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Sure, Patreon is great, but Patreon alone is not enough for most creators to make a living, considering how hard it is to get people to commit to monthly subscriptions.
Sure, Patreon is great, but Patreon alone is not enough for most creators to make a living, considering how hard it is to get people to commit to monthly subscriptions.
This is a bit unnecessarily tough on independent content creators… what exactly do you expect them to do? Make no money from their content? How would they be able to make a living?
Doing that would tell you nothing about whether the browser might have un-patched, known vulnerabilities elsewhere.
How do you know this? Of course there are lots of reasons for why they’d want to enforce minimum browser versions. But security might very well be one of them. Especially if you’re a bank you probably feel bad about sending session tokens to a browser that potentially has known security vulnerabilities.
And sure, the user agent isn’t a sure way to tell whether a browser is outdated, but in 95% of cases it’s good enough, and people that know enough to understand the block shouldn’t apply to them can bypass it easily anyway.
There’s no reason your clients can’t have public, world routeable IPs as well as security.
There are a lot of valid reasons, other than security, for why you wouldn’t want that though. You don’t necessarily want to allow any client’s activity to be traceable on an individual level, nor do you want to allow people to do things like count the number of clients at a particular location. Information like that is just unnecessary to expose, even if hiding it doesn’t make anything more secure per se.
simply reading the browser agent isnt really security
It’s not for their security, but for that of genuinely clueless people that are just running an actually outdated browser that might have known and exploitable security flaws.
Oof, that quote is the exact brand of nerd bullshit that makes my blood boil. “Sure, it may be horribly designed, complicated, hard to understand, unnecessarily dangerous and / or extremely misleading, but you have nOT rEAd ThE dOCUmeNtATiON, therefore it’s your fault and I’m immune to your criticism”. Except this instance is even worse than that, because the documentation for that command sounds just as innocent as the command itself. But I guess obviously something called “tmpfiles” is responsible for your home folder, how couldn’t you know that?
You’re of course right with the exclusivity argument — that’s a very real possibility, and yet Microsoft has tried it with Call of Duty, one of the most popular franchises ever, and saw very little success with it, resulting in them putting it back on Steam years later. If I were to guess why attempts like this have failed in the past, I would say that Steam is so dominant over the PC gaming market today that not even large franchises going exclusive attract enough of a user base to offset the loss of customers that aren’t buying games only because they’re not on Steam. Add to this the additional overhead of developing and maintaining a competing store front, and the cost-benefit analysis leans clearly towards just being on Steam and accepting their cut of sales. The exclusivity tactic clearly failed even for big titles like CoD, so it definitely won’t work for smaller ones. And we’re not even talking about cutting into the indie game market, which would require making very attractive exclusivity offers to many smaller studios, all for acquiring exclusivity on titles in the hope that they’ll be the next big hit — a very high risk strategy that likely results in a lot of sunken cost short-term.
Once they have that market share, they can give developers better margins, since they’ll be selling customer data at a profit
When we talk about “selling customer data”, I think we need to look in more detail into what this would actually mean in practice. It’s very unlikely that any online storefront could legally literally “sell your personal data” like address etc. that you would enter presumably as part of the payment process to third parties. That’s just illegal almost everywhere in the world, and certainly in the largest PC gaming markets. It wouldn’t lead to significant revenue either, because raw data like that just isn’t very valuable. Instead, I suppose what people mean when they say this (in the context of companies like Google or Facebook) is just the practice of selling advertising services that use the data they have on people to advertisers, who can then target their ads at highly specific segments, improving their return on ad spend. The actual private data though stays with the entity that collected it — because it’s what actually gives them the edge on the market; it allows them to offer better ad targeting than competitors.
How would this apply to Steam or a potential competing storefront? Barely. I assume no-one is arguing that a steam competitor could launch a generic advertising network that could stand against Google or Facebook, so we’re probably talking about advertising within the storefront itself. Steam today already collects information on your interests and customizes the store based on that, plus presumably your location, age group etc. — so they’re pretty much already using your “personal information” to the extent possible in this context. How else could a competitor realistically monetize personal information?
It’s a market, markets trend towards short term gains strategies over long term gains strategies because having faster short term gains means you can more easily crush your competition.
I wouldn’t say that this is the case when we’re talking about trying to eat into the market share of a dominant entity like Steam. Sure, potential competitors can make short-term plays that cut away some market share, but such strategies are expensive, risky, and alone likely don’t lead towards a significantly improved position long-term (exhibit A, again: COD being exclusive to Battle.net).
For better or worse (usually worse), toppling a near-monopoly like Steam is extremely hard for players with big cash, and practically impossible for independent competitors. This is especially true for products that are inherently sticky, like Steam, where people have curated large libraries over decades. The only reason Steam’s dominant position is not hurting the consumer is because their product works well and is in many ways very pro-consumer.
I’ve read that, IIRC. It was about getting featured organically though. Steam runs promotions for certain game series or even publisher catalogues frequently, with large custom graphics and usually a sale. Obviously I have no way to know for sure, but I can’t imagine that Valve doesn’t get itself paid for those.
This doesn’t make any sense. The reason Valve hasn’t been acquired is because it’s privately owned and not up for sale, not because it doesn’t have “enough profit”. In fact it’s extremely profitable, for all we know.
Sure, another company could come along and build a competitor. It’s happened already multiple times, and Steam is doing just fine despite some major titles these days being exclusive to other platforms. Unless Steam drops the ball on something big time, it’s unlikely that people will move to another platform en masse, especially one that is less focussed on consumer interests. No-one can just come in and “take capital away” from Steam, whatever that means, by building a competitor that sells advertising space and “monetizes user data” — they need users first.
… And then there’s the fact that Steam is already “selling advertiser space” today. Games don’t just get featured on their storefront because Gabe likes them. They make deals with publishers for this.
Apparently 50%+ of the company belongs to Gabe himself, presumably he would pass it on to some very trusted. That makes a hostile takeover pretty unlikely.
It’s not the same and I wish people would stop pretending that it is. Does it do what most people need it to do though? Yeah, probably.
SteamOS has HDR support indeed, and it works really well with pretty much all HDR-enabled Windows games in Proton I’ve tried.
You’re vastly overestimating how much the average consumer cares about these things
Pretty funny how it says “Unauthorized access” right below screenshots of features clearly being enabled.
macOS out of the box fucking sucks for monitor scaling with third party monitors. It’s honestly laughable for a modern OS. You can install some third party software that fixes it completely, but it really shouldn’t be necessary. I use an (admittedly pretty strange) LG DualUp monitor as a secondary, and out of the box macOS can only make everything either extremely tiny, extremely large, or blurry.
Other than that, I’ve had no problems at all, and the window scaling between different DPI monitors is a lot smoother than it was with Windows previously.
I also referred to men as males in the post, but that didn’t seem to bother anyone.
Because there’s no history of “males” being used in a derogatory way.
Google literally has an official list of IP ranges for their crawlers, complete with an API that returns the current IP ranges that you can use to automate a check. Hardly a moving target, and even if it is, it doesn’t matter if you know exactly where the target is at all times.
… you’re getting into philosophical territory here. The plain fact is that LLMs generate cohesive text that is original and doesn’t occur in their training sets, and it’s very hard if not impossible to get them to quote back copyrighted source material to you verbatim. Whether you want to call that “creativity” or not is up to you, but it certainly seems to disqualify the notion that LLMs commit copyright infringement.
“Version” is definitely used commonly to describe two different … versions of the same thing, without implying that one is better than the other or supercedes it. There are two versions of the PS5, one with and one without a disk drive. There are many different versions of Windows, like Home or Enterprise. You can get hardcover or paperback versions of many books. Etc. Etc.