This looks like a very classical and well-known case of executives copying each other.
That other company is doing layoffs and seems fine? Reports the line going up? Let’s do it, too!
The guys across the street are already implementing AI? Investors love it? Let do it, too! We may have taken a risk with blockchain, but this one is just sure to work better for us!
The big name is going for the money, predator-style, and they’re still afloat? Finally, we can cash out, too!
The suits did. You know, so the line goes up. Because we’re all gonna die otherwise or something.
I think it’s just true for the vast majority of countries, unfortunately. A country has to have a lot of things figured out and done right before it can regulate and train its police force so well that its population doesn’t nearly universally agree with the ACAB sentiment. Or at least doesn’t belive they’re all incompetent.
Not to mention Valve’s effort with Proton, allowing non-Windows gamers enjoy what they pay for on multiple platforms with great ease; their efforts have been massive for gaming on Linux, and without it, I wouldn’t have paid for a lot of games, earning their developers a whole lot of absolutely nothing.
Also the community hub, the workshop, the review system, the cloud saving, the functional wishlist, the gifting system, the shopping cart, the anti-cheat (you’re better of with it than without it), the discovery queue, the sales dedicated to specific types of games that actually help people discover games and drive the revenue up for the developers, the (I think) complete transaction history, the refunds system, the friends and the chat and profiles - and probably many more things that I’m either not aware of or couldn’t list off the tip of my tongue, combined with internal works that, again, do help the devs in the end.
Steam is much more than a place where one pays for a game to then simply download and play it. It’s much greater and more functional than that. None of the developers have to put their games on Steam - nobody forces Epic Games Store or GOG to be this subpar in comparison. Same way nobody forces gamers to use Steam. People use Steam because they love it - or because there’s no good-enough alternative, but that’s hardly Valve’s fault.
Steam charging 30% is not just worth it, but also surprising, given what putting your game on Steam gets you as the developer, and what it gets us, the players.
She’s also definitely Russian, and we, Russians, believe that it’s a guy.
There’s no women on the Internet.
1999 piracy mostly consisted of paying for a pirated copy that someone decided to make profit off; most likely, they weren’t the person to make the (first!) copy, and they’re not even sure what’s on the thing they were selling you. It was mostly bootlegging.
This is a real problem with changing your mind.
I can’t believe how many times I’ve been told I’ve changed when I no longer found something funny or said something that I wouldn’t have in my teen years.
One of the longest-running opinions of mine that hasn’t been disproved yet is that many people just don’t really mature or age mentally, it seems; they just grow older, without accumulating much if any wisdom.