https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/lawmakers-tiktok-ban-pro-palestinian-content-1235016101/

Always remember

Remind people that a monopoly isn't illegal. Abusing a monopoly to prevent competition and using a monopoly as a means to create unfair market conditions in other categories - Windows and web browsers in the past or Apple's monopoly on iOS software distribution.

Consoles are even more restrictive than an iPhone is still in the US and was in the EU. Complain about Steam all these devs and people want, unless it can be proven that Valve is using their market share to stop other companies from competing well, it's a moot point calling them a monopoly. That Wolfire lawsuit when I read the initial court filings they put out was a joke. It was citing Twitter posts and blogspam articles citing anonymous forum posts

Steam was not the first PC digital distribution store. It wasn't even great until like 2006/2007. In the early days Impulse could have been competitive but Stardock sold it to GameStop who in dumb move of the last 2 decades did nothing with it. Desura did not improve. GFWL was terrible. Windows Store used to have issues with making storage unreclaimable without a reformat of the drive. Direct2Drive never improved. GamersGate just stayed a key seller. GoG was never going to grow without regular day one games which wasn't going to be competitive as DRM free. Humble Store stayed a key seller.

Amazon and Epic's idea was to just give away games. Ubisoft and EA stores barely even had games they didn't publish. So sparse I bet they didn't have self publishing tools. Those 2 puzzlingly regularly had issues maintaining login sessions persisting over time. PC gaming is dieing was the mainstream meme until like 2015. Epic on Android doesn't even have a library of owned games view and it's been almost a year since that released.

Valve didn't make Amazon, Microsoft, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, Stardock+GameStop, Direct2Drive, ... all under invest and/or mismanage their PC game store platform efforts. It's not up to Valve to stop making the platform more appealing. EGS is 7 years old. Those other companies have been doing PC game stores for much longer. I remember buying and downloading PC games from Amazon before Prime gaming. It was just like Direct2Drive. Since 2004 Direct2Drive was always a storefront for any publishers game whereas Steam didn't start listing 3rd party games until 2005.

If any service was comparable to like end of 2013 Steam, that would easily be second best store platform. Instead every store is at best like 2010 Steam with nicer animations, bigger buttons. And today there's way more resources to make a competitor. More cloud service providers with mature onboarding tools. NPM install. A lot more open source databases. Kubernetes. Git. Etc. Should be able to do better than 7 year old Steam in 7 years from these companies that were far larger than 2002/2003 Valve when they got into PC game distribution. The big publishers were probably all wealthier than Valve up to like 2015

It's not Sony and Nintendo's fault that since the Kinect on the 360, Microsoft hasn't been able to manage their studios to be competitive with Nintendo and Sony studios

Steam has been the primary indie platform for games for like 15 years. Xbox had a moment in the early Xbox love arcade but the time the Xbox One came out, it was Steam and it has been ever since especially after Greenlight and early access

The machines the least appealing thing to me. It'd have to be Steam Deck priced to be worth it in my opinion. RDNA3 but less compute units than an RX 7600. Controller looks like a buy. Possibly that VR headset too

I'm hoping Steam Machines usher in good TV/movie streaming apps for Linux. I'd love to use a miniPC with a remote to replace AndroidTV/Roku

What is this corporate that replaces beef?

I do like durians. I've also never had issues with the smell. After learning how many people don't like the smell, I do notice that the smell does linger for quite some time

It sucks but my impression is that people familiar with releasing games on Steam all seem to immediately see why this could happen and gave feedback. Also it doesn't seem like a beloved early access game in general by those that bought into early access. It had its hype period a long time ago and limped out of early access. Now Valve is trying to help them market

Steam for the most part is the primary marketing platform for indie games. Not just for PC, also PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo because of how lackluster those shops are for discoverability of games that aren't front page advertised with large thumbnail/poster placements. Success on Steam is viral marketing for other platforms

Still recommendations are always to try to build a following both on and off Steam. Twitter for a while were the major social media accounts indies should spend time building up a following. Now it's Tiktok. YouTube and Twitch influencers are also a good choice for getting viewers converted to customers but you can't just pick a popular person, got to be mindful for if their viewers watch for game recommendations or for the personality only. So in that way, it's not as simple as pay a popular streamer to play your game and their fans will play the game

Regardless Steam is the best for marketing. Steam curators are way smaller than YouTubers, streamers, Tiktok but it's highly directed at spending customers. Some Steam reviewers have followers. You can follow game developer/publisher pages. That's how I learn of some games. I get emails and check out publisher Steam pages of games I like.

Until any competitor actually tried to compete with Steam as a service, I'm not going to knock Valve heavily over Steam. They keep improving. Itch is not anything close to marketplace that can compete with Steam. It's even more barebones of a service than Desura over a decade ago. At the basic level to compete with Steam, it needs a desktop client and social media functionality for developers to build followers. Maybe it needs to open source and join under the Linux foundation or KDE or something to help guide it to the next level

What's great is that their replies took more effort than just saying store bought meatballs

No shit? Games released on the Xbox store, Xbox store has a monopoly on it. PSN store monopoly on PSN store games

Going back to the spike TV days, it has always seemed to me that Geoff just wants glitz and glamour in video gaming that he can enjoy. And then with age that makes the glitz and glamour crowd for him also get older. Video game developers, welcome to the art gallery world, film/book/music/stage/television awards. It's a bunch of old people with money and glitz and younger glamour that call themselves producers of any kind they can think of predators trying to party and network and that's about it. Thing is with the game awards is that award shows peaked back in like 2005-2010 before YouTube and social media really took over media gossip. The game awards has been trying to make some prestige event out of a dying format that lost credibility with how non-inclusive these awards actually are. And I'm not talking about American social politics inclusiveness, I'm talking awards shows that want to be American/Euro-centric in a media landscape that is increasingly not that. So awards shows we know out here are declining marketing platforms for their potential domestic sponsors too because they're just not able to appeal to people like they used to when these shows aren't recognizing peoples super favorite game from like Colombia or China that was a hit on Steam but never paid a dime in advertising to American and European media organizations so get no media coverage

It does look really good. Hoping that the Steam Deck, Machine, and Frame are all successful to a point where there's more interest in TV/gamepad centric UI applications for Linux. Don't need much variety. Pretty much media apps

That's everything of value. All a well decentralized ledger could do is make it incredibly hard to block transactions, change the parameters for total coin supply and dispersion rate. Don't know why anyone expected anything in terms of more even wealth distribution. Wealth distribution is determined by off chain factors. Factors no different than any other value store

PC game emulation is the only thing I care for in high end phones. For that 16+GB is good. Sucks that we're going backwards in consumer electronics affordability

This. Steam Workshop I only use for my basic Witcher 3 mods being removing weight limits for inventory and stuff like horse sprinting stamina. I think it's been over a year since witcher 3 workshop launched. There's barely anything on there. Everything is on Nexus. All the ultra wide monitor support mods I grab off codeberg, GitHub, gitlab, or Nexus. I remember all the half life mods I used to get off modDB. Steam workshop is a far distant second to Nexus for mods for me. Close to GitHub for how much I use to download mods from

Love loco mocos. I love gravy

Nice. First time I had it was like 8 years ago and I've been all about it ever since. Hawaiian food I like meat jun too but hard to beat the caloric weight gain explosion of a loco moco. I'm happy with a pool of gravy

Rocks pirates favorite in the series so far. Rocks, Whitebeard, Big Mom, Shiki, ... golden. Garp and Roger stocks further in the gutters with every reveal

I'm certain Valve has something cooking to make all these third party emulators redundant. These are already pretty consistent with playing 2D games and older 3D games (not even that old). It's a potential market of users way bigger than a Steam Deck will ever be

Garp can be heroic but can't make up for how old he his while all this evil is happening while seemingly being a top combatant for decades. His son is out there successfully liberating nations and Garp is eating crackers and talking about training the future of the navy. He could have done more good with his son I bet and if Oda tries to shoe in some justification in how Garp had to stay in the Navy to help his son succeed, I'm rolling my eyes