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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
Remember when we all loved Google?? No? How about Firefox? Or maybe some of you might remember when Elon was our real-world Tony Stark?
Yeah. So…. There are two types of tech companies:
Those that suck, and those that have yet to reveal how they suck.
Remember that Gabeface chamber?
... They're like the opposite of doing nothing.
MSFT in particular has been essentially utterly out manuevered by Valve and their developements.
Its... its actually rumored (by Moore's Law Is Dead) that the specific weird custom chip the Steam Machine is using...
... was originally going to be used in something like like a planned Surface Super Duper Pro tablet.
But MSFT cancelled it.
After AMD had already made a bunch of the chips.
... And... then Valve comes along, figures out how to build a PC/Console out of MSFT's abandoned scraps, which also functionally hammers the final nail into the coffin of Xbox as an actual hardware device.
Valve beat MSFT at large segments of literally their own game.
Proton and Vulkan, both largely funded by Valve, flipped the fucking game table into another dimension, but MSFT did not notice untill it was beyond too late.
... Thinking with portals, you might say.
This is what you can accomplish when you don't have shareholders forcing you to be an idiot.
Private companies are perfectly capable of self sabotage through growth drivers without shareholders unfortunately...
Execs chasing bonuses and chasing w/e 3rd party "consultancy groups" say they need to do.
Fostering developers to go ham on windows to Linux comparability and now the same for X86/64 to ARM is much more than nothing. Valve have actually been the ones doing the most to pave the way for theirs and anyone who follows' future.
I'm not too jazzed about their virtual monopoly but that's sadly because they've just been working for consumers in more ways than the others. They're not the best at everything like GOG trumps then when it comes to actual ownership but it's sum of all of their parts that puts them head and shoulders above the rest.
They've done so much that they've paved the way for non gamers to be able to switch over to Linux much easier (I wouldn't say it's all on them but they've helped foster cross compatible development on Linux in general). I don't think you could say the others have done as much to affect the space outside of gaming as valve either. Except Microsoft, but their decisions have been much more controversial.
I hate to see myself glazing valve as much as I have here but it is what it is. I'll criticise them when the context allows and praise them like this in other times.
Stop giving credence to valve being a monopoly. That's tech bro propaganda. They are literally not a monopoly. There is multiple digital storefronts for PC gaming. There is options. There is choice. Do not further the narrative and get fucking valve antitrusted for no goddamn reason other than Microsoft wants them dead.
That's why i said a virtual monopoly not an actual one. Their prevalence in the industry among pc gamers makes them seem like a monopoly even though there are choices. The rest of my comment also explains why people choose them over other options so I don't know what your trying to get at...
I would go further and say that all that they've done are """merely""" sound elements in a strategy to avoid that in the era of always-online remote updateable software, Microsoft successfully uses their position as the provider (and, more importantly, controller of some of what runs in pretty much all consumer instances) of Windows to squeeze out Steam as a games store.
Microsoft slowly transforming for Windows applications into the equivalent of Apple for iOS applications (and their move towards signed applications could be part of that) would be a nightmare scenario for Steam and it's a realistic possibility, especially if you notice that Microsoft is moving towards "everything must be cryptographically signed by Microsoft" to run in Windows.
So it totally makes strategical sense for Steam to invest into getting as many gamers as possible away from the Windows ecosystem, and one path is to get more games to as easily as possible run in the already existing and established alternative to Windows - Linux - the easiest way being to invest in an ever improved Windows-Linux adaptor layer (i.e. Wine/Proton) backed by a Steam store in Linux which just seamlessly uses that layer when needed, whilst another path is to sell their own game machines which do not run Windows and there again using Linux makes sense as the OS, both because it already exists and is mature and because using it on their machines has synergies with their investment in the "make games targeting Windows seamlessly run on Linux without needing changes".
This isn't Valve and Steam being nice guys doing nice things because they love their customers who use Linux, it's just good long term business planning and management of maybe their greatest external risk - Microsoft.
I mean, "Yay for choosing Linux!" and "Respect for their business sense", but lets not deceive ourselves into thinking they're good guys because of doing what just makes sense strategically to manage Microsoft as a risk.
I agree, it's just nice that they chose a platform that others can use what they've implemented whilst they're still around and if they somehow go tits up on Sunday.
Their decision to do it open source is the nice guy side but you are right they have ulterior motives that just make perfect business sense rather than it just them being "nice".
Playstation isn't lazy. They happily shoot themselves in the foot every other week. For every 1 good thing Sony does with the brand, they do 3 or 4 fucked up things.
Look, failing at selling video games people want to buy, is like failing at selling porn, or running a casino full of machines that tabulate a set amount of winnings before giving back a predetermined amount.
Doing nothing is sometimes the smartest way to make money.
But what if I want to confirm I am rich for being smart and thinking out the box instead of having rich parents and exploiting people like half of those poors think I am?
Well they apparently have people you can pay to whisper such in your ear.
Remember, you are mortal.
look, im very grateful for valve employee’s work on proton (& other technologies), and i recognize that out of the major gaming companies, valve is one of the least bad…
but they’re still a corporation. they’re still unethical. they popularized gambling mechanics and they basically have a monopoly on PC gaming distribution.
don’t worship companies. they don’t care about you. need i remind you, in the late 2000s/early 2010s, nintendo was the good guy. just making good games and innovating, while everyone else was busy making yearly slop, day one DLCs, paid online, microtransactions, broken games on release… and now, look at them.
what were you smoking? nintendo has never been the good guy...they successfully patented the "digital representation of water" back in the day
Valve is worker-run and largely worker owned, it's literally 350 people who just work on whatever they think is a good idea
They're technically a corporation, but also an amazing argument for collective ownership
They ship one thing every decade and it somehow changes the whole industry.
Made large contributions to Linux gaming compatibility
Also platformed independent game developers.
Monopolized a market by offer good services to both end users and buisness clients.
Lets not forget the evil though : helped set the 30% cut for apps/games that became the standard across all digital spaces, arguably started online gambling and microtranactions in gaming.
The very first instance of microtransaction began with Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. You know the one, the horse armor for $2.50. That was in 2006.
Team Fortress 2 didn't come out until 2007.
Online Gambling has been a thing for quite a while beforehand. You can't entirely blame Valve, here. Inspired? Perhaps, but it took them quite a time to even start giving in.
Yep.
This is, at least initially, Todd's fucking fault, and I am never going to forget, nor forgive that.
I can still remember seeing that pop up on Steam and being baffled, thinking it was the dumbest thing I'd ever seen.
Then, within a few years, as I'm getting a degree in Econ, (during the GFC, lol) I realized....oh no... this is going to become the new paradigm for funding game dev, making money off of games, and that there need to be proactive pushes and discussions now to figure out how to manage and regulate this before it gets out of hand.
Unfortunately, most gamers are fucking idiots, so that discussion did not even start at a wider scale untill the paradigm was well established, and I had the same idiots who 5 to 10 years prior were telling me 'methinks the lady doth protest too much', well, now they're just telling me 'pff, bro, what are you gonna do about it? just shut up'.
Ross Scott from Stop Killing Games had been saying the kind of stuff he'd been saying about games preservation and DRM bullshit for a solid decade before he got any large amount of attention.
I know because I'd been following him since even before his Mind Of Freeman days, back when he was basically just making skits in either GMod from before Gmod was sold for money, or he was just basically writing his own HL2 mods eseentially, to set up and block out and film the skits.
People just fundamentally do not seem to understand that preventing an egg from falling off of a table is much easier than unbreaking an egg.
See also: Climate change, current US tariff policy.
Just a side note:
TF2, released in 2007, hasn't had lootboxes till 2010. Valve was not even the first game to have them.
spoiler
FIFA was 1 year ahead, but not the first one either.
Also, TF2's lootboxes are not the same as Dota2 and CSGO/CS2. TF2 weapons have an actual change of gameplay to them while Dota/CS has just skins. Not to mention, you can get all weps in TF2 by just playing the game.
I agree with your sentiment, but you're wrong.
Horse armor was nowhere close to the first microtransaction. Maple Story released in 2003 and is widely considered to be the first videogame with micro transactions. You could make a strong argument that arcade games were the origin of micro transactions even.
Part of what made the horse armor so egregious was that it was for a full-priced game. And it's also worth pointing out that Microsoft was involved in that mess too. They had purchased times exclusivity for Oblivion on Windows and Xbox. An unnamed Microsoft executive allegedly went to Todd Howard and compared the pricing to things like Xbox system themes or iPhone ringtones, when at the time a 30s crappy quality version of your favorite song might cost $5.
Gambling has existed for thousands of years. I don't blame Valve. I don't really play their FtP games much, but my understanding is that the micro transactions are mostly cosmetic and not pay-to-win. There were times in my life when FtP games were a great boon and I had the discipline to not buy micro transactions, but today I prefer games that are just one purchase. Still, just because I don't like FtP games doesn't mean they shouldn't exist or that I hate Valve for having some.
It's going to be a very, very interesting series of events once Gabe passes away.
Enjoy him while we're able.
That scares me. I've been a huge steam fan boy since it was in beta. Lots of nostalgia. When the OGs pass away and valve is sold off to Amazon.. the end
Valve could've legitimately done nothing and still be winning in comparison to the big three, but instead they've slowly and steadily been helping the gaming community to give Windows the middle finger by making huge contributions to Linux gaming.
Honestly, its downright shameful how many companies have forgotten that a good way to make money from customers is simply to treat them nicely while they're buying your goods.
Valve's big business strategy seems to be just wait for your competition to shoot themselves in the foot
>made their own linux distro
>develop Proton and Lepton
>all that in Valve-Time™
>Windows gave up
Microsoft practically handed it to Valve. Microsoft wanted gamers off the PC and on to the xbox so they ignored the PC platform they were already dominant on. This gave free reign to Valve. One of the biggest mistakes in PC history if you ask me.
Other companies running game stores/platforms must think like this which is why their stores end up competing with a 2008 Steam. Does nothing is incredibly incorrect
i guess i'm the only one excited as hell to buy a steam machine.
I am not gonna buy it. But fuck man, I am exited as hell for what is going to happen with PC gaming and OSes. I feel that thanks to Valve we going to finally break MS' iron grip on OS market.
Same here.
Whilst I don't necessarily think Steam are doing it because of being good guys (I just think it makes good business sense for them to move gamers away from Windows), that doesn't mater for the outcomes for gamers, what maters is that what they're doing helps us all out to escape the ever tightening clutches of Microsoft which nowadays is basically an Evil Tech Corp.
A few years ago? I would have said "oh that's near for laypeople, but I am better off building my own PC".
With the prices of GPU's, RAM, and SSD's.... The Steam Machine might legit be a better value than building it myself.
Valve was responsible for creating the gambling mania in gaming. Remember that!
Fifa ultimate team. Magic the Gathering cards. Both older