At risk of a shitpost:

…Is it projection?

Because there ARE places where one’s vote actually does not matter, places Tankies tend to glaze.

Though a complicating factor is that many Tankies clearly don’t live in those places… because lemmy.ml is blocked in some of those places.

It determines the price. If you “self-publish” on a web shop or something with DRM free downloads, you have to price it the same as on Steam, otherwise Steam may delist you. So devs can’t get around the 30% fee by offering a discount on their store.

And… practically, if the storefronts are the same price, most will just buy on Steam.

There can be other complications related to scammers, but that’s not Valve’s fault. Supporting both also takes more dev effort.

Rimworld took this route, at least for some time. It started only self published via the Ludeon Store yet ended up mostly on Steam because that’s where all the attention and mods went. I have the game bought both places, oddly enough.

Yeah, I swear, I love our lemmy content posters, but why must links always be from content farms or tabloids?

Does no one ever click through to see where they copied the news from? Does it never occur to posters “huh, this site is spam, maybe I should find another, if not the original source?”

Do people here, on Lemmy of all places, still not worry about Valve being a monopoly?

It worries me, deeply. Especially with how the community already makes up excuses for them doing anticompetitive things.

There is only one way that ends.

I can’t think of a single example of a “happy sustainable monopoly” in history, but at best they must be vanishingly rare.

there’s some form of capitalist fuckery going on behind the scenes that makes it financially unviable?

Uhh. It’s that Steam is an effective monopoly?

They hold all the attention, all the recommendations, so if you aren’t on Steam you are practically invisible.

There are a few major games that only self publish. Starsector is one, of the top of my head. Hence it is practically invisible to most.

Darn, I really like warhorse’s potential.

The Henry Game (as I call it) is so medieval it hurts. It is a work of art, but it’s not my favorite theme. I really want to see how they branch out.

What I would give for them to make a Shadowrun game…

I am all for reviving abandoned projects. For sure.

But I just don’t want slimey forks to be the reason it is abandoned, either.

The bit about vibecoded forks sapping attention is really important, though.

It’s different than the usual “solo dev fork drama.” Vibeforks spawn in the dozens, often go out of the way to draw attention, fizzle out quickly and leave precisely nothing constructive behind. They actively drain the main project.

It seems like a small thing, but these kinds of projects gain manpower and motivation through exposure. I’m seeing this exact same thing erode communities in other niches, too.

Ironically, this is even happening to LLM inference engines.

Llama.cpp and other community projects are drowning in manpower shortages.

Yet dozens of vibecoded “forks” keep popping up, to support some specific thing and fragment the community. There are also a number of commercial “Tech Bro leeches” that sap attention from the main project and send support tickets their way, while contributing precisely nothing back, with Ollama being the most notorious.

Because it got enshittified and politicized by Tech Bros.

If you wanna tell me about the usefulness of LLMs, you are preaching to the choir. I was playing with GTP-J 6B finetunes in 2022. I am quantizing some weights as I type.

However, you can’t look at me with a straight face and tell me everything is okay in this space. It’s a nightmare, a giant scam that is going to implode.

As Lemmy is a refuge for people who see how caustic mainstream social media is, folks here are particularly sensitive to the issues surrounding “AI” too.

In other words, Lemmy literally selects for enshittification sensitivity.

It is going to suck.

On the positive side, it does seem to be starting something of a reniassance in the modding scene.

Are we putting ourselves at a competitive disadvantage to big tech et. al. by being anti ai purists?

It doesn’t have to be either/or.

You can use LLMs as a tool and never touch Big Tech. You can use them for utilitarian purposes, without getting all cultish about them. You can actively hate “AI” while doing this.

Honestly, I think Big Tech is stoking the “Pro AI” and “Anti AI” divide, because what they’re most scared of is the public viewing it as yet another dumb automation tool. That would obliterate their business. They want the public to see it as an “all-in-with-us-or-nothing” affair, kinda like they did with social media.

Modern video games.

If you sent, say, a huge RPG or simulation game back in time, or even Minecraft, anyone who understood computation would drop their jaw. What a computer can render 90 times a second still kinda drops my jaw, when I think about it.

Trump (or whatever account manager posted this) is just trolling, for attention.

It turns out the whole world is terrible at “don’t feed the trolls.”

• Yes, but padded too. It is my favorite AC for sure. PLAY AS KASSANDRA, her voice actress is so much better. And the Atlantis DLC is my favorite part, a great ending.

• Probably, but… honestly? It is like a 100 hour+ game. 3 minutes to sign up with a burner email and another 40 seconds to uninstall the launcher isnt that big a deal, proportionally?

Playing devil’s advocate, sometimes the blame is not solely on Microsoft.

Bethesda Softworks is a good example. They’d basically doomed Arkane to dev hell with that vampire game, and kept that little detail hidden during the acquisition; Microsoft gave them total leeway when the Arkane team supposedly hoped a “rescue” instead, and never got it.

It’s a hard argument though.

Take Phil Spencer. Just Phil Spencer. Thats an incredible crater, right there, and he failed upwards for it.

You need to block the political subs. At least the ones constantly posting tabloids or reposting Twitter ragebait.

Even then… yeah. It’s a major problem for Lemmy/Piefed. There are cat subs, but niches feel buried these days.

Sadly, based on market share, people seem to be picking Steam over GoG.

They almost always pick what’s most convenient/familiar over what’s principled and better in the long term.

And Microsoft!

It’s nested enshittification.

(Though to be fair, Redfall was BGS’s fault).

+1 for “contact admins.”

This isn’t Reddit, they are human beings you can reach.

Don’t let the stalker “win” by switching accounts. If you do that, just do it temporarily; they’ll get bored after a while. Then come back to this account.