…I should’ve added the /s, come to think of it.

When are Denuvo games coming to GOG and itch.io? We feel extremely left out guys.

“Do you like it there?” The one on the right says.

I live in a dictatorship that toppled dictators before, and this is the current permeating thought. Not “we’ll get rid of him” but rather “let’s wait it out.” And so you wait out a decade, two, three… Maybe it is over and the plans were arranged so his successor would take over instead.

Your thought is one of a people under a brutal dictatorship. So much for the championed first and second amendments, eh?

Am I going to have to wait 24 hours to open apps I already have installed? Will they all get auto-removed and need reinstalling?

At the start I would have thought this was possible but pretty ridiculous. Why would Google do any of that?

But it turns out this was not ridiculous, as Play Protect literally just removed Ankiconnect, an app I already had installed for months, without giving me the choice to keep it or axe it. They certainly could force us to go with their “Uncle Google can I have permission to use my phone?” flow for apps we already use.

WE MUST CONTINUE TO OPPOSE THESE CHANGES, THESE ATTACKS ON OUR ABILITY TO INSTALL APPS AS WE WISH.

I upvoted, and with this I commented.

I think you perfectly nailed it. When I go to a text article, I’m in charge of how fast or slow I want to take it, I can skip text, and a feature I really don’t use much is if the browser has a reading mode, which would remove all the stupid shit crammed into the site like the cookie bar or other things uBlock Origin doesn’t get.

It’s also that I only need to read. Videos might work with just listening but especially often they need me to also watch the feed. Way more effort so a guy can say things that I’ve already lost track of midway.

Can you please give me some links to the fascism on their forums? I already know they sell fascist games like The Great Rebellion (GOG is guilty too), or that one asset flip where LGBTQ people somehow rule the US with an iron fist - I forget its name but I saw it in a video and it was genuinely bad and creepy.

I’d dare say they don’t do ANYTHING against fascism, so in my books they are just as much enablers of fascism as the companies actively lobbying for it. You know, Nazi bars and all that. Plus I’ve got a feeling those who insist they aren’t fash because they don’t spend their money on fash things are not aware of or even ignore things they’re actually doing, or benefiting from the current admin.

So now you’re just babbling for the sake of babbling, coming up with the most braindead takes possible, while ignoring practically everything i say because i don’t fall under the criteria of your tribe, thus inherently being a corpo billionaire shill. With this behaviour you’re only proving my words about your inability to see nuance. I hope you’re a kid, because that would at least mean some potential for intellectual development in the future.

Cool story bro. btw, buy a mirror instead of using me as yours. I hope Gabe gives you a dollar to buy that mirror.

define “unaccountable corporate master”, and explain to me how did you manage to put a game publisher under a term like this.

What a stupid question. See everything I have literally said directly to you. Read my replies and find out the answer. As someone once said, let’s stop before you embarrass yourself further.

>gets given a case of valve signing an exclusivity deal with an indie game, Epic-style

>“Hardly seems comparable.”

>gets given examples of stores that thrived without a shopping cart

>comes up with excuses anyway

By now I’d be feeling sorry for the double standards applied only against Epic, if you know, it wasn’t just a carbon copy of the exact thing I’m criticizing by yet another sleazeball billionaire.

It’s crazy to see people defending any of them but Gaben always gets defended.

Well I should’ve looked at the sub before deriding yacht owners. Of course it is pcgaming. He is their god. To criticize him or his company is sacrilege. Never mind that he is cut from the same cloth as every other CEO. But he did one good thing so clearly the two billion bad things don’t matter.

You’re welcome!

I’m not sure of any more examples, just like you I’ve only heard about it lately after Epic spawned. I’m NOT hoping to find more of this scummy behavior from Valve, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I did.

They certainly are paying tax money to the Trump-Epstein Administration, as is every other American company, further enabling all those things. You have GOG as the European option that won’t pay tax to the Epstein class. Also you don’t really get to be a billionaire without also having substantial political influence…

But no one actually uses anything but steam.

Skill issue. Literally. See, unlike US politics, you don’t have to choose between lesser evil and pure evil, because there are more options not vetted by two political parties and their donors. And in fairness to US politics, the lesser evil is recognized as a lesser evil, whereas here every single time I call out the pure evil, someone shows up and goes “they’re not pure evil, they’re GOOD GUYS”

Valve has done bad guy things, and I will call out the fact they’ve done things and their owner has been rewarded with seven yachts for it. You can come back to me when the hypotheticals with EA become reality.

Billionaires bad? Boo, get new better material!

Whatever. Go get your shilling paycheck from billionaire Gabe. Again, I hope it is more than $0, cause nobody deserves to defend a rich asshole for free, everyone deserves a paycheck for doing things well. <3

That said there’s one point I noticed that’s making me feel very icky.

How many artists and modelers started out from submitting their works for tf2/dota2/cs:go? How many animators started from SFM? How many people became indie devs thanks to the existence of the Steam greenlight? How many people switched over to linux thanks to proton?

Wow. You’re saying this as if level designers haven’t started their careers by making custom levels for Doom, literally one of the earlier indie games by creator id. Hell, you’re giving the discontinued popularity gate called greenlight more credit than it deserves. The truth is Valve wouldn’t be here today without the Quake engine that id themselves made - they’ve driven more innovation than valve’s regression and capitalism sold as innovation. Yes, indie games existed before Valve has, shocker I know.

And as for Linux, once again, *wine. Even then, I switched to Linux and stayed because the basic experience has been elevated, and all of that without using any Valve software. If the experience isn’t better than it was before, I’d just go back to Windows. Besides, what is the point of Linux if I end up changing my unaccountable corporate master for another unaccountable corporate master, Valve?

I know all of this will fly over your head. This is for everyone else in the room who thinks a little bit of “good things” absolve one of responsibility. I can totally say Microsoft Windows was a positive influence because it made computing easy to access and develop for, but understandably nobody’s going to forgive them for the billion bad things they’ve done in turn.

Valve paid a bunch of publishers to sell their game exclusively on steam

Fuck yes. Here’s Darwinia going steam exclusive back in the day. Pretty scummy Epic behavior isn’t it?

https://forums.introversion.co.uk/viewtopic.php?t=40203

and refused to implement basic features (like a shopping cart) in their UI?

Fun fact: itch.io doesn’t have a shopping cart, Google Play doesn’t have a shopping cart either, and they’re both established (itch is even beloved despite that shortcoming, I personally like them). Only scummy Epic gets this complaint constantly lodged against them. Curious.

Then bitched about how everyone more successful than them was evil and wrong?

I don’t care about their word battles, sorry.

Dude, get over it. Your precious company has enabled all the industry illnesses I mentioned and more, and all the pushback that the company gets for it is the owner being rewarded with seven yachts. If it were EA or dare I say Epic, I’d find you on the other side of the fence. Because that’s what this is. Blind simping. For your short novel of a post, I hope you are getting paid $0.01? Cause your hero doesn’t really care as much as you do, so you better be paid for it than be a fool and do it for free.

calling proton a “wine fork” is akin to calling a linux distro a “kernel fork”

It is a wine fork, and wouldn’t exist without the initial contributions that made wine, the actual hero of this story, in the first place. Next.

Second, Valve never “fucked over game ownership”,

Explain Steam to me then. Literally launched as a DRM built-in to hardcopies of Half-Life 2, using an account based activation scheme with a one-time use code. Literally the CD key people deride but now with a bloatware launcher and an internet connection requirement, for a single player game. After you use the code, the game is now bound to your account, and your hardcopy can’t be resold in a legally playable form. Oh and now in our current day, they literally can decide to delete your whole library of “subscriptions” as they call it. I’m sure you’ll find some way to blame literally any other party but Valve for things that Valve has done.

And because people like you kept throwing tons of money at them so other companies are compelled to copy them, along with their model of not owning anything… We get to the territory of…

accusing Valve in The Crew shutdown incident

And many countless other games that were shutdown or killed because of their DRM failing.

Does that mean that without Valve there’d be no crates? I highly doubt that.

It doesn’t matter. Point is they’re the first to popularize the concept and poison the entire industry with it. I don’t care what “nicities” they might have compared to other companies, the fucking idea itself is predatory and Valve even more so for spawning it.

Valve is one of the few rare exceptions that don’t try to exploit their consumers

Yeah, same Valve that sells in-game diamond rings for $100 and lootbox keys for $5. Same Valve that created the “trading card” system just to profit off of thin air by milking their userbase. Same Valve that spent years opposing refunds until Australia forced them to offer them. Totally not exploitative.

developing a platform that becomes a de-facto monopolist purely by the virtue of being that good

Propaganda. It is monopolist because it is. Their APIs deliberately lock in devs to their own ecosystem, such that it becomes harder to integrate into other ecosystems, therefore adding an artificial barrier to their competitors as they have to develop their own solutions and devs must also weigh whether they want to even bother with all this stuff. The recent lawsuits as well show they actually threaten devs when they have different prices in other locations. Plenty of reasons for their monopoly, and this rose-tinted “they’re just that good” is nonsense.

by sponsoring and promoting FOSS

Microsoft contributes to FOSS too. Tell me about how Bill Gates or Satya Nadella are cool people then.

If every corporate CEO was more like him, i think the world would be a better place.

Oh I’d be terrified of this world alright. The world where CEOs do all sorts of bad stuff and they get praised for it even as we lose ownership rights or more.

Now try to turn on your head and oppose me without trying to demean anything i say in your head by calling me a simp

I’ve played the game by your own rules and I regret it already. You’re so deep into believing the bull you’re spewing, I don’t think anyone will pull you out of it.

You don’t become a billionaire by “”“offering good services”“”. The only way you can do that is by exploiting people and hoarding money - the methods to achieving that are all laid down above. All billionaires should not have this wealth while other people don’t even have a roof above them. End of.

You know there’s more than two game companies, right? You know that unlike the presidency in the United States of Fascism, there can be more than one game distribution platform, and those can be run by multiple companies, yes? While you’re at it, buying games from Steam means your tax dollars go to the Trump Administration.

Oh, I should’ve clarified. My bad. By the same shit I meant their launchers are pretty similar in their origin stories, purpose, and how they get there.

I condemn all mass layoffs no matter who does it. Admittedly I haven’t heard about any mass layoffs at Valve in recent history, so I’ll give them they’re better on that front (unless proven otherwise).

I’ve kept hearing these scare stories for years. Sorry, they’re shallow as shit. I’m not settling for Valve just because scawy EA is worse. To hell with them both. Anti-consuner is anti-consumer. A billionaire is a billionaire, and all of them are delicious.