The glory days of Epic Games are long gone and Tim Sweeney is a god damn moron.

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It does make sense, because I’ll boycott nearly all future productions.

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Valve revolutionized Linux gaming; Tim categorically rejects it.
Valve banned shitcoins and blockchain scams; Tim welcomed them with open arms.
Valve enforces honesty regarding AI slop; Tim wants to literally deceive people.
All that on top of what they did with third-party exclusives.

He’s like that annoying kid who didn’t get invited to a birthday party and vowed to always do the opposite of what the popular kid does. Petulant fucking overgrown child.

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Valve banned shitcoins and blockchain scams

would’ve been nice if they banned gambling, too, but that’s part of their business model unfortunately.

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45M

At least the shit is all cosmetic not like EA sports games with their UT packs I guess. Low bar.

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It might be cosmetic, but it can be sold, which fuels the addiction mechanic. EA is bad, too, but this whataboutism.

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deleted by creator

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The launcher?! This bloatware is the second worst thing about Valve’s services right after the gamble mechanics.

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deleted by creator

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I don’t want to discredit Steam’s features like compatibility layers, but the software itself is a mess. It is an unnessecary RAM-heavy chromium instance, to be fair, just like most other launchers. I replaced it with Playnite which is streamlined, responsive and more feature rich for managing a library (Steam still needs to be installed of course because they don’t offer offline installer like GOG). And I’d argue that console user saren’t free of launcher, they are locked into a very specific one.

But as someone who’s neither been to Costco nor Walmart, what is the difference?

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25M

LordGabn has to buy Aston Martin’s so how.

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205M

I hear people say this sometimes, but I don’t know what they mean. Is there part of Valve’s system that has a gambling mechanic I’ve just never engaged with?

Or is it one of their games that has gambling?

Because I’ve been using it for years as basically my sole gaming interface and haven’t seen any gambling.

artyom
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The short version is that an enormous, multibillion dollar gambling industry has been built around Valve’s item marketplace, and in particular around CS:GO skins. If that sounds completely insane and stupid, I’m with you, but it exists. Valve takes their typical cut off of all of these trades, and thus derives massive profits from it.

Here’s the long version: https://peertube.gravitywell.xyz/videos/watch/a8e6d20c-3003-4b14-b9c4-cb6a25b238e7?isPeertubeContent=1

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45M

Huh. I didn’t know this was a feature Steam had. Weird!

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55M

Loot boxes in Counter-Strike

Kevin
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Mainly Team Fortress 2 and Counter Strike GO/2, cuz both of them have cosmetics with rarities obtained via what effectively amounts to lootboxes. In one sense they also have an out-of-game economy around these things where these items are traded for actual money

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All their big multiplayer games have lootboxes and stuff like that.

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There is a massive secondary market for in-game items (primarily CS skins) that Valve refuses to combat or even officially acknowledge. Some of it is legitimate, some of it is literal lottery for children. And since every transaction takes place on Steam, they get a cut of that.

missingno
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TF2 was the original gacha game.

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His expectations are just Unreal.

OldQWERTYbastard
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A man of culture, I see.

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Worry about your own fucking storefront. There’s a lot of worrying that needs to be done.

Nico198X
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definitely keep doing it then. Sweeney is consistently on the wrong side.

OldQWERTYbastard
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Bingo! Valve is one hell of a monopoly, but they don’t totally fuck their customers. Sweeney has to answer to his shareholders. Those are the real customers; not you and me.

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Both Valve and Epic are private companies and thus have a bit more of a say over what they do than public companies would. Sweeney actually just answers to himself, and I mean that pejoratively, otherwise he would have invested in EGS more to compete with Steam and focused more on Unreal Engine’s near-monopoly in the AAA space.

Instead, he focused on “owning” the metaverse, and courting crypto. If I were a shareholder, I would say he wasn’t acting in my best interests.

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Sweeney has to answer to his shareholders.

which is like 40% tencent.

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Not 10%? I thought tencents thing was they just have a 10% share in an absurd amount of stuff

harmbugler
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And if it’s as he says, and eventually all games get labeled that way, what’s his problem with that? Man just doesn’t want to compete.

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I think a lot of people might clutch their proverbial pearls when they find out that AI has been involved with game development for years now.

NaibofTabr
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Every person in every industry in a rush to replace the work of creative people with output from machine learning models can fuck right off.

Every consumer who is content with products made by such people can also fuck right off.

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Ok. You want a cookie?

NaibofTabr
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No, I want worker protections, regulatory enforcement, and broad public distrust of the exploitative owner class who are using AI to extract more wealth while destroying the environment we all live in.

Patronizing “AI” systems is collaboration with the worst garbage of the human race, the robber barons who are comfortable killing people for quarterly profits.

People like Peter Theil, Elon Musk and Sam Altman.

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Nothing epic about the guy or his company.

Annoyed_🦀
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Epic fail.

Mika
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Tbf AI tag should be about AI-generated assets. Cause there is no problem in keeping code quality while using AI, and that’s what the whole dev industry do now.

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Cause there is no problem in keeping code quality while using AI,

Hahahahahahahaha

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No, the issue with “AI” is thinking that it’s able to make anything production ready, be it art, code or dialog.

I do believe that LLMs have lots of great applications in a game pipeline, things like placeholders and copilot for small snippets work great, but if you think that anything that an LLM produces is production ready and you don’t need a professional to look at it and redo it (because that’s usually easier than fixing the mistakes) you’re simply out of touch with reality.

Mika
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Are you even reading what I say? You are supposed to have a professional approving generated stuff.

But it’s still AI-generated, it doesn’t become less AI-generated because a human that knows shit about the subject approved it.

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This is what you said:

Tbf AI tag should be about AI-generated assets. Cause there is no problem in keeping code quality while using AI, and that’s what the whole dev industry do now.

At no point did you mention someone approving it.

Also, you should read what I said, I said most large stuff generated by AI needs to be completely redone. You can generate a small function or maybe a small piece of an image, if you have a professional validating that small chunk, but if you think you can generate an entire program or image with LLMs you’re delusional.

Mika
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https://vger.to/piefed.ca/comment/2422544 mentioned here.

Dude are you a software dev? Did you hear about, like, tickets? You are supposed to split bigger task into smaller tickets at a project approval phase.

LLM agents are completely capable of taking well-documented tickets and generating some semblance of code that you shape with a few upcoming prompts, criticising code style & issues until they are all fixed.

I’m not theoretical, this is how it’s done today. MCPs into JIRA and Figma and UI tickets just get about 90% done in a single prompt. Harder stuff is done in “invesrigate and write .md how to solve” & “this is why that won’t work, do this instead” to like 70% ready.

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Sorry, I won’t go through your post history to reply to a comment, be clearer on the stuff you write.

I’m a software engineer, and if that’s how you code you’re either wasting time or producing garbage code, which might be acceptable wherever you work, but I guarantee you that you would not pass code reviews where I do. I do use copilot, and it’s good at suggesting small snippets, maybe an if, maybe a function header, but even then 60% of the time I need to change what it suggested. Reviewing code is harder than writing it yourself, even if I could trust that the LLM would do exactly what I asked (which I can’t, not by a long shot) it would maybe be opened to bugs or special cases that I would have to read the code, understand what it tried to do, figure out edge cases on that solution and see if it handled them. In short, it would take me much longer to do stuff via LLMs than writing them myself, because writing code is the easy part of programming, thinking on the solution and it’s limitations and edge cases is the hard part, and LLMs can’t understand that. The moment you describe your solution in sufficient detail that an LLM can possibly generate the right code, you’ve essentially written the code yourself just in a more complicated and ambiguous format, this is what most non technical managers fail to understand, code is just structured English, we’re already writing something better than prompts to an LLM.

Mika
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This is literally in this thread.

Again, your solution should be already thought out and described in tickets and approved tech plan. If it’s not, SDLC problem.

And it’s not true that agents can’t help with edge cases, they can. If you know which points to look at, you task to analyze the specific interaction and watch which parts of the code would be mentioned.

I do write way less amount of symbols to LLM than I would when I write code. Those symbols don’t have to be structured and they can even have typos, so I can focus my brain activity on things that actually matter.

Plus, copilot is shit.

I rate your post as a skill issue.

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It’s not in the thread line I’m replying to, to get to that I would have had to read another reply, and all of the replies to that to spot yours.

If the work you do can be fully specified in a Jira ticket, you’re a code monkey and not a software engineer, of course you can use LLMs to do your job since you can be replaced by an LLM.

And it’s not true that agents can’t help with edge cases, they can. If you know which points to look at, you task to analyze the specific interaction and watch which parts of the code would be mentioned.

You’re missing my point entirely, it’s not that it can’t help with, it’s that the solution it writes will not take them into account unless you tell it to, and to explain every edge case in enough details to be unambiguous about all of them is essentially the same as writing code directly. Not to mention that you can’t possibly know all of the edge cases of the solution it will write without seeing it, so you can’t directly tell it to watch for edge cases without knowing what code it will write.

I do write way less amount of symbols to LLM than I would when I write code.

Maybe, but then you have to review everything it wrote so you waste more time. Give me one concrete example of something that you can prompt an LLM to give you code that is advanced enough to be worth it (i.e. writing the prompt and reviewing the code it wrote would be faster than writing the code myself) and not generic enough that I would be able to find the answer in stack overflow.

Those symbols don’t have to be structured

If you don’t structure them the LLM might misinterpret what you meant. Structure in a language is required to make things unambiguous, this reminds me of the stupid joke of “go to the store and bring 1L of milk, if they have eggs bring 6” and the programmer coming back with 6L of milk because they had eggs. Of course that’s a stupid example, but anything complex enough to be worth using an LLM would be hard to describe unambiguously and covering all edge cases in normal human speak.

and they can even have typos, so I can focus my brain activity on things that actually matter.

Typos are very easy to correct, most editors will highlight them for you, and some can even autocorrect them but more likely you avoid most of them by using tab completion anyways. I don’t waste any brain activity on that, I’m thinking on the solution and structuring it in an unambiguous way, that is what writing code is, it’s not some cryptic art of writing the proper runes to make the machine do your will like you seem to be implying, it’s just structured thought.

Plus, copilot is shit.

Might be, wouldn’t know any other as that’s the one I have available to use, but sincerely I doubt others are that much better to make a difference.

I rate your post as a skill issue.

Yup, I have absolutely no skill in using LLMs, nor will I waste my time with it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a neat tool for auto completing small snippets like we used to do with an actual snippet library a couple of years ago, it is also a decent tool to navigate unknown code bases asking it where certain parts are or how to achieve something in the. I would say that 60% of the time it gives you some good pointers, but 90% of the time most of the code it writes is wrong, but at least it points you in the right direction of where to start investigating.

I don’t expect you to understand this since from what I’m reading here you probably never worked on anything big enough, but a software engineer job is not to write code, that’s just a side-effect, our job is to solve problems, so either you’re trying to get the LLM to solve the problem for you, or wasting lots of time explaining your solution in English, reading the generated code, understanding it, analyzing it, fixing any issues and testing it, possibly multiple times instead of explaining your solution once in code and testing it.

NaibofTabr
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there is no problem in keeping code quality while using AI

This opinion is contradicted by basically everyone who has attempted to use models to generate useful code which must interface with existing codebases. There are always quality issues, it must always be reviewed for functional errors, it rarely interoperates with existing code correctly, and it might just delete your production database no matter how careful you try to be.

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deleted by creator

NaibofTabr
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I’m sorry, what exactly do you think this conversation is about if not using AI for code generation?

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I’m sorry, too

Mika
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So don’t accept code that is shit. Have decent PR process. Accountability is still on human.

NaibofTabr
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So don’t accept code that is shit. Have decent PR process. Accountability is still on human.

If this is necessary then there is, in point of fact, a “problem in keeping code quality while using AI”.

Mika
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This is necessary when working with 100% human code too.

NaibofTabr
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OK, sure, but again the claim was:

there is no problem in keeping code quality while using AI

Whether or not human-written code also requires review is outside the context of this discussion, and entirely irrelevant.

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35M

A decent review process is always necessary, LLMs or not.

Mika
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deleted by creator

NaibofTabr
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OK, sure, but again the claim was:

there is no problem in keeping code quality while using AI

Whether or not human-written code also requires review is outside the context of this discussion, and entirely irrelevant.

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The people lazy enough to have ai generate their code aren’t going to do that. You’re acting like games didn’t already have bugs before we invented a mostly wrong shortcut that kinda looks just good enough to fake being useful.

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15M

I feel like I get where he’s coming from, but I can see the revulsion.

I picture someone asking their AI to write a rules engine for a gamemode and getting masses of duplicative, horrific code; but in my own work, my company has encouraged an assistive tool, and once it has an idea of what I’m trying to do, it will offer autocomplete options that are pretty spot on.

Still, I very much agree it’s hard to sort the difference and in untrained hands can definitely lead to unmaintainable code slop. Everything needs to get reviewed by knowledgeable human eyes before running.

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The killer app is language processing and if a localization contractor isn’t using an LLM to quickly check for style errors and inconsistencies, they’re just making it hard for them for no good reason.

Eh-I
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I don’t know how long it’s been since I even bothered claiming the free game of the week. Like a year.

OldQWERTYbastard
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My Steam backlog is 600+ games deep so I don’t have to swim in that Epic shit. Sweeney can suck a nut.

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85M

I’d rather buy a game on Steam than get it for free from Epic. Seriously.

I claimed the first few games and their launcher was shit. Now, to be fair, Steam wasn’t exactly a pinnacle of achievement when it first came out, either, but it’s been refined and honed to a razor. Epic is just “let’s throw shit at the wall and see what happens”, with no coherent strategy or marketing beyond “we’re not Steam!”. Their client, as I understand it, is still shit, and their CEO is a jackass. Haven’t had it installed in years now. Meanwhile, I have a backlog on Steam of like 1000 games.

Why would I ever use Epic? It has no value.

And yes, that goes for games sold on Steam with the “have to use Origin” bullshit, too. I’m not launching Steam to then launch Origin. This is not Inception. Let me play my damn game and stay out of it. Ya know?

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25M

I got a few epic games to be claimed on epic store. I just don’t. I don’t have an account and I also do not have a will to make one. Nothing of value is there anyway.

Annoyed_🦀
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And i bet you don’t even touch the free game you claimed because Epic launcher take forever to launch.

OldQWERTYbastard
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Nobody wants to give their computer AIDS for a free game.

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65M

I’ve never even installed the Epic Lawnchair. I just use Heroic, which works very well.

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Shit like this is why people only use that storefront for the free games. Completely out of touch.

mohab
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This is like Jared Leto giving Daniel Day-Lewis acting advice 😂

Go back in your hole, Tim.

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Sweeney has Steam living rent free in his head. Whining about Monopoly

Meanwhile, Epic Games already has something resembling a monopoly with the unreal engine, its buggy and resource hungry as fuck, and just seems to be getting worse. Necessitating an arms race of computer upgrades just to run the newest games on their obtuse engine thats being used for everything now. Epic certainly isnt doing anything about it. Its just a money printer for Tim’s legal battles.

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re: unreal - and unity - have stopped caring about devs and just chase new tech like nanite or new advertising shite.

godot ftw, they’ll never come back and say “hey we’re changing the contract now you gotta pay for every install” or “hey everything is AI now”.

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Epic is on track to becoming a google play store

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If that actually happens and the label becomes redundant, then we can talk about removing it.

Or better, inverting it to a “No AI” label for the people like me who will still care.

Tech bros always act like this : they don’t want to actually win by making a good solution. Instead they try to make you feel like their solution is inevitable and they have already won…

For a group of people who claim to be all about meritocracy and the “marketplace of ideas”, they sure like to short circuit those whenever possible…

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Bullshit translator: “I want to sell more AI made games, so i can reduce costs by firing everyone, and being held accountable for using AI is gonna prevent me from bilking idiots to increase my fortunes by another billion or 5”

Quazatron
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Bingo.

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