ggppjj

It doesn’t get them money, but it still registers as engagement with the audience which I think is really the only true metric.

I’m in tears, I’ve finally found the version of this toy I had as a kid.

Thank you so much for this shitpost, sincerely.

Eh, I think they also really have an infinite money pump with all of their worldwide products. I don’t think they would be able to hold out if VR were more widespread and actually became a market that big players were entering instead of dipping into and then exiting, but with the market the way it is, for people that don’t have powerful enough standalone computers to back them up… They’re the only product that truly could become the standard as of now. Even if you have a PC capable of running desktop VR, the Quest 2 is incredibly attractive with a reasonably good wifi router and steam link. “And if you have a Quest anyways, you definitely gotta re-buy beat saber because what if I go out to a hotel and wanna play, and hey look this game that I wanted on PC was on sale” and so on.

I say this as the owner of an index and a quest.

Unfortunately, my understanding is that Meta’s offerings are so cheap because they’re making a loss on the hardware to undercut competitors that don’t have the resources or desire to do the same.

I was leaving you the option to do so instead of telling you to stop as a courtesy. Considering you would rather not, I will change my approach to hopefully better suit you:

Stop replying to me. I do not want to talk to you.

it’s frustrating and difficult to talk to you about this issue. I still am confused as to the point that you have. Feel free to continue to attempt to explain it, but I’m not interested in continuing to talk to you. Thank you for your time.

The steam deck is making them money, that was a product developed by fucking around.

I don’t know how you read that from what I said, or how I could have “said this as if” anything. It’s a fact that stands alone.

Do you think that devs and engineers pay for prototypes themselves?

Whatever bud, enjoy being convinced you’re right so hard that you get mad at other people I guess. I guess the end result of the steam machine project or the steam controller or the index or the vive or the steam deck and multiple people at Valve describing that’s how it works are just not real because how they came to exist at all don’t make sense to you.

Steam made Valve more than $2,000,000,000 in 2021.

They have infinite money forever.

Gabe Newell runs a biotech company as well.

A couple million on a blue-sky product development pipeline is an incidental cost for the most part.

I’ve seen some arbitration agreements stating that you can’t collaborate with other customers who are affected by the same issue, requiring each customer to have a different attorney.

Oh no, I did it anyways and collaborated with other customers online. Oh well guess we gotta arbitrate that now.

Nano is the tool that people use when they don’t have a need for TUI editors in general and therefore don’t want to have to memorize how people with teletypes decided things should have been done 75 years ago and who also don’t want to get dragged into endless pointless bickering arguments about which set of greybeards was objectively right about their sets of preferences.

I’m glad people enjoy the editors they use and also I just wanna change a single fuckin line in a config file every once in a while without needing to consult a reference guide.

Clanfolk, a (very alpha and also very playable) game that draws clear inspiration from Rimworld, but has a kind of tech progression that feels spiritually similar to bootstrapping a factory in Factorio, while being set in the Scottish Highlands.

They’re still there, just deprioritized as compared to actual helpful reviews.

I don’t know what a solution would look like here. In your opinion, what should be done to stop Valve from being anti-competitive? What specifics should I be raising awareness of and looking into? What should be done by/about Gabe Newell?

I would like to know more about what you believe the solution here is, because at its core I see Valve as the end result of very talented and self-driven people doing an amazing job at delivering a very good product. I would hope that would lead to success, and I am given to understand that Gabe (to focus back in) is not a disinterested corporate figurehead as the position is with other software companies.

There’s some amount of anti-competitive behavior that is just… Doing business in a space with competitors. I write private code that I use myself and within the company I work for that I choose not to share with my competitors, is that anti-competitive behavior? This is a dumb example, but also I haven’t seen a direct convincing argument as to what Valve is doing to deserve the label.

In many ways, to provide my viewpoint, they’ve directly supported both unofficial modifications to their storefront by users (Decky Loader, for loading steam deck mods), modifications to their hardware (OLED screen mods, replacement parts on iFixit for reasonable prices), and even support Windows on the deck and are beginning (through reading commit logs) to support competitors’ hardware in their custom OS. They’ve singlehandedly pushed gaming on Linux into the mainstream eye and are doing well with it.

All that to say that I don’t think the way that Gabe became a billionaire was bad, and while I would prefer he use his personal wealth to better society I both don’t know enough about what he does with his money to know whether or not he’s already doing that and also think that any solution here would genuinely go against fundamental liberties and personal freedoms that I personally agree with. I’m not an absolutist on this, but enough of what I do know about the history of Valve and Gabe in specific lead me to lend him some amount of goodwill, because he has through his works and actions earned it from me.

I don’t disagree that billionaires are bad. Personally, I strongly believe in a Star Trek post-monetary future.

I wouldn’t call Gabe Newell a friend, although I suspect I don’t disagree with many of his opinions.

You are able to email him at gaben@valvesoftware.com, as is anyone else. I’ve emailed twice. Once when I was 13 to inform him of a bug in portal 2, and once a few years ago to inquire about steam being ported to arm.

There was a lot to explain about my position there and it may be a bit disjointed. If there’s anything I can clarify on my thinking, I’d be happy to.

I don’t see how posting to lemmy in general is going to influence people that disagree with you both because I don’t think there are many people here that do and also I think that your comment in particular is so far removed from the topic of this article that it borders on being a non sequitur entirely, and I’m worried you may get the feeling that the people downvoting you are against your message and not the fact that your message isn’t relevant beyond being a knee-jerk reactionary cry against Valve, one of the only privately owned companies that seems to listen to user feedback as thoroughly as the article demonstrates.

I don’t believe Valve is a monopoly and I’ve directly been able to talk to Gabe Newell via email multiple times over multiple years. Maybe some of their inter-business dealings could be better for their business partners, but as a lifelong steam user that so far has felt comfortable buying almost every hardware product they’ve put out I continue to feel comfortable supporting them because they seem to actually care about their customers from what I have directly experienced.

I don’t mean any of this in a confrontational tone, and I apologize for the general shill vibes of that second paragraph. I’d be happy to continue the discussion, I think your message is correct and good and I think there are better more effective ways of acting on it.

I mean, comments are free. If you believe that’s a decent enough use of your limited time on this Earth, who am I to argue?

This would’ve been a useless comment even if it were relevant.

Huh, released over a month ago

Form, not function.

And to top it all off, release codenames are Discworld references!