Ask Lopez what he thinks

Planescape: Torment

Waiting to get a better eyeglass prescription so I can read the tiny text

It’s not like the value added for that 30% tax isn’t there. Steam has made so many things so easy that it’s easy to forget what things were like decades ago.

If you were an independent game publisher, you had to figure out how to set up a web storefront, a content delivery network hosted in perpetuity, take payments, do multiplayer, add in-game chat, map every weird joystick and gamepad in the universe to your control scheme, achievements, friend lists… And every game developer had to do that independently because there was no public solution, really. The friction to enter the indie dev space was so much higher.

Also, steam does not force you to use their store- you can generate steam keys and sell your game away from the steam platform. The only thing that they enforce is if you sell it for a lower price elsewhere, they’ll de-list your game. Which I think is reasonable.

Python is Spanish; a ton of people learned a bit in school and never picked it back up again. Places that speak it natively all have their own conventions because, even though the native languages were replaced by colonizers, a lot of the native languages patterns remained in place. Most places that speak it are super welcoming and stoked that you’re trying to learn.

Assembly is proto-indo-european

I’m invested because higher adoption of my preferred platform causes prices of said platform to drop, making the platform economically attractive to develop for.

Fewer users causes less effort to go into the platform by larger corporations due to lower revenue streams, diminishing updates and feature count over time.

Eventually, users leave due to pain points not being addressed. Shrinking user bases causes independent developer talent to focus on other platforms since the economics no longer work in the marginal case.

The shrinking independent developer contributions to the ecosystem make the required effort to develop for it that much higher, since the tools and apps that would have been built weren’t.

Higher development costs slow down feature pacing, due to the increased effort needed to substitute the efforts of missing ecosystem developers.

Lack of feature cadence drives users to other platforms, shrinking the user base, bringing us back to step 1.

Assume someone is already going to buy a Chromebook for $200-300. Why not spend $900-1000 on a nicer laptop or desktop and need a console at all?

And if you’re a certain age, why invest in an ecosystem that will die with the next hardware iteration, when you’ve seen it happen over and over? I bought a cartridge of Super Mario Bros 3 in 1993 with my birthday money. Why should I have to buy it again, ever, if I still own the cart? Why not invest in an ecosystem that’s by and large always backwards compatible?

Same. Upgrading the computer I was already going to buy with hardware to play games was cheaper than the console.

Weird comparison.

I already own a computer to do daily work in other areas of my life. Why not add the extra $700 to my PC budget and access 35+ years of gaming history, vs. paying $700 to access ~700 games that I can’t play when the next hardware iteration drops?

Carbon steel loses 70% of its strength at 800 degrees though.

From other discussions I’ve seen, the guy stepping down was frustrated by having C code rejected that made lifetime guarantees more explicit. No rust involved. The patch was in service of rust bindings, but there was 0 rust code being reviewed by maintainers.

I can get my dick sucked every few hours all week.

Caveat: by men

Plot twist: I’m bi

Double twist: I’m married

Final twist: I’m lying

A fairly minor and shitty law that influences all public speech about other people

Medication meaning the epilepsy is now effectively treated and he hasn’t had a seizure since.

He got medicated

I believe it. A childhood friend of mine had totaled like 7 (very cheap) cars by the time he turned 25.

After a particularly brutal crash, he was diagnosed with epilepsy after having an absence seizure in the presence of an ER nurse.

Hasn’t wrecked since.

Cp2077 is a good game. Did they hype it too hard, overpromise, fumble the launch, and launch too early? Yes, to all of those. But it’s one of the better games I’ve played recently.

My parents are approaching 60. I told them that the signal text message app would work a lot like iMessage if we both used it. And it did. It was great. For the other people that used signal, the experience was generally better. For other people that didn’t, SMS was fine because that’s how I was going to talk to them anyway.

The thing is, My parents are not going to go to more than one app to communicate with other people. Since it no longer sends and receives text messages, it doesn’t work with 99% of the other people in their lives.

They own and run a pretty large business. There’s no way that they’re staying on more than one messaging platform. You can talk all day about what they “should” do, but at the end of the day just getting them to switch to another app was a huge lift for me. Not only did they switch back to regular SMS, I burned a lot of credibility with them on tech related stuff through no fault of my own.

Repeat this story for the 90 or so people I had converted. There was no critical mass, so adoption evaporated overnight because my social graph is not enough to provide any sort of critical mass and adoption.

I quit using signal after they stopped supporting text messaging on Android. I had my whole family using it and that just evaporated overnight 😭

I have listened to a ton of game developer talks over the years. Some of the old indie devs that have given talks basically all welcomed steam because it meant that they didn’t have to deal with all of the stuff that steam does themselves. Before people started buying games through steam, doing an acceptable level of DRM, distribution, payments, refunds, etc. was all hand-rolled, for each company.

You can still do that yourself. Why do people stick with steam with the supposedly onerous 30% cut? It’s because steam provides a valuable service. Now the people that build games don’t have to deal as much with the things that aren’t building games.

In my opinion, a platform like Steam was bound to emerge at some point. Let’s thank our fucking stars that the company that “won” is not beholden to any shareholder and is run by a gamer that understands what people who love video games needed.

If you think that the 30% cut is too high, there’s nothing stopping you from building all the infrastructure yourself. And there are plenty of companies that have done so, like Epic and, until recently, Sony.

But I would say unless you are a team building AAA games and making millions and millions a year, where the savings you can realize outweigh the cost of rolling your own infrastructure, steam is kind of a good deal.