity gate called greenlight more credit than it deserves. The truth is Valve wouldn't be here today without the Quake engine that id themselves made - they've driven more innovation than valve's regression and capitalism sold as innovation. Yes, indie games existed before Valve has, shocker I know.

And as for Linux, once again, *wine. Even then, I switched to Linux and stayed because the basic experience has been elevated, and all of that without using any Valve software. If the experience isn't better than it was before, I'd just go back to Windows. Besides, what is the point of Linux if I end up changing my unaccountable corporate master for another unaccountable corporate master, Valve?

I know all of this will fly over your head. This is for everyone else in the room who thinks a little bit of "good things" absolve one of responsibility. I can totally say Microsoft Windows was a positive influence because it made computing easy to access and develop for, but understandably nobody's going to forgive them for the billion bad things they've done in turn.

Valve paid a bunch of publishers to sell their game exclusively on steam

Fuck yes. Here's Darwinia going steam exclusive back in the day. Pretty scummy Epic behavior isn't it?

https://forums.introversion.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=40203

and refused to implement basic features (like a shopping cart) in their UI?

Fun fact: itch.io doesn't have a shopping cart, Google Play doesn't have a shopping cart either, and they're both established (itch is even beloved despite that shortcoming, I personally like them). Only scummy Epic gets this complaint constantly lodged against them. Curious.

Then bitched about how everyone more successful than them was evil and wrong?

I don't care about their word battles, sorry.

Really makes you think what if the people in the meme actually understood these bits. Oh what am I saying, they would and still insist this is the big bad.

Oh damn. I only have the one vinyl and I don't even know if it still works or not.

Dude, get over it. Your precious company has enabled all the industry illnesses I mentioned and more, and all the pushback that the company gets for it is the owner being rewarded with seven yachts. If it were EA or dare I say Epic, I'd find you on the other side of the fence. Because that's what this is. Blind simping. For your short novel of a post, I hope you are getting paid $0.01? Cause your hero doesn't really care as much as you do, so you better be paid for it than be a fool and do it for free.

calling proton a "wine fork" is akin to calling a linux distro a "kernel fork"

It is a wine fork, and wouldn't exist without the initial contributions that made wine, the actual hero of this story, in the first place. Next.

Second, Valve never "fucked over game ownership",

Explain Steam to me then. Literally launched as a DRM built-in to hardcopies of Half-Life 2, using an account based activation scheme with a one-time use code. Literally the CD key people deride but now with a bloatware launcher and an internet connection requirement, for a single player game. After you use the code, the game is now bound to your account, and your hardcopy can't be resold in a legally playable form. Oh and now in our current day, they literally can decide to delete your whole library of "subscriptions" as they call it. I'm sure you'll find some way to blame literally any other party but Valve for things that Valve has done.

And because people like you kept throwing tons of money at them so other companies are compelled to copy them, along with their model of not owning anything... We get to the territory of...

accusing Valve in The Crew shutdown incident

And many countless other games that were shutdown or killed because of their DRM failing.

Does that mean that without Valve there'd be no crates? I highly doubt that.

It doesn't matter. Point is they're the first to popularize the concept and poison the entire industry with it. I don't care what "nicities" they might have compared to other companies, the fucking idea itself is predatory and Valve even more so for spawning it.

Valve is one of the few rare exceptions that don't try to exploit their consumers

Yeah, same Valve that sells in-game diamond rings for $100 and lootbox keys for $5. Same Valve that created the "trading card" system just to profit off of thin air by milking their userbase. Same Valve that spent years opposing refunds until Australia forced them to offer them. Totally not exploitative.

developing a platform that becomes a de-facto monopolist purely by the virtue of being that good

Propaganda. It is monopolist because it is. Their APIs deliberately lock in devs to their own ecosystem, such that it becomes harder to integrate into other ecosystems, therefore adding an artificial barrier to their competitors as they have to develop their own solutions and devs must also weigh whether they want to even bother with all this stuff. The recent lawsuits as well show they actually threaten devs when they have different prices in other locations. Plenty of reasons for their monopoly, and this rose-tinted "they're just that good" is nonsense.

by sponsoring and promoting FOSS

Microsoft contributes to FOSS too. Tell me about how Bill Gates or Satya Nadella are cool people then.

If every corporate CEO was more like him, i think the world would be a better place.

Oh I'd be terrified of this world alright. The world where CEOs do all sorts of bad stuff and they get praised for it even as we lose ownership rights or more.

Now try to turn on your head and oppose me without trying to demean anything i say in your head by calling me a simp

I've played the game by your own rules and I regret it already. You're so deep into believing the bull you're spewing, I don't think anyone will pull you out of it.

You don't become a billionaire by """offering good services""". The only way you can do that is by exploiting people and hoarding money - the methods to achieving that are all laid down above. All billionaires should not have this wealth while other people don't even have a roof above them. End of.

You know there's more than two game companies, right? You know that unlike the presidency in the United States of Fascism, there can be more than one game distribution platform, and those can be run by multiple companies, yes? While you're at it, buying games from Steam means your tax dollars go to the Trump Administration.

Oh, I should've clarified. My bad. By the same shit I meant their launchers are pretty similar in their origin stories, purpose, and how they get there.

I condemn all mass layoffs no matter who does it. Admittedly I haven't heard about any mass layoffs at Valve in recent history, so I'll give them they're better on that front (unless proven otherwise).

I've kept hearing these scare stories for years. Sorry, they're shallow as shit. I'm not settling for Valve just because scawy EA is worse. To hell with them both. Anti-consuner is anti-consumer. A billionaire is a billionaire, and all of them are delicious.

Also no, I hate the Epic fucker just as equally as I do the Valve fucker. Funny how Epic does the exact thing the other people did and somehow they're derided for it, though.

Just because there was bad (CD keys), doesn't mean we must settle for worse (phoning home to servers owned and run by a private company based in the fucking United States to play a fucking single player game). But if you're happy owning nothing... Well, I'm not.

Forking Wine and invoking XKCD #927 with Linux does not a hero create. Especially when said """hero""" has fucked over game ownership and introduced the wider world to the original lootbox, the Mann Co. Crate that can only be opened with $4.99 keys. Funny how nobody mentions that, when it is even more useless and predatory than the Oblivion horse armor that people keep bringing up to this day (which I wouldn't have forked over $2.5 but somehow even that low bar had more value to it). Gee whiz, no wonder we got The Crew's shutdown and tons of in-game economies.

Stop simping for a fucking billionaire. Treat them all equally.

The classic.

Does it have to be a CD? Can't it be a DVD?

So how much did he pay you to simp him? Hope they raised their simping wages above $0.

I know it is weak, I have cracked the games I used to have there myself before just giving up the account. It doesn't change the facts it harmed games forever, that it is the poster child of "you will own nothing and you will be happy."

My thinking about it is if I pay even a dollar to say itch.io, I know they mean well and I know they won't directly support US fascism, but they still pay taxes which would inevitably go to all the actively harmful faces making our lives worse. I wanted to know whether or I'm being overkill for that, but in all honesty there doesn't seem to be anything overkill about this, it's just the appropriate response.

I use a Xiaomi phone as well with Android, but with Google already planning to screw us over in the most """advanced flow""" possible, I'm only hoping Linux phones catch up and maybe it would be the next one. I did try to also migrate out of Google Docs but it seems my only decent European alternative is Proton which is not easily accessible in my country, what's with them offering a VPN service and all that.

Likewise, I appreciate every little bit of effort you make in boycotting the USA, and even 5% is better than 0%. Thank you.