I bet an open source emulator in pre-alpha stage would run Skyrim at 120fps on Switch 2 ez.

Yeah, I want such giants (that are basically core infrastructure of a sector) to be regulated.
Just whip up a law saying their margins can’t be over 5% of a game’s sale price (the reason is to boost smal devs & market competition). Worst case 10 ppl don’t get richer.
(It’s a bit like capping the price of a medicine, but for cultural reasons instead of healthcare reasons.)

What, are they gonna quit the business bcs making only 100 million a year in net profit just isn’t worth it & would rather go do manual labour in the mines instead?

(Same logic as with taxes - if there was a 90% tax over 10 million ppl would still do the same things they do anyway, we were just taught to believe that someone earning 1bn per year would say ‘no, it’s not worth it for those 100m after taxes, I quit and now you can’t buy my good overpriced phones anymore so you lose’. It would never happen. The only difference would be in their wealth concentration, ie in their power over government/lobbies/public media.)

Financial (the capital’s) success isn’t the same as company success or even some sort of measure how much a company continues to society in more intrinsic terms.

We have one success metric & we can’t be surprised it’s winning.

It’s the new fancy castles.
The most you can get detached from the pleb.

If you wanted a huge luxury castle you needed the resources of maybe hundreds of villages and a staff of hundreds just for regular upkeep (you had to make all the products needed locally, from cleaning supplies to masonry, etc).

But today building a home for 1bn (that’s basically a limit of sorts, -ish) that can run on a staff of 10 ppl is hitting the limit of usability.

With mega/superyachts (ie luxury ships) it’s a more exclusive game, this dude didn’t just spend half a billon on a “smaller” object (that took 2000 people 4 years to build), it will also cost him 50~100 million in yearly upkeep (+maybe that sum every like 3~10 years for refurnishing, bcs why not, it’s the standard).

And this isn’t counting the usual support megayacht that will probably accompany the superyacht at all times (for extra staff, equipment, quests, maybe area accessibility in some cases).

That’s more common in new high-end luxury yachts, it’s a benefit to the guests as well (prob the main motivation?).

The only possible explanation is that they didn’t use enough AI.

I think so too, but they are a fairly small company/group with a stable (50+%) owner & basically don’t bother with much (neither publisher or consumer side). Eg GOG is smaller but fights DRM a lot more actively (and achieving DRM-free deals even before Steam).

I hope before Gabe goes Gaben’t he makes Valve a proper nonprofit - bcs the service they offer is like a mass infrastructure thing (which are always scary).

As to why devs think they have a monopoly - it’s hard to succeeded without Steam, especially if you arent a AAA studio (and even a small mistake on Steam part for their game’s visibility on Steam Store can cost them everything), and Steam isn’t really fighting over devs to offer them a better deal than the competition, it’s the other way around (it’s clear who has the power).

So yes, they have quite a fair bit of monopoly.
Modern, especially tech, monopolies aren’t a single-provider-locked-in type of thing, look at Google, they hold a monopoly over so many markets without those prerequisites. And they fought, shaped the markets intentionally to eventually get to that position (that’s why they were valued that high even before the revenue kicked in).

Y’all member the time when hardware demanding games meant awesome graphics?

So you are saying I can get them to swat my employer’s offices?

dickscourse

(Judging by their convo)

It’s (from the era of) Quake with extra Earth lore & special triangles.

It’s like in the movies where the main hero chooses to not kill the bad guy at the end “because that would make him as bad as them” … yet he killed 1000 poor henchmen throughout the movie with no issues.

Again.

Yeah, we don’t really have systemic/infrastructure dependency on Apple. Compared to Microsoft (which we are dependant upon atm) who can and does extort the EU a bit everywhere it can.

That’s why foss all the things!

Just the evil nature of a megacorp manifesting in monology tenancies.

Anti-monopoly laws are at most too loose atm, not too strict.

(Also the threat is just a threat, they’ve been saying that for a decade now.)

I member! <3
I was there, I loved the original game too.

And I’m still sad we didn’t get more episodes.
Fascinating read, thx for sharing.

Lol, I even posted on their forums on the day Elexis was born (the game is set in the future).

Dark Mode, LLC??

Y’all have pre-built phones? And even laptops? Or car computers??
Weirdos.

/s

But def, this type of info is at best for the investors (and even then just unstructured info about market shares), not consumers.

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

What were you Boy doing all night? (: