crossmr

Canada either did, or still does, have a law like this. Years ago back when getting chipped cards for satellites was a pretty big thing, a lot of people near the US border could get ones from the US that weren’t available in Canada and get the chipped card or whatever it was. At one point the company made a request to the Canadian authorities to crack down on it, and the response was something to the effect of ‘your product isn’t available here, you don’t have standing to ask us to do that’.

It’s easier to define it as this:

If you commercially release something and region restrict it, people in any region where you don’t also provide a legal way to purchase/use it should be free to get it however they want.

It’s not insinuating anything like that. It’s stating a simple fact that they got 6 Billion dollars for basically zero effort and resources. All of the things you’ve described are to allow people to buy more games. They cement valve simply as a store front and platform but not a game developer.

This is the point as to why Half life and most other games were basically dropped. Valve made 6 billion in passive income while trying to build a game selling and delivery platform. Even the best game in the world isn’t going to make that kind of income and it’s likely to take more effort than what they’ve done already.

This isn’t anyone playing anything. This is a story about how people bought $19 billion worth of games and then never played them (which would suggest they likely never downloaded them either). Valve made over $6 billion and used no more resources than serving up the store page and the payment processing.

and this is why Valve is in no rush to pump out games like they used to. Why they have no real burning desire to continue half life. They made enough money to keep the lights on indefinitely by doing no more than simply letting an automatic process run that any first year web developer could set up.

Because until we see it, unedited, we don’t really know the truth of what occurred.

Good to see people would rather be ignorant and make assumptions than understand what actually happened in an incident.

I test all scripts as I generate them. I also generate them function by function and test. If I’m not getting the expected output it’s easy to catch that. I’m not doing super complicated stuff, but for the few I’ve had to do, it’s worked very well. Just because I don’t remember perfect syntax because I use it a couple of times a year doesn’t mean I won’t catch bugs.

Gen AI is best used with languages that you don’t use that much. I might need a python script once a year or once every 6 months. Yeah I learned it ages ago, but don’t have much need to keep up on it. Still remember all the concepts so I can take the time to describe to the AI what I need step by step and verify each iteration. This way if it does make a mistake at some point that it can’t get itself out of, you’ve at least got a script complete to that point.

and valve got 30% of that… for basically doing nothing more than hosting a store page. If you’re wondering why we don’t have Half-life 10 by now.

Someone get on midjounrey and get us a potbelly mosquito.

are there a lot of new things to say about this after it was posted 4 days ago? https://kbin.run/m/[email protected]/t/503264/I-Will-Fucking-Piledrive-You-if-You-mention-AI-Again#comments

@[email protected] if your post is ‘TIL A star system exists’ and you can’t really tell us an interesting fact or piece of information about it, I’d say… don’t write something to be honest or if you really want to write about that thing, try to find something interesting about it to actually submit. TIL on Reddit also has a rule about titles standing on their own. Yes you can expand on topics inside the submission, but people should get something simply from reading your title. A lot of those titles don’t really give you anything at all.

@[email protected] These all amount to nothing more than, TIL X exists. The problem with posts like these, is that if you can sit there and write endless posts just like it, it’s not really a good post. TIL about fir trees, TIL about car tires, TIL about weed trimmers, TIL about Disney land, etc. etc. etc. etc.

TIL about the TRAPPIST-1 Star System TIL that there is a global, time traveling radio (sort of) TIL norway has a homocide map with exact locations of murders.

This doesn’t start with TIL and doesn’t really sound like a TIL at all:

https://kbin.run/m/[email protected]/t/492996/What-Do-Neural-Networks-Really-Learn-Exploring-the-Brain-of#comments

We then have topics which are vague and don’t really tell us anything.

TIL: How Henry Ford’s Strange Social Program Aimed to Control The Personal Lives Of Workers TIL: How The IMF and World Bank Debt Trap Countries and Force them into Austerity

This is just presented in non-neutral way, and has been posted dozens or even hundreds of times over at reddit, so much so that it’s on their repost list:

TIL this Fun Fact: Unfortunately, Chainsaws Were Invented for Childbirth

Clickbait style submissions like this:

TIL that in 2014, a photographer tried to copyright a monkey’s selfie and sue Wikipedia for it.

In this kind of submission the user is telling us about an event, without actually telling us the outcome of that event. It’s unclear exactly what ‘fact’ it is they’ve learned, beyond ‘an event happened’, it’s delayed news at best. A much better TIL would be about the outcome of the trial and what legal implications that has.

Topics like this are just written to say LOL These people are stupid:

TIL the US government once banned sliced bread

and are missing crucial context in the title like the fact that it happened during WW2 when there were shortages.

TIL Most Explosives used by Hamas Are Unexploded Israeli Bombs Dropped on Palestine

This is literally related to a current on-going international conflict and politics and seems to be written to support an agenda. There are reasons they have a rule about no news, and no political posts.

At least this place isn’t as bad as a TIL I saw on another instance that seems to do little more run a bot to repost submissions from Reddit

@[email protected] no? Magazines should have standards for their posts so that a community can be formed and grow around those principles. The principle of ‘just post whatever you want’ doesn’t encourage much beyond post anything. The only real restrictions on posting in the rules are: no baiting, promoting agendas or self-promotion.

There is nothing there on how you present what it is you’ve learned beyond ‘start it with TIL’. There isn’t even a hard requirement that you link to the source, which makes no sense.

Requiring users to actually link to a reliable source to back up what it is they’ve learned, and to present the knowledge in an objective and readable manner should be a bare minimum.

@[email protected] Not just yours. The most recent is just little more beyond ‘TIL X exists’ a couple before yours is ‘TIL X exists, well sort of’ so it’s not even that vague. There are in fact several like that in recent posts. Some are opinions are just vagueness, or nonsense.

As downhill as TIL on reddit has gone, the rules there are a good foundation but do require active moderators to remove the stuff that doesn’t belong.

@[email protected] content dumping isn’t an improvement.

@[email protected] This is on the microblog, not the main thread posting area.

I find it great when we have a meeting every other half hour. I get a lot done on those days.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2830720/FreeInfantry/

Free Infantry. I wouldn’t say I’m hooked, but it would be great if this really took off again. Was a great game back in the day. I’ve completely forgotten how to play it or do anything and mostly fumble around.

I don’t think the age of the game is really relevant. If the game is active and you’re making money on it, you support it.

For the base game, which I think 30% is still more, I think it certainly makes sense. Because they’re providing a complete solution.

For in-app purchases or unlock purchases, whether or not the purchase is in-app, the solution isn’t complete, and not worth the 30% they charge on those transactions. It would be trivial for every transaction to have a custom field where you could store an array of what was purchased in in that purchase and have it returned when the transaction was checked. Boom, complete solution. Specifically for in-app purchases if they wanted to take 5% since all they’re doing is the job of Stripe and nothing more, then I’d consider that fair.

They lowered the cut for people who didn’t need it. Massive publishers selling tons of games. Arguably indie games that only sell a few copies need a larger cut than EA on their latest blockbuster.

There isn’t much in the way of scale here. Their bandwidth isn’t monitored on a per game basis, and if that was a factor in the cost they’d be basing the cut on the size of your game. Some 1 gb indie game pays the same cut or larger than a 100gb mammoth from EA. Valve is also way more strict with that indie game in getting itself published than they are with the EA game as well.