Fairphone is looking to capitalize on Goole restricting AOSP support for Pixel phones. FP seems to be the way going forward.

As a side effect of Valve putting SteamOS on an VR headset with ARM mobile chipset, regular Linux on phones will likely also improve.

You don’t need to even have the launcher installed to claim the free EGS games. I usually claim them to support the developers.

Still, Steam does dominate a massive portion of the PC market.

Steam revenue in 2023: USD 8.5 bn.

Overall PC gaming revenue that year: 45 bn.

Steam is big but the biggest cash cows are Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft. Neither is on Steam.

Also, Microsoft uses their Windows monopoly to ship the Xbox Games store to almost every PC user.

If Steam had a dominating market position, the EU would have classified it as a gate keeper under the Digital Markets Act.

The meme about Valve/Steam “does nothing, keeps winning” is mostly true (I don’t think the average gamer knows about Valve’s contributions to FOSS).

Because of Fortnite EGS has a very big installed base. People added their friends on Epic because of Fortnite. And yet gamers buy other games on Steam instead. That may have something to do with the fact that the main page of EGS mainly promotes Epic’s own games, whereas Steam promotes third party games first.

Fuck their monopoly!

Interesting monopoly when the world’s biggest PC games – Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite – aren’t even on Steam.

Because a PC tells the OS what hardware is present. Phones do not, that’s why there is no hardware detection.

Nobody forces phone makers to support the standard that would just do that: https://www.arm.com/architecture/system-architectures/systemready-compliance-program

Conveniently forgeting the part where valve creates a gambling system for kids, as usual.

Do you mean loot boxes in Counter-Strike? A) It’s not a game for kids. B) And no, I’m not getting involved with parenting of other people’s children, so I actually do not care.

But I get it, the only things that mathers is you.

I matter to me, yes.

There has actually been a case going around about Valve forcing price parity despite their official ToS not saying so, with emails from employees to devs as evidence.

They’re doing a shitty job at enforcement if your claim is true.

I can’t understand the amount of energy people spend defending Valve.

Valve uses my money to make the Linux FOSS stack better for everyone, including me. GOG doesn’t.

Buying on Steam instead of GOG serves my personal interests.

What’s wrong Heroic?

Not officially supported. Using the GUI with a controller is wonky.

is that supposed to be good or bad? A lot or a little?

Neither. It’s reporting, not an opinion piece.

That article seems to be making a heck of a lof of excuses.

No, it doesn’t.

The hard pivot from “the Deck is an unmitigated success!” to immediately, quietly admitting it hasn’t outsold any actual handheld console is… kinda weird.

It sold millions in a market that was up to Deck’s launch owned by small manufacturers that sold on crowdfunding platforms in production runs that may have been only in the tens of thousands. Stating that Steam Deck is a success is not a contradiction to Nintendo Switch being an enormous success.

Probably a few more but all users of the Flatpak versions are lumped together no matter if they use Arch or Fedora.

As long as AMD and Intel continue their open source drivers, I’m fine with it.

Hey GameStop. Just wondering: Where are Song of the Deep 2 and 3? Can’t you count to 3?

https://www.ign.com/articles/2016/01/28/insomniac-and-gamestop-announce-publishing-partnership-with-song-of-the-deep

True. Wasn’t meant as a comprehensive list. 😁

What I find funny and I realized it a bunch of years ago: whenever consumers have actual choice of an alternative product and aren’t forced into the Microsoft product because of Microsoft’s monopolies, people tend to pick the competition.

Windows Phone: consumers chose Android and iPhone.

Xbox: consumers chose PlayStation and Nintendo.

Handheld gaming PC: Steam Deck.

Chat (MSN, Skype,…): WhatsApp and a plethora of alternatives. (Businesses use Teams because of Office monopoly.)

Edge browser: Chrome.

WMA: MP3.

Games shop (Xbox/Microsoft Store): Steam.

Nature is healing.

Nah, they’re lying. They’ll just cover their tracks better in the future.

Do you expect copyright laws to mention every single type of transformative work acceptable? You are being purposely ignorant.

I asked nicely to provide a quote that machine generation is also covered that you couldn’t provide and now feels the need to lash out.

And yes, I absolutely expect that machine generation is explicitly mentioned for the simple fact that right now machine generated anything is not copyrightable at all. A computer isn’t smart, a computer isn’t creative. Its output doesn’t pass the threshold of originality, as such there is no creative transformation happening, as there is with reinterpretations of songs.

What is copyrightable are the works that served as training set, therefore there absolutely has to be an explicit mention somewhere that machine generated works do not simply pass the original copyright into the generated work, just like how a human writes source code and the compiled executable is still the human author’s work.

Edit: Downvotes instead of arguments. Pathetic.

Not a single line in your comment offers anything that machine generation, which is not at all human creative work, falls under fair use.

Please quote me the line where this covers machine generation as well? I’d love to sell Google translated Harry Potter books for being transformative work. Maybe I can transform the lastest movie releases to MKV and sell those.

So it’s safe to assume all code generation was trained on GPL code from GitHub and therefore the game code is derived work of GPL code and therefore under GPL itself? So decompilation and cracking is fine?

Use your AI generation all you want but don’t enter a painting contest using machine generated content trained on other people’s work without their consent.

How many embedded DRM-controlled news article videos are you watching on your living room tv though?

Obviously it’s only a fraction of the overall DRMed content out there but it exists, most notably for live sports that TV stations stream for free on their website but require paid subscriptions when using streaming apps.

Then I won’t watch those, simple as.

Doesn’t change facts for millions of others.

🏴‍☠️ Well 🏴‍☠️ I 🏴‍☠️ don’t 🏴‍☠️ care 🏴‍☠️

Random clips on the web are DRMed these days, like news articles with an embedded video. Many CMSes just DRM all clips. Totally BS but I’ve seen the video frame staying black on a bunch of sites now.

People who connect TVs to the Internet only invite malware. They usually don’t receive big fixes after a few years and tend to spy on all watched content.

Pretty sure DRMed content refuses to play on those.

If meeting sales projections fails, heads roll. Literally.

Generative works cannot be copyrighted

While that is generally true, a derivative work of a copyrighted work is usually copyrighted by the original author (see remixes of music where the remixer only partially owns a copyright for the remix but the original artist does as well). That is what makes generative AI so risky. A court could order “This is a automated modification of work XY, thereby the full copyright lies with the author of work XY.”

Then use a free OFL-licensed font. Or cooperate to commission your own fonts to share among this consortium.

Really a non-issue if you’re not stupid.

If the permission was necessary, the Flathub package would enable it by default. I can’t remember ever having a bad experience with the Flathub package.

When I first read that the ship a dedicated Distrobox container just for Steam, I was utterly confused as to what the benefit would be and I still cannot see it. Maybe the Bazzite developers dislike some of the restricted permissions of the Steam Flatpak or maybe they just want to package it on their own but the benefit for the user escapes me.

I’ve read another comment and then I realized it’s because of Bazzite’s Game Mode session. It’s a special login session and not just Steam in Big Picture Mode. Flatpaks cannot be used for this kind of specific use case.

I still had to go multi-arch on my x64 Debian system, leading to a lot of problems…

That’s what Flatpak is for. 32bit crap is moved into its own corner without interfering with any system level stuff.

(not super important but overlooked here) The “horse” is a woman

I’m sorry for accidentally misgendering a grown adult who’s still naked with a young girl riding on top. I guess that triggers a different fetish then.

(definitely important) The scene was only an unfinished scene still being worked out

True but they still thought it was a great idea to depict this scene and then only change their minds not because they realized their mistake but because it works better with an adult doing the riding story-wise.

I definitely think Valve should have handled this more fairly.

The reviewer asked for a playable copy after being unsure from screenshots and text alone. I think that’s pretty fair.

Never heard of them, nothing of value lost

Me neither but popular doesn’t necessarily good or unknown doesn’t mean bad but to first come up with a scene of a young girl riding a naked man, then to model this, and in al that time not thinking that this depiction is seriously fucked up (they only changed this scene later because the scene “works much better when delivered by an older character.”

moralists see nudity and think it can only represent sex - meanwhile, by the screenshots, it represents dehumanization.

Except in the review build submitted to Valve there was a young child riding that naked man.

Feels like some key piece of information is omitted here tbh

You mean the key information im the middle of the article that I quoted in a comment 15 minutes before yours?

In the early build reviewed by Valve, day six featured a scene in which a man and his young daughter visit the farm. The daughter wants to ride one of the horses, resulting in an interactive dialogue sequence where the girl rides on the shoulders of a naked “horse” while it’s led by the player.

Young girl interacts with naked man and you saw no problem with it…

“The scene is not sexual in any way,”

Maybe not to you but that doesn’t change the content of what you submitted to Valve.

the young character was changed into a twenty-something woman. “Both to avoid the juxtaposition,” it explains, “and more importantly because the dialogue delivered in that scene, which deals with the societal structure in the world of Horses, works much better when delivered by an older character.”

Cool, the review build still featured a young girl riding a naked man and you thought that was a great idea…

Back then Steam was a downgrade.

I didn’t know games could choose to be made by new developers

No, game’s aren’t alive and cannot choose anything. The higher-ups at publisher and IP owner Paradox Interactive can, however.

Usually these things happen at Microsoft when they shut down studios, like what happened with Essemble Studios (Age of Empires, Halo Wars) and Double Helix Games (Killer Instinct).