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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Semperverus@lemmy.worldtoFunny@sh.itjust.worksSelf Identified
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    5 days ago

    Thats not true. If it were, the drama wouldn’t pull so many views on-platform and spawn tons of conversation off-platform.

    It’s perfectly okay if you don’t care about it, but please be mindful of attributing ones own views on life and current events to the masses without hard evidence.



  • It makes perfect sense if you’re a systems engineer.

    Downloading games costs bandwidth.

    Steam services millions of customers daily.

    Valve, correctly, decided to do a bit of load-balancing by prioritizing updates by how recently and frequently you play them, and spreads them out.

    This is nicer to their systems, and its nicer to most people who don’t live alone and have to share internet with other human beings in their home (or at work).

    You’d think it would be no big deal, bandwidth is “infinite” and “free” in most peoples minds. But there is a maximum throughput, and there is a cost in energy, time, performance, and money.

    Load-balancing, people. It saves lives.











  • You missed 3 times in a row.

    1. The 30% cut thing has been industry standard since the dawn of time. Valve goes out of its way to make exceptions to this rule down to 10% in cases of very high volume but everyone only talks about the 30 since thats all they hear about. Only an Epic Games apologist would parrot this as a talking point. Plus, developers are not getting nothing for that 30%, especially games that use Valve’s Steam networking services. Unlike Microsoft and Sony who also take 30% cuts, Valve doesn’t charge $10,000 per game patch to have someone review and approve it to be published.

    2. The regional pricing goes both ways. There was literally a game recently users were complaining about NOT getting it because the publisher opted out or something, where the regional pricing would have made the game affordable but in USD (Valves country of origin and therefore default), it was exhorbitantly priced. And this one wasn’t even Valve’s fault.

    3. Valve did not censor games directly on behest of the Australian nutjobs, they fought back against them pretty hard, but Valve is ultimately beholden to the payment processors (who they also pushed back on). Once Visa and MasterCard started threatening to pull services, Valve was put in a “comply or die” situation. If they didn’t do as they were told they wouldn’t be able to accept money with anything but Stripe or Bitcoin. They literally lost Paypal as a payment option over this fight.

    I think its very dishonest of you to frame these points as enshittification. This term means the intentional degradation of a product or service for the sole motive of increasing profits. For point 1, the whole industry literally started off like that. For point 2, it was literally an attempt at equity (valve may not get the deltas correct but in some countries they’re losing money on games). And for point 3, you might be able to argue it but ultimately it wasn’t for profits so much as it was survival.

    If you wanted to shitsling at Valve, you should have mentioned how Valve invented lootboxes in TF2 and then exacerbated the issue in CS:GO/CS2, releasing that awful plague onto the industry.