It’s not harder to cancel than to sign up though. It’s a one or 2 clock process to cancel and a whole lot of card details entering to sign up.

Shadowy cabal? They literally list their board of directors on their FAQ…

Jay Graber; Jeremie Miller, the inventor of Jabber/XMPP; Mike Masnick; and Kinjal Shah.

What about a group of public figures is a shadowy cabal?

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.

What about that is unreasonable considering you’re using their platform to deliver your software and their multiplayer framework. Steam makes no money on the sale of your keys.

Also, if your issue is that steam is a monopoly, then go make accounts in other places and stop supporting that monopoly you’re mad about…

I got a ton of my games through humble bundle, Which distributes steam codes. I’ve also gotten steam keys through Itch.io.

As for your price argument, price matching is only for the lowest price steam has ever sold the software for. So you can sell your games at steam sale prices 100% of the time and have a higher price on steam. So you’re literally just wrong.

Except it has gotten progressively worse as a product due to misuse, corporate censorship of the engine and the dataset feeding itself.

That’s like saying we vote for presidents because “at least they aren’t Hitler.” I don’t like Liz Cheney any more than I enjoyed her Father. But she is not wrong in this instance and I think that’s the important take away in this article.

So less than 1% of natural born Canadian citizens in 2023 were to non-citizen parents? Really send like it’s not that big of a deal at all

He doesn’t care about the constitution. Like not even a little. He has said as much when he called for the termination of the constitution in 2022.

But steam isn’t trying to be monopoly. They don’t pay developers to only sell on their platform. Games that are only on steam are only on steam because steam is the only place that developer wants to sell the game.

That lawsuit is ridiculous and misses a ton of huge boons to developers. The fact is , valve only takes that sales cut for games sold on their platform but they never require you to make that sale on their platform. In fact, they are totally cool with you making the sale elsewhere and giving a steam code out which means steam makes nothing on that sale and they still host the software distribution for said sale. You can use their multiplayer infrastructure, their distribution infrastructure, and their communication infrastructure without paying them a dime if you sell your game on your own website. And it’s by design that you can do this.

As for consumer benefits, steam has a system that allows you to give your friends and family members access to your library. They are constantly selling games at steep discount (after getting permission from developers to do so). They allow a huge range of content with very light handed censorship policies. They have a robust multiplayer system and communications platform that integrates seemlessly with the games they sell and distribute. I won’t get into the Linux stuff but all I will say is Proton wouldn’t be where it is without valve and steam.

Steam is single handedly the most pro-consumer and pro-developer platform on the market. When developers put their games on steam, everyone wins. And it’s never a requirement that those games only exist on steam. When steam is the only place a developer sells their game, it’s because steam is legitimately the only place that developer wants to sell it anyway.

You can also use steam as a distribution platform completely free of the 30% cut by selling steam keys through your own site. Steam specifically gives developers unlimited free steam keys and games no cut from the sale of said keys. And it’s not even a work around, it is intentional.

You wouldn’t want that. JD Vance is miles worse than Trump in every way people hate trump for.

We also elected orange Hitler. AGAIN. Nothing surprises me anymore.

An auction doesn’t necessarily need to go with the highest bidder. Things can be sold to whoever the beneficiary of the sale decides. The families of Sandy Hook are taking less money than they would have otherwise by taking the Onion’s bid and they are accepting of that fact that they will get less money as a result. The other outcome is Alex Jones buying his company back or some other company that may use the platform for more continued disinformation. The Onion is the only business that can give confidence that their platforms will continue to push Satire rather than spewing hatred into the world.

The modern porn industry is much more independent than it used to be. Most creators control and own their content and choose where it gets uploaded initially. In the past, the porn business was absolutely abusive to their stars but I think it’s much less the case these days. Filmmakers have to fight for actors because if they don’t treat them well or pay them their worth, they’ll just post their own content directly to their fans. I’m sure there are still huge negatives but I just don’t think it’s as bad as it once was and I certainly don’t think the porn industry is something to be upset about these days.

I think that’s fine. The whole point of getting TSMC to start manufacturing in the US was to ensure that Taiwan wasn’t the only place making the chips the world is using considering China has been actively threatening to take Taiwan back for decades. If TSMC can be sustainable in the US and other countries, even if Taiwan falls off the map, the technology is not China’s alone. If I were TSMC, I would be trying to build plants in Australia and in Europe and South America to diversify and secure preservation should worse come to worst.

At the end of the day those roadblocks are just laws. Laws that he has been cleared to break as long as he does so under the pretense of an official act.

Every finite range has 2 limits. A bottom limit and a top limit.

There’s a lot of stuff everyone has that they don’t need. What’s your point? Are you going to go vegan? because technically you don’t need meat. Are you going to stop driving an automatic transmission? Because you don’t need that. Oh, social media (Lemmy included), you definitely don’t need that.

Yes a totally normal thing to say about a sexual assault victim who was murdered by her assaulter.