You pay less because you get less. I’m selling a product. The last thing I’m going to cheap out in is sales. I’m not going to see great sales from the EGS because A)Nobody uses it

That’s exactly it, Devs have to accept Steam’s cut because it’s essentially the only place you can sell things. It makes logical sense, but do you not see why this is a disadvantageous position for the Devs to be put in?

It’s like trying to sell your hand made Combs. The gas station on the corner is happy to take only 20% of the profit. They’re all over the place and accessible. But you really want to sell it at the boutique shops because they have more comb-seeking customers.

This would be a fine analogy, if there weren’t a single digit amount of storefronts. Steam and EGS are more equivalent to supermarkets. Sure the odd person is going to go to speciality stores on occasion, but the vast majority of sales are done through supermarkets. Steam is a supermarket competing against speciality stores. The only other real supermarket in town is EGS and as you’ve discussed, it’s such a dumpster fire no one shops there.

I’m not disagreeing that Steam deserves its position, it does for sure. But we live in a world where it has no meaningful competition, and one of the ways it exercises its position is by maintaining their 30% cut. A cut which was established by stores that had to manage the logistics for real physical copies of the games.

My point is that there isn’t a reason that Steam has such a high cut, other than it wants more money, and has the market saturation to command more money

Taking a different and hopefully more productive stance than the other guy, I just want to explore people’s thoughts.

People already have built these alternatives. Itch.io, EGS, Humble Store, Microsoft Store, GOG. These platforms exist, but they struggle to achieve the full market dominance that Steam has as the “default” platform, meaning Devs are borderline forced to accept the 30% cut if they have any hope of making sales.

As shown by Steam’s huge profits, they certainly take a higher cut than they have to, and they can definitely stomach a smaller cut

The people who are more likely to retain a PC and not just use a phone, are more likely to be tech literate power users.

This selects against casual windows users, and selects for hardcore Linux users

Only because everyone’s on edge, give it a few years and they’ll need “anonymised” data collection to “help improve their service”

only 2tb? that’s the size of my cache drives

Well you have to actually setup the boilerplate, plus copilot is generally more intelligent and context aware, especially for small snippets when you’re already coding

Also want to point out, most of that is container, not spent fuel. The safety standards are so ridiculously high that they basically guarantee zero risk.

More people (per plant) are exposed to elevated levels of radiation due to coal power, and that’s not even including the health risk of all the other shit they release

Other than the currently dying Tory party (and even sort of them), every single major UK political party is for green energy and against climate change to varying degrees. And I mean on a policy level, not just words.

I’m not too familiar with other governments, but Europe seems to be going well on that front too. And as much as China bad, they seem open to green policies, and the US democrats seem pretty okay on climate, especially as carbon capture helps out fossil fuel companies.

I know that’s not a massive ringing endorsement, but considering the cost of 4% energy expenditure for a single year, it seems like a no brainer. If you spread it over 20 years that’s 0.2% of energy, less than AI or crypto uses by far

Agreed, using LLMs for code requires you to be an experienced dev who can understand what it pukes out. And for those very specific and disciplined people it’s a net positive.

However, generally, I agree it’s more risk than it’s worth

That’s honestly pretty good, I can see world leaders coming together and just doing that. There must be other technical challenges to this other than raw power usage

Browser history also holds significantly less information than a screenshot of you using your computer taken every 3 seconds

You’re right, it’s fantastical, but it’s still worth talking about.

It’s worth talking about as it solidifies the argument more than just assuming your opponent is acting poorly. The argument of “Even if Microsoft is a saint, it’s still a bad idea. But we know Microsoft also has a history of data collection, spying, anti-patterns etc.” is a much stronger argument than the latter half on its own

Using Copilot as a copilot, like generating boilerplate and then code reviewing it is still “babysitting” it. It’s still significantly less effort than just doing it yourself though

My bad, I can’t read 🤦

I don’t think GamersNexus covered Madison’s case? I know they covered Billet Labs and the performance metrics being off though

Honestly, the best evidence they could provide to someone like that is suing Madison for defamation and winning. But they don’t want that, I don’t want that, and I’m sure you don’t want that either. It would also look mega bad for LTT. Which is why I think they mentioned that they could sue in the post, but chose not to.

And it’s not like some rando is going to be invested enough to pay a 3rd party to investigate LTT without a conflict of interest being there.

Everything else kinda needs to stay locked up due to employee privacy and data protection laws. So, I honestly can’t see how they can “win”.

I will say, LTT is a big corporation, and there is a massive power deferential between them and a single person. And given how difficult it is to stand up that, especially when you’re afraid of rocking the boat and losing your job, plus how fucking annoyed I am about the Billet Labs debacle and how they responded to that. I still believe that most of what Madison said was true, or at the very least, she believes what she’s saying is true

You kinda inherently do when you post on a public forum, the other guy’s being a bit of a dick, but you can’t just expect a circlejerk whenever you post your opinion

Yeah zero psychological risk is a bit of an overstatement. Zero physical maybe, but there’s definitely psychological risks, and I’m not even thinking about child support

Edit: I can’t read, it says physiological and I’m just deficient in the reading

I love how this implies the protagonist just wants to die

Unfortunately, we all know for the US it would go fine. The UK is the same, we whine for a bit, then nothing happens