There’s some attempt to try and make it genuine, and there are guidelines around it to support that (e.g. 1 = barely noticeable, 3,4 = distracting, 5,6 = unignorable, 7,8 = prevents normal activities, 9 = prevents conversation)

But in practice you’re going to get about one in every dozen patients who engages with this scale in good faith and you’re going to get a number between 8-11 from everyone else.

but it would be an incredibly stupid thing to do.

So we can pretty much bank on it definitely happening, got it.

Um, there is more than one type of anticompetitive practice? Amazon uses predatory pricing to drive companies out of business, Microsoft uses tying to sell Teams, Google uses self-preferencing for their own services in search results, Facebook acquired Instagram rather than compete with them, etc.

None of which are related to Steam nor has Steam done anything resembling any of these examples to my knowledge.

One of Valve’s favorite anticompetitive cudgels is requiring “most favored nation” clauses in their contracts, prohibiting devs from selling for less on other storefronts (which Amazon also has used).

Valve prohibits people from selling steam keys for less on other storefronts which I think is perfectly reasonable. You can list your game on Steam for $20 and distribute it on Itch for $5 or even free and Steam has zero problem with this, so long as you aren’t distributing steam keys via that storefront. This is to try and prevent a developer from leveraging Steam for advertisement purposes but making all their actual sales off-platform.

Can you describe where Steam has done anything even approaching that, ever?

EA and Activision stores didn’t fail because Steam bought them out and bullied them out of the market, they failed because they were trash products. Steam doesn’t buy “default placement” in anything. They just have a good product that people want to use over alternatives.

Point out a situation in which Steam has acted anti-competitive and I might agree that you have a point, but I can’t think of any situations to call out here.

You can sell your game for different prices on different platforms, you just can’t sell steam keys that way. If you purchase a game on Itch and it gives you a steam key, that’s still a steam purchase and is subject to this restriction. If you purchase a game on Itch and it hands you an installer then you can buy that game at whatever price they want to sell it at.

Failing to make a product that doesn’t suck shit does not make a monopoly for your competitor.

In fact, Steam is de facto not a monopoly because of the very existence of GOG. EA and Activision tried to break in to this arena but failed to provide a product that actually switched people off of steam, because they failed to provide a comparable experience to steam. GOG did, and they’re doing fine.

deleted by creator

Whoa, back up there. Nobody was talking about CSAM until you brought it up.

Huh. Did that come with an update? I remember trying to play HZD when I first got my steam deck and it consistently hit about 14fps during combat at the lowest settings. Completely unplayable. I just uninstalled it and didn’t try again, but maybe I should now.

The oligarchs use VPNs to make their corporations function. They won’t be made illegal. Blanket banning all VPNs in America leads to an instant grinding halt of all commerce.

The Shadow Wizard Money Gang

Come to my house and I’ll play you some of my CDs

If you could sell this for $500 or less you have yourself a customer

That’s basically unenforceable unfortunately. Search engines are effectively made to be gamed by the way they function. SEO up to a certain point is what makes your website actually findable, it has just gotten out of hand.

1. Texas can’t even properly support their own power infrastructure inside their own state

2. The vast majority of the population of Texas (Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Dallas/Ft Worth) are solidly blue. The state maps are gerrymandered to death such that 100,000 square miles of empty land has the same voting power as over ten million citizens. This is the sole and only reason Texas is consistently “red”, is via rampant voter disenfranchisement.

Refuses, or is forced?

A thing we see over here in America sometimes is the same group, or even the same man, having control over both public and private options of a given service. The public option is stripped of funding and only operates at minimum wage, while the private option has 5x the funding and hires industry experts. This then easily paves the way for “the public option is trash and doesn’t work, we need to privatize this entire industry”. Suddenly your post office is owned by an individual and you’re paying a weekly post subscription.

Be very, very cautious and suspicious of private options attempting to supplant public ones. It’s a key tactic that our homegrown American fascists like to use and it’s upsettingly effective on the general public.

Not to be confused with the elusive cocktopus

Thanks for this. At the beginning of the comment,

Do you think we’re all just a bunch of rubes?

My answer was, well kinda, yeah. By the end of it my opinion has changed.

I do still think that this is appreciated more as a performance piece than a painting, if that makes sense. You appreciate the action behind what produced this piece, and maybe by extension the piece itself but the meaning lies in the artist’s actions off the canvas. I do still think that yeah this is a pretty trash painting in as much as we define a painting. But you’ve given me a new perspective on it that I had not in fact considered before. I’m no stranger to wrestling demons but I never connected that to Pollock’s pieces before. I’m still not sure that I do, but I can understand and appreciate why you would.

There is also no good art without bad art. Even if I don’t think the result was successful, he was trying something new and novel and that has to happen to evolve our art. I don’t much like Picasso’s cubism either, but I can’t deny that it was a bold step in a new direction that then inspired other artists after him. Maybe this is similar.

I still don’t like Pollock much, I think his art really could have been made by anyone, and the only reason we know his name is because of luck and nebulous connections to CIA psy-ops, and every art magazine ceaselessly jerking him off in their articles when he was popular. But maybe I’m wrong. I do appreciate your new perspective on his work. Maybe the fact that it could have been made by anyone is part of the actual message that’s trying to be communicated in these pieces.