That there is no guarantee that I will always have access to a game I like is really what kills it for me as a user. Like, I’m basically paying them the equivalent of the cost of a game every 3 months, but I could loose access to a game I like at any time because it’s no longer on game pass, so I’d be better off just buying games I like outright with that money every three months.

I’d rather my money go directly to studios making things I like, rather than fractionalized among who ever Microsoft decides deserves to make games.

The wages do not come out of the profit.

Profit is revenue minus expenses. Wages are part of expenses.

Wages are used to ensure that people working there are able to keep working there, covering day day expenses of the workers.

Wages rarely reflect the real value of the effort put in by the people working at the company. They reflect the cost to the worker of choosing to work at the company.

I think that workers at a company should be payed some percentage of the profit of the company, with financiers and investors receiving some percentage of the profit in turn.

Unless the company is an ESOP, has some sort of profit sharing mechanism or is a co-op, they do not, they only get paid an hourly wage or a salary. If the company becomes more profitable, they do not see a consummate increase In their compensation. And they have no say on if the company is sold, and they are not compensated in anyway for the company they’ve contributed to being sold.

I don’t own a car.

But if I were to buy one, I’d like that every worker at the factory who assembled it got paid some percentage of the factories profits, and had some amount of input on the leadership of the company as a whole, not just an hourly wage.

Does it generally work like that? No, but doesn’t mean I don’t think that’s a better way to do things.

I think the larger issue is that so many studios get set up as things that can be sold by one or two people for the benefit of only one or two people. Like, the larger issue is that everyone who has been working at the studio should have some amount of say in if it should be sold or not. And if they do sell, you should be getting a cut of the truck of money.

MORE SOULS ON THE ALTER OF THE AI GOD, you know, just a few more and it shall burst forth from the machine and solve all our problems.

Just keeeeeeep pouring resources and capital on to the fire, any day now. Don’t worry about the climate or housing prices, the inevitable AI god will solve all that, surely. All the ruined lives and destroyed careers will be worth it, promise.

Shame, exploitive studios that let the business idiots take over and then sell them to Microsoft.

Will be happy to support the people who used to work there that go on to make indie games.

it’s kind of terrifying how much power has been concentrated in the hands of people so eager to adopt such a flimsy ideological/religious cause.

You think the producer was trying to be an ass? Or like, are they just that deep in the cult that they think this is helpful advice?

Like, they’re shooting them selves in the foot right now, this demand they’re trying to cut costs to keep up with, was artificially created by them!

Open AI is the largest single source of the demand, and they’re just redeeming credit Microsoft gave them in exchange for letting Microsoft use their models. Much of the rest of the demand is from users messing around with, or accidentally activating, the models from OpenAI that Microsoft has hastily welded on to anything they could. Microsoft could argue that’s bringing in money, but really Microsoft just raised the price of the office suite and didn’t make it clear that people could have kept the old price by switching to a new tier that didn’t have the features. Like, they could have just raised the price without the new features and pocketed the money without inducing demand or giving OpenAI free compute.

And now to pay for that unforced error, they’re going to let their games side fall even further behind. Like, it’s not happening yet, but, I think we’re quickly going to reach a point where Xbox has gone the way of the Dreamcast, and windows is no longer the default for PC games because it’s such a bloated mess.

Almost like there’s some kind of deeper generational economic divide, almost like all the people who own all the stock are retiring and starting to live off investments, and thus companies are pressured to payout ether in buy backs or dividends, so prices are rising while quality and pay falls, and only those benefiting from the record profitability can afford the new prices.

Sort of like the allocation of resources and labor are being redistributed to a retiring and wealthy leisure class and the burden to support that is falling on the younger generation.

someone finally told him about how much oil passes through Hormuz.

“The beatings shall continue until morale improves”

I doubt outright imploding, but, definitely certain elements that they need the votes of to pass legislation are probably telling his people they won’t vote for the bill unless certain things are removed, things that other elements said were mandatory for them to vote for the bill. It only takes a handful of intractable issues like that to prevent them having the numbers to pass legislation. Unless the senate agrees to pass the exact version the house did, it’s going to have to go back to the house again, and there are a lot of representatives who have buyers remorse after realizing what was in it.

I think the strategy was basically to go to everyone they needed to vote for it, ask them what they wanted in it. And just welded all that together along with the stuff trump wanted, tell everyone what they asked for was in it, then rush it through before anyone could take a close enough look to see anything they would object to, which worked for the house, but has failed in the senate by the fact it hasn’t passed yet and that certain figures like Rand Paul have objected to it.

it’s so crazy that areas of the country where air conditioning wasn’t really needed for comfort in the past are now places where major heat wave events can make a lack of one a safety issue.

Probably because threads is dead and has almost no native content.

If it was from 10-20 years ago, top down from an angle with modeled 3d units, it might be one of the Wargame titles from Eugen, or if it was WW2 setting maybe Combat Mission: beyond overlord, Company of Heroes, or Men of War.

If it was straight on top down 2D, it might have been Mud and Blood, which was a WW2 wave defense flash game.

Was it top down in the sense of looking straight down or from above at an angle? Were the units modeled as individual 3d models or just 2D icons?

Also, roughly what time period was it set in? Like, Napoleonic, WW2, Cold War, Contemporary?

Was it single player or multi player focused?

Could you get additional units as the game went on or were you locked with the units you started with? How could you get additional units? Points? Timer?

The thing is, I don’t think valve wants to become a desktop OS provider. Becoming the provider and maintainer of an OS for hundreds of millions of users is so far beyond their scope as a company. They’ve got a third the employees of Canonical and a fiftieth the employees of RedHat, the companies behind Ubuntu and Fedora. Maintaining a limited scope console/handheld OS that runs on a handful of hardware set ups is one thing, but supporting a fully fledged daily driver desktop OS meant to operate on any system is something else entirely.

Right now, most of their users are on windows, which makes them nervous because Microsoft is a known monopolist and has been slowly creeping deeper in to the PC games space. That’s why Valve has put so much effort in to software to support compatibility on Linux, so there is a viable alternative if Microsoft try’s to push them out. I think the steam deck and steamOS were a means to that end, create a business reason to develop and support those tools, not a first step towards becoming an operating system developer.

A better route forward for them would be to use their reach and public trust to help people make the switch to other extant distros. For example an all in one utility on the steam store that helps people select the right distro for their use case and set it up, have a hardware scan and a little quiz to choose a distro, a hard drive partitioning tool to set up dual boot, a tool to write the ISO to a USB drive (or maybe even just set up a bootable on the disk using the partitioner IDK), and migrate important files over using their cloud system.

If the issue is that people trust stuff with the valve branding on it, but are not willing to try Linux on their own, then Steam acting as a guide is much more practical than Valve taking on all the work needed to maintain a proper distro.

Beef is a lot more expensive in Europe in my experience, but is also of a much higher quality. You can get an equivalent quality in the US but you’ll have to go to a specialty butcher or a farmers market and it will be more expensive than an equivalent cut in Europe.

And frankly the cheap stuff in the US is still too expensive for me to make it a regular part of my diet. So, if I’m going to have it, it’ll be a treat, and I may as well buy the better stuff in that case.

American Fanta is corn syrup and artificial orange flavor, Fanta in Europe is orange juice and cane sugar.

Still a soda, but like, actually a food instead of an industrial byproduct.