HBO has a good track record period. I’m guessing you mean GoT but that series is a gem until the last season. Even in the last season, the zombie fight lasted a whole episode and a half and was peak tv. House of the dragon was pretty good as well.
Domain names are a fucking racket.
Nothing new tbh. How we subconsciously round off numbers is a big part of super market pricing. Everything with a zero at the end seems bigger. Not only does 19.99 seem much smaller then 20, but even 21.99 seems smaller then 20 at a glance.
We don’t get many high budget fantasy shows. I’m all for it. Larian is already moving away from bg anyways, I think wizards of the coast upped their licensing price by quite a bit.
I don’t think a lot of Canada likes the monarchy. It would probably galvanize the separatist movement of Quebec which is mostly dead now from what I understand.
From a distance, it’s very hard to tell if it’s two consenting hobbits or if one is a child. It’s easy for them to find themselves on the list, poor Bilbo.
Link to that experiment? It sounds a bit far fetched, I feel like they aren’t using something based on an LLM.
Copyright companies and big AI. Google stands to profit massively if they are the only ones with the budget for a “legal” LLM. In any other context, strengthening copyright laws would be met with riots but they have managed to convince a good portion of the population that it’s somehow in their best interest in the space of a year.
That or China (probably both)
Fan fiction and fan art, without appropriate permissions or licenses, are usually an infringement of the right of the copyright holder to prepare and license derivative works based on the original. Copyrights allow their owners to decide how their works can be used, including creating new derivative works off of the original product.
Seems pretty clear. It’s at the discretion of the owner. The profit aspect doesn’t matter in terms of the law, it just makes it likely that companies will go to court over it.
Additionally, usually as long as the fan content is non-commercial, it is not a problem with copyright holders.
Notice how it says with copyright holders and not with copyright laws.
It’s copyright infringements but like I said, most won’t bother fans not making a dime. There’s economic advantages to having fans create and distribute your content for free. A company can choose to copyright strike anything with their characters in it at anytime.
It doesn’t break copyright laws because training something on any kind of data, as long as the data was legally obtained, is legal (this includes scrapping publicly available data).
You can’t generate a sonic picture and sell it for the same reason you can’t draw sonic in Photoshop and sell it. These are tools and it’s up to the user to use them in a legal way.
Fan art is actually illegal, companies let it be because they get instantly thrashed by fans if they complain.
Copyright laws are broken but in the opposite way. Can we rename this sub to “How to bootlick the copyright machine”
It just doesn’t work if the spine is still there.
We don’t know how much it costs for their servers but I doubt it’s anywhere near what they charge devs. Gaben having an 11bn dollar net worth kind of points to that.
The biggest problem is that it isn’t up to devs since steam has market dominance. Not putting your game on steam is basically suicide, they have close to 90% of the PC market…
Selling it won’t stop it. They set up the whole machine and instead of breaking it, they sell it off so they can keep their image and the profits.
I saw a few pictures floating around. One of the docs mentions two brothers and a third guy with specific first names and someone pulled up court documents showing they were arrested a week before the files with them in it were released.
I haven’t really seen it hit the news so idk, my guess is they might get a sweetheart deal as well.
Retail needs a location to store and sell their product. They need employees as well. One small Walmart has as many employees as steam does. Retails also buys the product in bulk, there is a bigger risk involved if it doesn’t sell or even sells slowly.
Huge difference imo.
Ya, I misread it and I’m way off. It’s 4bn. Epic also made a lot less, my stats are not for gross revenue but generated revenue before they split it with the devs. Amateur hour over here (me, not you).
I went off in my other comment and was a bit of a dick throughout the convo. It just feels like someone is being robbed here. 4bn is a lot of money and, from the wolffire lawsuit leak, they have less than 100 people working on steam full time.
I’m not reading the Google summary.
Okay, but your stats are still wrong? (Edit: so are some of mine though, disregard me being a dick here). Using AI wasn’t my point.
If so then Epic should have caught up by now, no?
Is making 1 000 million in a year with something like 5% not catching up? Do you think any of these billion dollar stores are running at cost?
Please back that up.
Having a vampire sucking up 30% of your revenue does affect a company but quantifying it would mean some pretty in depth studies and getting information from bankrupt companies. I do know most devs don’t like it. https://gdconf.com/article/gdc-state-of-the-industry-most-devs-feel-steam-s-30-cut-isn-t-justified-many-prefer-10-15/
And yes, all those points you mention are happening, but having a huge chunk of your profits taken like that obviously aggravates it.
What does that 30% pay for? Do you know?
I know it pays for Gabens yacht fleet worth 1.5 billion lol. We do have rough numbers. We know their employees count and revenue, and that they are making an estimated 11 million per employee from an article by the financial Times. That doesn’t include data atorage but I doubt the cost of offering downloads is anywhere near there revenue.
I own more computer games on disc from physical stores than I do from steam.
Stores don’t even stock physical discs for PC Games. How many of those are from the past 5 years? Last year had 95% of games sold digitally (PC and consoles). https://twicethebits.com/2025/06/19/the-shift-to-digital-gaming-why-physical-sales-are-declining/
But I do not trust the developer who originally brought the lawsuit
What dev? This is about a UK lawsuit on behalf of UK gamers. I can’t find anything about a devs involvement.
Nobody is suing Nintendo, PlayStation, or Microsoft over this.
PlayStation is getting sued for it, the trial is for March. This is specifically about the 30% (https://www.catribunal.org.uk/cases/15277722-alex-neill-class-representative-limited). (https://woodsford.com/woodsford-funded-5bn-class-action-against-sony-playstation-gets-go-ahead-in-uk-competition-appeal-tribunal/) .
I want to point out that this is pure whataboutism, just like the OP. But what about epic, but what about nintendo. All of them deserve to get sued.
I also never said
Then the proper response would be “yes, steam does deserve to get sued, epics behavior doesn’t even have anything to do with the subject, but they also deserve to get sued”. Like what’s your point then? Why make a bullet point of things steam does well if you aren’t trying to imply that they are “good enough to be allowed to abuse”.
I feel like you scanned right over half of what I did say.
We are both writing walls of text.
Steams revenue was 16b (edit: it’s 4b) in 2025, epics was 1b in 2024. At least click the links instead of pasting what the Google summary tells you. You are mixing up epics store revenue with their unreal engine revenue.
The fact is any game store front is a money printing machine mostly because of the rampant price fixing, hard to enter markets and abuse from those that hold the lion share of that market (Steam, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo).
That money is being sucked out of the companies that are actually making games, and is leading to a reduction in quality, layoffs and bankruptcies.
For regulation, we could easily have limits on the percentage store fronts are allowed to demand for digital media, but each time there’s a lawsuit, a bunch of idiots loudly fight it. Lawmakers aren’t going to enact laws that go against what the lobbyist want, especially if the majority of the population have been instructed that the boot is for their benefit.
Your list of pros and cons doesn’t matter, every player being compared is bad. It’s just a defense in favor of Gabens yacht fleet at this point. Exclaiming that steam shouldn’t change because you like their product, even though it’s clearly having an impact, is the same as defending Amazon because drop shipping is easier than going to the store.
Fyi, I use both, I literally own a steam deck and the sd card came from Amazon. Defending their practices is just fucking weak though.
Go on their support forums and bitch about it. It’s the least we can do. Obviously, I plan on deleting the app and retiring my account the moment it asks me for a picture. Not interested in playing the game and trying to trick it or something silly.