Cethin

Well, it depends on where you are. It doesn’t go as far in the US as it would in many other places

Oh, for sure. I just meant they’d be doing it overseas if they could. Right now they’re only able to do it locally, and are currently not able to continue because Ukraine is holding them off.

I feel bad about saying this, and this is more for other people, but don’t let other people’s expectations push you into having kids. If your partner wanted five kids and you didn’t even know if you wanted one, you were incompatible and you should have ended things once you discussed this like responsible adults. Instead you brought someone else into the world who may suffer just so you could try it out.

I’m not saying this to say you’re a bad person. Honestly, this wouldn’t happen to a bad person probably. You’re a good person who let expectations push you into a position you didn’t belong.

As others say, you may end up bonding with them later, and that will be great. They won’t be a baby forever, and also you’re really tired and probably grumpy right now. That’s all fair. I hope for your kid that things work out, but for anyone else reading this, if you don’t agree on children with your partner, it’s time to find someone else. That’s a fundamental thing that needs to be the same. It’s like if you want to be monogamous but your partner doesn’t. That’s just not going to work. There are some things that you just need to share or break up. It doesn’t make you bad for doing so. Also, yes, it’ll hurt and suck, but it’s the responsible thing to do.

It doesn’t hurt to try though. Make them actually shoot the EOs down. Don’t just assume they will so you do nothing. Force their hand.

It’s grammatically correct, but maybe not semantically correct. Grammar has to do with word ordering and stuff. Semantics has to do with word meaning.

Again, the point is you were saying (or agreeing) that copies being available for free decrease the value. You then later say it has intrinsic value.

I’m not arguing that they don’t have intrinsic value. I’m arguing that you undermined the point of value decreasing if it exists for free by admitting this. It doesn’t. It’s worth something no matter what someone else paid, and no matter what you paid.

A game decreasing in price over time isn’t doing so because it’s worth less (usually, with the exception of online games). They’re decreasing the price to capture customers who don’t agree with the original valuation. It doesn’t change value to the consumer based on the price changing. The object is not suddenly less valuable when there’s a sale and more valuable again after. It has a degree of “goodness” no matter what. The price doesn’t effect this.

I don’t know if you just don’t know how conversations work, but it follows pretty reasonably. It didn’t come from no where. First someone complained about “the west” doing colonialism. Then someone corrected that all major powers do it. Finally someone points out that tankies only complain about “the west” and never China or Russia who do the same things.

To be fair, China does it all over, especially in Africa. Russia probably would too if they could.

Also also, either the thing you’re copying has value that arose from the effort of creating it, or it doesn’t. If it’s of value, then it’s reasonable to expect payment for it. It’s it’s not of value, then you shouldn’t miss not having it.

Doesn’t this contradict the whole rest of the argument? It either has value or it doesn’t. It being available for free somewhere doesn’t change the value. If it’s not of value, then they shouldn’t miss you having it.

No, and there never will be a way. Once you create a system to detect AI generation, models are trained against it until they pass most of the time. You can create something that works temporarily but it’s only a matter of time until it stops.

They get paid. They just don’t get a share of profits. They are usually paid a salary or, increasingly more commonly, are paid as a contractor.

Adding on to say: no. It doesn’t cost the creator anything when a pirated copy is made. They potentially miss a sale, but if their item wasn’t in a store where someone may have made a purchase you wouldn’t call that actively harmful, right?

In addition, most media the creators don’t actually make money from the profit. Most of the time they’re paid a salary, maybe with a bonus if it does particularly well. The company that owns the product takes the profit (or loss), not the actual creators.

Also, a lot of media isn’t even controlled by the same people as when it was made. For example, buying the Dune books doesn’t give money to Frank Herbert. It goes to his estate.

My god, you people are so frustrating. I said Steam provides a good service. I only said their profit margins are significantly higher than physical retail (which is obvious), and you act like I’m saying people should avoid it. You’re so dramatic. You people are against anyone saying anything besides Valve should make more money. It’s crazy.

The plural of the noun bus is buses.

You’re pretty lazy if you stopped there.

That only makes sense in a dense, built-up area where there are enough passengers arriving and departing every 5 minutes that it’s worthwhile for a bus to stop. That may be true in downtown NYC, but it isn’t going to be true of the more distant parts of Long Island.

Three things:

first, buses (I’ll switch for you, even though my phones really likes the two s version) don’t have to stop at every stop. They can drive past stops that don’t have passengers. As long as passengers are on the route every five minutes then it’s got something to do.

Second, our society building so spread out is part of the problem and should also be part of the solution. Mixed use and denser living spaces should be being built. Suburban hell is a massive issue, and part of the reason buses won’t be as useful in some places.

Third, we don’t need to have a 100% solution. A 90+% solution is still great, and it’d be better than these taxis. Whenever someone say "oh, it won’t work in this situation* it isn’t really an argument. Yeah, any solution will have outliers. They need to be considered, but they need not obstruct good solutions being implemented.

They have to include them anyway, because almost no game is sold exclusively on Steam. The only features they don’t have to include are features for the customer, so that’s not relevant. The features relevant to developers are access to market (which is the same as physical retail) and DRM, which they have to include anyway if it’s available outside of Steam. Just for reference though, Denuvo is about $100k/y, which is close to the cost of 1 employee.

They’re a private company, so the data is not available, but we can estimate. GameStop, which IIRC is only US based, not global, has total expenses of about $2b/y. Valve, meanwhile, spends $221m paying employees in their gaming division, which is larger than the Steam division (that we don’t have data for).

As you can see, the cost of operating Steam is significantly lower than operating physical stores. That’s obvious to anyone, but for some reason I had to prove it to you.

I found settings for it in my phone’s settings menu, so yeah, no standalone app you can disable or remove. They baked it into the OS.

Storage and bandwidth definitely weren’t cheap in 2003.

To access the same number of people, all around the world, compared to physical stores it’s essentially a rounding error. Rent alone for all the stores would be far more than Valve had to spend, then you need employees to operate the stores and all the other ongoing costs. Storage was not as cheap, and from a consumer point of view it wasn’t cheap, it it’s far cheaper than physical stores around the world.

Additionally Steam provides features that a brick and mortar store could never even think of providing, including updates, DRM, instant access to global consumers, community features, in-depth data analytics, and the ability to adjust pricing in real time.

Not sure how that’s relevant, but yes. I didn’t say they didn’t.

While a lot of the work Valve has put in Steam seems both obvious and ubiquitous today, these were features they pioneered for both developers and consumers.

Again, sure. It doesn’t contradict anything I said so I don’t know why you said it.

I’d also like to point out that the only digital marketplace I’m aware of that charges less than 30% by default (Epic) is famous for losing billions of dollars in the endeavor.

Once again, sure. It doesn’t change anything in my comment.

I don’t know why if anyone says anything that is not just gobbling Valve’s cock with enthusiasm they get people showing up talking about how great they are. Sure, I like them too. It doesn’t mean there aren’t reasons to complain. That’s how you end up with companies enshitifying.

It almost feels like bots how frequent it is, but I just think you people have a compulsion to defend them from what isn’t even criticism, like they’re going to praise you for it. Well guess what? They don’t even know you exist.

The difference is physical retail had a lot of overhead. Steam just creates a new key and adds it to your account. Yeah, they also have to store the game data and distribution up to the ISP, but that’s really cheap compared to storing physical games at physical locations that only have access to their local buyers. Valve’s profit margins are significantly higher. They could probably take 5% and this would still be true.

If you’re talking about the first paragraph, then no, that’s literally what they do.