Just your normal everyday casual software dev. Nothing to see here.

People can share differing opinions without immediately being on the reverse side. Avoid looking at things as black and white. You can like both waffles and pancakes, just like you can hate both waffles and pancakes.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • Off the top of my head, the biggest one I can think of that had potential was Rumbleverse, which was an epic exclusive and got shut down. That one had a lot of potential just lacked visibility. just they didn’t get the player base.

    But doing a quick google search also gave me quite a few more, such as Gigantic, which was a third-person hero shooter that used its own exclusive launcher along with the Windows Store.

    There’s the Darwin Project, which launched as an Xbox Game Pass and did eventually go to Steam. However, by the time it hit Steam, the damage was done. They had lost all momentum.

    There is Rocket Arena, which was an Origin Epics game title that eventually went free to play and then closed down later.

    There was quite a few MMO-style live service games, but those have tentative life spans anyway, So I don’t think that it would be fully fair to list those.

    There was Knockout City, which was exclusive to Origin and consoles and also had a lot of streamer support, and did eventually come to Steam(albeit mostly for their cdn system as stated by one of the devs of it)

    Those are just a handful of games from a Google search, the reoccurring trait across all of them which was they were decent games that people enjoyed playing. They just lacked the user base. And by the time they made it to Steam(if they made it to Steam), it was already too late and they had already lost momentum.

    It’s likely that if those games had just been released day one on Steam that they would have had the momentum required to continue going. But instead they intentionally excluded the Steam user base usually due to some form of exclusivity deal.


  • yea the only way I can see confidence being stored as a string would be if the key was meant for a GUI management interface that didn’t hardcode possible values(think for private investors or untrained engineers for sugar/cosmetic reasons). In an actual system this would almost always be a number or boolean not a string.

    Being said, its entierly possible that it’s also using an LLM for processing the result, which would mean they could have something like “if its rated X or higher” do Y type deal, where the LLM would then process the string and then respond whether it is or not, but that would be so inefficient. I would hope that they wouldn’t layer like that.


  • yea looking into it, the steamworks policy doesn’t mention price parity outside of product keys via steam being sold on other storefronts, being said it does look like steam has submitted to the courts evidence of them communicating via email threatening studios that if they actually went through with it, that steam would just choose not to sell their game at all, this was uncovered during deposition during the Wolfire & Dark Catt’s U.S. antitrust lawsuit against Valve. They went on record admitting to the email and explaining that the steam key page was meant to be for all products as a whole. It sounds like it’s a situation where on paper they have it one way, but in practice it’s meant to be the other.



  • I’ve said this in the past but I think it’s worth restating. I’m amazed that EGS is willing to even front the cost of these free games. Like I would expect some form of arbitrary restriction like requiring periodic actual money purchase to be eligible. They have posted income reports that state the free program just isn’t working. Sure it’s increasing numbers, but that isn’t very helpful when your revenue is still decreasing ontop of the cost of the program. I mean it does help that its a flat cost and not a cost per install for them, but still.

    for perspective: my last purchase was void train in super early stages of the game (2021 I think?) and prior to that was satisfactory somewhere around 2018 or 19. Meanwhile I have collected a lot of decent games from the program. And I’m one of the better cases. I have /tons/ of friends who have zero intention of ever actually buying anything on the shop, they only use it as a log in, claim the weekly freebie, log out or play the freebie game. Heck, there are programs that are dedicated exclusivley to log in as you, and claim the weekly freebies so you never even have to log onto the storefront. It isn’t a sustainable model.

    I feel like they would be better off forcing an annual payment history check on the platform, something stupid small like “if total paid is > 5$” or something cheap, or even like how steam does it where once you purchase something once everything unlocks. From a financial/business mindset, I don’t get their intent on the current program. It only encourages people to grab games and never actually spend money on the sinkhole.






  • I don’t use twitter either, its blocked by choice on my DNS blocker but, the majority on the platform are not a pedo, regardless of the owners of it. It’s still really the only valid mainstream option for content creators. Do you have a better option? Because I know bsky or lemmy sure as hell aint going to get the job done for them (they have already tried that and went back due to lack of usage.)

    its a circle, creators aren’t going to leave the platform because consumers are there, consumers aren’t going to leave because creators are there. The only real hope of that changing is either twitter screwing up so hard that they can’t stay, or a superior alternative being made that allows both the creator and the viewer to leave at once, so far bsky has come to be the closest but has still fallen short.

    edit: changed tone and wording to be less aggressive.


  • In the case of content creators, you go where your audience goes. Almost all of the content creators I watch went back to twitter and almost exclusively post only live notices and social updates. I don’t have one that has a good opinion of the platform but, there’s a much larger audience there so therefore they stay.

    Visibility is everything, and there are many steps between following you off the platform and not engaging with your stuff. Many will not follow a creator to an alternative platform if it means having to juggle an additional network, they will just let that creator fall out of their interest group.

    I know for a fact I wouldn’t be on lemmy if I still used reddit, so any content creator I followed there I dropped. It is too annoying having to juggle multiple social media platforms.



  • For sure, anything of that caliber, be it a monetary violence such as a massive financial shift from wealthy to either the government structures or the people, to a physical violence such as a revolt, to a virtual violence such as banning products/companies that are not following the established mantra, I do think the end result would be the same, I doubt it would lead to the collapse of civilization but, I do have to say that it won’t be pretty and in best case scenarios the penalty is increased pricing for awhile while things stabilize, worst case scenario is dismantlement of known authorities/governments due to violent protests.

    For some food for thought btw on the economic scale? You could take half of amazons annual net income(income after taxes, liabilities, deductions etc) for 2024, distribute it evenly across all known people in the US (Amazons primary market) and be able to give each person $80-90. every person and that’s still allowing the company to keep 30B. It blows my mind. The same can be said about Microsoft. They made 88B in 2024, so half of that is 44B across every person would be 130ish per person. Nvidia would be ~18, apple would be ~144. It’s really sickening when you think of it the amount of money those companies have.



  • Yea, I get that. Stable is from the developer POV, my expectation though was that I could at least finish the install process without running into an issue. I didn’t expect that a built in driver would decide to just black screen and the official driver to just not work period(Linux Mint), or that the installer wouldn’t be smart enough to properly configure the X server to allow for a login(Debian 12).

    I somewhat expected it of Mint, but for Debian 12 I was pretty surprised to see it. You would think something that was good enough to reach a point where they did a package freeze would be able to at least reach a desktop before showing signs of an issue. But I guess considering that the installer itself crashes if you try to manually partition a server, and then decide to go back in and set up luks in the installer, I shouldn’t be too surprised.

    Being said, I have not heard of Did not know that PikaOs it was a Debian derivative, I might actually look into that one then. (and yes before you ask it is exclusively because it contains “Pika” so I think it would be funny to try it 😂)

    edit: I realized after seeing the logo I had heard of it, just didn’t know it was based off debian.






  • Fully agree. When I mention switching to Linux on the rare occasion it comes up I make sure to mention that you can do basically anything on the platform, but with that customization comes drawbacks. If you are afraid to research an issue then I would not recommend full stop. I also mention not to be afraid of needing to use the terminal if needed. Don’t expect a 1:1 it’ll do most things you can do on Windows, but there will be some things you just can’t