I assume it is a case of monopoly abuse. There are things you are allowed to get away with as a minor player in a market because no one has to do business with you.

For example, GoG can insist that developers give them a game build without DRM since they are a minor software store and a majority of their customers know they can buy software other places.

Steam, on the other hand, is used by almost all gamers. For many gamers, it is the only game store they use. If a game is listed on the Steam front page, a large portion of the games market will learn about the game. If Steam decides not to list a game, customers may assume that the game is not out yet, regardless of the amount of advertising they see for it. The publisher would need to have a special advertising campaign saying “yes, the game is out already but you have to use this other game store to buy it.”

Letting companies sell DLC outside of the Steam Store sounds like a bad deal for Valve but they look like a good company for publicly following through with it. If too many companies are abusing that policy, Valve is well within their rights to revise the policy and ban the behavior, taking the resulting PR hit. What they are not allowed to do is act like the good guy publicly while secretly and selectively enforcing a ban for companies that they are mad at

P.S. If Valve does ban selling DLC outside of the Steam Store, it would make Steam an unusually restrictive store. I can open up Steam and buy DLC for any game by Wise Wizard Games, associate that DLC with my online multiplayer account, then download the same game (for free) on iOS and Android, open up the new copies, log into my online play account, sync purchases, and play my newly purchased DLC from another app store. I have never heard of an App store not allowing it but most game developers do not implement it because it costs them money to code it up and they make money from people who buy the same contents multiple times.

Some times. Officially, all games on Steam include DRM and are supposed to run except if launched from the Steam launcher. Some developers do not bother getting that DRM working correctly.

The headline is misleading. The article is even worse.

The girl was not killed for refusing to marry. The girl ran away from home over the marriage (the strategy had worked for her to get out of her first marriage, at age 13). She was caught by a neighbor who did something bad to her (she did not want to say what and her family did not want to hear it). When her family found her 3 days later, they killed her for hiding at the neighbor’s house (despite the fact that she was taken there unwillingly).

I assume that the article is supposed to support the point I was making? Most of it is talking about how big pharma invents new medicines and then sells that at a very large profit, which harms people in poor countries who are more likely to need treatments for diseases like HIV but have the hardest time paying for them.

There were the cures that worked in theory but did not work in actual cells. There were the cures that worked on mice but did not work on humans. There were the cures that cure cancer but have a higher fatality rate than the cancer. Those cases cover just about every cancer “cure” you read about in the news.

Then there are all the cures that work for some people some of the time. Big pharma has patented them and is selling them for enough money to cover all of the other cures that did not work (and give everyone a very nice bonus).

Seriously, if some phara company could cure cancer, why wouldn’t they? They can sell it for 100k per treatment, make enough money for each of the 10 biggest investors to buy a small country, and then close up shop.

I still don’t understand why the bottom three teams have worse odds than teams 4-10 from the bottom. Is it a measure to insure that teams that tank only tank a little bit? Even with flat odds for the bottom 10, there is no reason for a team not to start winning once they are out of the play-in. They would want to since it is more interesting for fans and helps with player development.

Then you are not the market that they are targeting.

Used Decks were priced very far above MSRP on Facebook Marketplace a couple weeks ago. I assume that means that the demand is there.

I assumed that the Steam Machine would be much more powerful than a four year old budget portable computer.

I don’t care enough to watch the YouTube video, so can someone explain to me why I should be installing Cuda Oxide right now instead of sleeping? What does it offer to someone who does not know Rust and is not doing CUDA development?

I ask because the topic of this thread suggests that every single person should start using all 10 of these projects urgently.

That mental health issues are real issues and not “just a symptom of poverty” or whatever other bullshit people say to make it a purely political issue instead of a health one.

Also, people who don’t understand the expression “you can’t buy happiness.” It does not mean that you do not need money to be happy. It means that no amount of money is going to help you if you do not care for your mental health.

I think the problem is not the crime he is accused of but the fact that he has outstanding arrest warrants he is hiding from. It would be awkward if all the kids gather for a tournament and as the judge is explaining game rules cops burst in and drag him away.

You still need someone to organize the tournament and generate pairings. You need someone who knows the rules about how to handle game glitches and know how to recognize if someone is triggering a glitch intentionally. The judge also needs to monitor player behavior outside of the game (When does a player celebration cross into taunting? When does a player reaction count as violent or threatening?)

For example this disqualification for shaking the game table: https://aftermath.site/pokemon-go-firestar73-disqualified-statement-community-outrage/

From the one law class I took in college, civil courts are for one person to get reputations from another. Criminal courts are for society to get respirations from a person. A criminal fine is about paying back society because your lack of following the law is making people around you feel unsafe.

The victim of your crime can sue you independently and get additional money from you. I believe they can even use the evidence from the criminal trial and a civil trial is much easier to win.

The VR industry.

Where did you see that first reply?

Disclaimer: I have not played the game or read the rules, so I am speaking based on what I have heard from reviewers.

The game is single use. You read story cards and stick more and more stickers to the board until you have read every story card in the game.

If you are curious about what would have happened if you took the other option on story card decisions, you can flip the board and replay the campaign always doing the opposite of what you did in your first playthrough (you have to do the opposite, since the game does not come with enough stickers to take the same decision twice).

Once you have played through the campaign twice, you should have experienced most of the possible game story.

Handheld computers are competition to the PlayStation in the sense that Sony would want everyone who owns one to buy a PS5 instead but not in the sense that those consumers having an option is hurting sales significantly. I could not find actual numbers, but analysts seem to be estimating that Valve has sold about 6 million Steam Decks in total. For comparison, Sony sold 1.5 million PS5s last quarter, which is devastating since they sold 2.8 million the year before.

Also, that sales gap is going to get worse in the short term. Instead of raising Steam Deck prices or reducing profit margins, Valve has decided to stop selling systems until RAM prices come back down.

Good riddance. I don’t think I have ever seen a positive news article about him as a person. As a coach, his career highlights seem to be developing Gianis and Luka but never having much team success. I am not saying team owners are overtly racist, but I wonder if he would have had as many coaching opportunities if he was black.