Because PCs are worse for living room/controller gameplay, you have to deal with Windows or Linux, and many other factors?

Most of the services Google kills are also because they “fizzled out”. If you scroll through the Killed by Google site, a lot of the stuff listed there were test apps or small-scale experiments that most people never heard about or cared to try, like all the apps under Area 120. There are a few high-profile examples (Reader, Stadia, etc) but they’re definitely not the majority, same as Mozilla.

Apple discontinued its own Apple Pay Later service in favor of just integrating third-party payment services, like Affirm: https://9to5mac.com/2024/06/17/apple-pay-later-united-states-ending/

Modern consoles are pretty great about backwards compatibility. There’s room to improve for sure, but an Xbox Series X/S can play all Xbox One/Series games, plus hundreds of 360 and original Xbox games. PS5 is a bit worse with only PS4 backwards compat. The Switch is in the roughest shape, because PowerPC emulator or hardware compatibility wasn’t practical with the design or hardware of the original Switch.

They still have the benefit of being a fixed hardware platform with guaranteed compatibility for the games built for them.

Google worked on Privacy Sandbox/Topics API/FLoC for at least five years, and it couldn’t get something that advertisers, regulators, and users could all agree on, so it’s just falling back to the thing that worked (but has next to zero privacy protections). Sigh.

“Fortnite and Tekken 8 are running on the same engine designed for… Unreal Tournament 20 years ago.”

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Whether or not the exclusivity deal is between the publisher and the store or just the publisher doesn’t make a difference for the consumer. There’s no functional difference between Counter Strike 2 requiring Steam and Fortnite requiring the Epic launcher except that gamers are used to Steam.

Also, every game launcher on Windows still puts games in the start menu.

No exclusivity for games

Valve doesn’t need to pay for exclusivity because it already dominates the market. There are many games that are effectively Steam exclusives because they are not available through other methods on PC. Half-Life 2 received a lot of criticism at launch for requiring Steam.

They purposefully made SteamOS open source so that other companies can easily release portable PC gaming products

SteamOS is open source, but you need a license to use the Steam brand, and Valve doesn’t allow that. One company tried to make a handheld console with SteamOS, but it can’t be legally bundled with the hardware: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/10/24033161/ayaneo-next-lite-steam-deck-competitor-steamos

That said, who knows what happens when he dies?

Yes, that’s the point of the article. If you need one specific person to stay alive for something to continue functioning well, you don’t have a business, you have the British monarchy.

Every other major application and service on Mac has ARM-native builds now, there’s not really an excuse for Valve. It’s especially silly when much of Steam is running through a Chromium engine, not machine code or anything else that might be difficult to port.

There’s a difference between Valve deciding to not make Mac games anymore and Valve leaving the Mac Steam client a slow and laggy mess on newer Macs. The former only affects people who want to play Valve games, the latter affects a lot more people.

Valve has avoided many of the same anti-consumer moves as other tech and gaming giants, likely due to its smaller size, status as a non-public company, and the long-time leadership of Gabe Newell and other executives. Valve won’t stay that way forever—the company is not immune to the pressures of capitalism, and there are already examples of anti-consumer behavior.

Valve is not immune to enshittification, and it has already happened on some level with minimal current Mac support, facilitating gambling through item trades, etc.

I would like to see more collective action, but it’s also incredibly difficult to put your housing situation on the line when the US (and most states) does not give you a functional backup. As you said, it’s capitalism at work.

I mentioned in the article that 5G home internet is not a solution for everyone. The reliability varies significantly by location and network quality—some people have no issues, for others it’s unusable. It’s not a perfect solution that will fix the US’ infrastructure problems, but in the meantime it is making a difference for some people.

I mean, yeah, just leaving it at “china bad” is still xenophobia. Tech companies in the US and other countries can be just as shady.

The latest versions through GOG and (I think) Steam run pretty well, there’s no more GFWL or other stuff that broke a long time ago.

Minecraft Legends doesn’t have a broken camera that makes you fall off cliffs constantly ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I did say the element zapper was missing. uBO Lite is using the same default filterlists as uBO, which includes some trackers: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets

There are malicious extensions found in the chrome web store pretty frequently, and if I was making one, I would definitely use the API that lets me man-in-the-middle all network requests. So google’s statement that 40% or whatever of malicious extensions use that API seems plausible to me.

You could definitely make the argument that Google should just do a better job of reviewing extensions, but that alone also wouldn’t be a 100% solution. Google definitely messed up with the original rule limits, though. If chrome is more optimized then surely it must be able to handle just as many (if not more) rules than uBO.

Right, my point was just that the article is wrong/clickbait. The changes won’t “disable uBlock Origin” or “essentially kill off uBlock Origin”.

This article is really wrong, wow. There is already a Manifest V3-compliant version of uBlock Origin, it’s discussed in this thread: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/338

I don’t know if it’s stated definitively anywhere, but I’m pretty sure the plan is to roll out that different version to Chrome users as an update to the existing extension. It’s going to be slightly worse because MV3 is still missing some API features.