“It’s a structure that has proven to be necessary because of our low population and geographic dispersion,” said Martin Pelletier, senior portfolio manager at Wellington-Altus Private Counsel, referring to oligopolies in general.
No it’s fucking not, that’s absolute fucking horse shit.
That means consumers will continue to grumble about their limited options, and investors can feast on attractive stocks.
That means that the rich will continue enriching themselves at the expense of consumers’ wallets, the quality of products and services they receive, and literally their lives and livelihoods.
This author is a huge fucking piece of shit. Most of what they’re writing is true, but their gleeful characterization of their gluttonous depravity absolutely boils the blood. In a just society they would be thrown in prison for profiting off an oligopoly, not given a fat dividend for doing nothing. Fucking investor pieces of shit.
I mean yeah, Take Two (2k, Rockstar) certainly has a better management track record than Embracer, and a lot of other bracer studios were just shut down, at least franchises like Borderlands and Risk of Rain might live on now.
Do you have any idea how many news articles we have to read about your insane election system that has campaigning for 3/4 years instead of normal countries that campaign for 2 months? Like the entire campaign seasons of Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, and Spain, take up combined less time every 4 years than the US’s primaries do.
Fair, harassment / trolling in a harassing way is never an ok response, but people are allowed to be critical of too much American content overwhelming a community. Americans may think everything that happens in those 3 campaigning years matter but the rest of the world doesn’t necessarily.
VideoLAN @videolan App Stores were a mistake. Currently, we cannot update VLC on Windows Store, and we cannot update VLC on Android Play Store, without reducing security or dropping a lot of users… For now, iOS App Store still allows us to ship for iOS9, but until when?
You know what I find more annoying then that? Defending a monopoly that’s rent seeking to the tune of a million dollars of revenue per employee per year, and that’s with most of the employees literally being paid to work on nothing.
Lmfao “for free”. Did you read the article? Did you not see the part where Valve takes 30% of every single game in existience’s revenue? The part where Valve makes more money per game then the studios actually developing them?
Yes, steam was great and rose to its monopoly through its greatness, but they have been flat out abusing that monopoly by not lowering prices when they can. The occasional free return is a trinket they throw back at you after overcharging you by at least 15% on every single other game you’ve ever purchased.
On PC, Microsoft takes a 0% cut of apps distributed through it’s store and 12% of games, so EGS isn’t really the outlier there, but regardless 30% being average in an existing anti-competitive industry doesn’t really prove anything about whether or not it’s a fair cost. That can easily be oligopoly collusion / price signalling which happens all the time.
Console makers like Microsoft and Sony are also funding building the hardware and maintaining the platforms since they lose money on up front hardware sales. I’m not saying I agree that this should be a legal business model, but they have more of an argument for charging 30%.
And regardless of all of that, when I’m talking about a fair price, I’m talking about a fair price in an economic sense, as in, does Valve provide more back to the economy then money they take out of it, or are they rent seeking? Given that Valve made more revenue per employee than literally any other tech company (pushing $1million/employee/year), all during a period where their employees literally were allowed to work on whatever personal projects they wanted (virtually none of which went anywhere or made Valve any money). In that context, I can’t see their fees as anything other than rent seeking. Yes make a profit, yes pay your employees well, keep a nice cushion, and invest in R&D, but Valve has been able to afford to do all of that and just burn / hoard cash at a ridiculous rate, all money that would be going to the actual game designers and developers if we had competitive markets.
Valve also allowed most of their employees to work on whatever they wanted for a decade, an initiative that produced almost nothing, and during that time they still made close to a million dollars per year per employee.
I’m not saying I’m unhappy with Valve being private or with Valve making enough money to give itself a nice cushion, but the scale of the money they’re making is absurd when independent game devs often still struggle to make money.
EGS would be profitable if they had the sales numbers that Steam does. Theyre not profitable because they’re basically just a fortnite and rocket league store.
No it doesn’t. It leads to Valve wasting money enriching themselves to the tune of millions of dollars per employee per year while independent game developers making normal salaries continue to have to lay people off and be underfunded.
Excellently, Unreal Engine makes a huge amount of money for them.
Have they stopped running at a loss yet?
You’re probably thinking of the Epic Games Store, not Unreal Engine, and it would be grossly profitable at 12% commission if it had the established infrastructure and sales numbers that Steam does, it’s only not profitable because they are still developing and building infrastructure and they basically just sell Fortnite and Rocket League.
But on that matter, Valve charges much less for their engine, and is often free for indie devs.
If you’re talking about the Source Engine, they’re really, really not comparable. The Source Engine hasn’t even been updated since 2013.
EGS would be grossly profitable if they had a good service, but they don’t because their platform is shit. What are they supposed to do?
How would you convince gamers to use your store instead of Steam? There are reasons that anti-monopoly laws don’t care how you got your monopoly, once you have one it’s problematic because it makes nearly impossible for competition to form against you.
“… employing Linux developers and finally making actual cracks in the true monopoly of Windows.”
Again, Valve has made close to a million dollars per employee per year. No they have not spent anywhere remotely close to that on Linux developers. You’re equating a trinket they tossed you in the last couple of years with the giant horde they robbed from developers.
Funny, it’s not the indies with the huge layoffs
It is, independent studios lay people off and have to close up shop all the time, on top of just not making that much money to begin with, they just don’t make headline news the way that big companies do.
It wasn’t their money to spend. Devs lost their jobs because Valve kept taking more than they needed.
Again, 1 Million dollars. Per Year. Per Employee. That means per every single Linux dev they employed, they still made a million dollars per employee.
That’s indefensible and it’s really weird to see lemmy get their dicks hard about excess greedy capitalism just cause this time it’s behind a service that they like. Facebook gave back a huge amount of open source projects but that doesn’t make up for the harm they’ve caused, even just the harm caused by them sucking up an inordinate amount of societal resources, and Facebook “only” makes ~$750k per employee per year.
When games like Duke Nukem 3D or Quake were out, Boomers were what? 30 to 50 years old? I’m sure some of them played FPS games, but there is no way they were the majority.
Think about it this way, it’s not that the majority of people playing those games are boomers, but the majority of games that boomers play are those games.
Also, this has caused me to look up the formal definition of Gen X vs Boomer, and I did not realize that everyone born after 1964 is considered Gen X. In my head Gen X went from ~1975-1990, everyone before that being a boomer, so assuming other people have the same conception of boomer in their head, then the majority of people able to afford gaming PCs in the mid 90s would be boomers…
They also do just go boom and have stuff like the BFG …
On April 8, 2024, a spectacular and rare celestial event is set to unfold over Canada, the United States and Mexico – a total solar eclipse. As the Moon aligns perfectly between Earth and the Sun, temporary darkness will sweep across parts of the country, captivating countless spectators.
The idea that things wouldn’t be worse for Gazans with Trump in power encouraging Israel to wipe them out is honestly fucking ridiculous. Both sides do bad things so both sides are equally bad is like grade 3 level reasoning.
It’s not a strawman, the post says the situation is simple, and then says to make other countries safe for Jews, implying they should just go to other countries.
It’s either that they’re proposing a solution that that’s simple, or maybe the situation isn’t simple and easy to solve like their 14 year old self claims it is.
Why is it so much to ask to make every country feel safe for jewish people? Have the fascists won, or what?
No one has argued otherwise.
Because if your answer to “the jewish question” is a settler colonial ethnostate, you’re literally repeating fascist opinions.
No one has claimed that.
Because if your answer to “the jewish question” is a settler colonial ethnostate, you’re literally repeating fascist opinions.
That is the clear solution they’re implying, either that, or there isn’t a simple solution, and they’re a fucking moron for claiming that it’s a simple situation.
That’s not referring to displacing people though, now is it? Don’t you agree that we should address antisemitism in other nations?
How is that a solution to the current situation?
How about we make it so that everyone in every country has their basic needs met? Yeah that would be great, it’s also an irrelevant point to bring up while discussing how “simple” the Israel Palestine situation is.
There’s clearly one state that’s been consistently in the wrong, that even celebrates its atrocities.
Bruh, Hamas celebrated the mass rape and murder of civilians. I’m as angry at Israel’s response as the next person but you need to pull your head out of your ass if you think this is entirely one sided.
You have. That was the thesis, OP stated. You called that thefis naive.
Lmao, no. OP’s thesis was that ‘the situation is simple, we just need to make everywhere safe for Jewish people’. That is naiive to the point of being an irrelevant non-sequitor.
No, they’re implying the opposite: “Don’t commit genocide and set up an ethostate”. The “don’t” applies to both.
No, they’re not, because they’re not talking about how simple it was in 1945-1947 to make the decision not do something, they’re describing the current situation as simple.
Saying “well don’t get yourself into this situation”, is not useful, helpful, or remotely meaningful. Everyone is already aware of that. That goes hand in hand with it being a shitty situation.
You linking to a thread with a bunch of people condemning Hamas proves my point, not yours. And try making a real point, instead of just linking to your favourite echo chamber.
When you said that the situation is entirely one sided, you opened the discussion to bringing up how it might not be, that would lead us to Hamas.
Don’t want to talk about Hamas, don’t bring up the Israel Palestine situation and claim that it’s entirely one sided. I blame Israel for a lot of Hamas’ current state of being, that still doesn’t make the situation entirely one sided.
You don’t want to talk about Israel Palestine, stay out of this thread, really not complicated.
And yeah, I edited it because I initially responded emotionally and then thought that there was a better and clearer way to express myself. Sorry you got the initial notification before the edit 10s later.
I clearly explained why I was insulting your post while insulting it.
And you claimed the situation was entirely 1 sided, so I brought up the Hamas attack, you then stuck your fingers in your ears and repeatedly claimed that this wasn’t about Hamas. I got frustrated and responded emotionally before editing my post 10s later.
Keep ignoring any voice you don’t want to hear though, I’m sure you’ll learn and grow as a human being that way.
Again, if you say the situation in Israel / Palestine is one sided, you are inviting people to bring up Hamas.
If you’re going to deny that Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack happened, then that’s on you to provide sources. I’m not going to dignify someone asking for sources on basic facts that have been widely covered in literally every major and minor news source.
You are tho. You have been very actively trying to play down Israel’s aggression.
Literally have not. Quote me where I do.
1 is a nuclear state that has the most advanced weaponry and backing from the biggest countries and financial aid from the whole world and the other is a resistance force that allegedly did bad things(which no one has said otherwise to you).
Hamas mass murdered over 1000 civilians and promised to do it again and again until all Israelis are dead.
I’m not defending Israel responding by killing over 10,000 women and children, but to claim that it’s an entirely 1 sided situation is simply inaccurate, and to claim that the situation is simple is asinine.
It’s not wrong and not unfair. The AVP can’t connect to a gamng PC and be used for full fidelity VR, and it has basically no games, nor the controller support necessary for high quality games to come to it in the future.
I mean yeah, pretty much, that and good software / network engineers. But otherwise hosting a global game like Palworld and having the player base it does would’ve been absolutely impossible if they were self hosting servers or calling up individual hosting providers around the world to work with. Being able to manage your entire network as software and be able to deploy anywhere around the globe nearly instantly does have huge benefits, not the least of which is that anyone can do it, even a small Indy dev, and there’s little no upfront infrastructure costs, the costs only really scale with your users, so if your game flops you don’t pay much, and if it’s massive you should have the revenue to pay your bills.
Again, you’re not actually making an argument about meta doing anything to make the fediverse worse than it is, you’re not even arguing that metas actions in those other situations are directly applicable and will happen here, you’re just saying “look at these bad things that Meta did before, sure other bad things must happen”.
That is the literal textbook definition of a FUD argument.
Consumers may grumble, but these oligopolies are great for investors (www.theglobeandmail.com)
Canada: three oligopolies in a trenchcoat....
Take-Two acquires Borderlands studio Gearbox from Embracer for $460m (www.eurogamer.net)
please be considerate rule (lemmy.cafe)
clearing this post out bc it wasn’t all that funny and could be read as a little bit mean which wasn’t my intention...
VLC - App stores were a mistake (archive.is)
VideoLAN @videolan App Stores were a mistake. Currently, we cannot update VLC on Windows Store, and we cannot update VLC on Android Play Store, without reducing security or dropping a lot of users… For now, iOS App Store still allows us to ship for iOS9, but until when?
And the most popular man in the whole Fediverse is... (feddit.cl)
Sauce: fedidb.org/popular-fediverse-accounts?page=1
Tim Sweeney emailed Gabe Newell calling Valve 'you assholes' over Steam policies, to which Valve's COO replied internally 'you mad bro?' (www.pcgamer.com)
I hate the term "Boomer Shooter"
Not to say I hate the genre, I actually love me some Dusk or Turbo Overkill, but why, oh why are they called Boomer Shooters?...
Apple's Epic ban is questioned by EU regulators; more details (9to5mac.com)
Map showing the path of totality of the solar eclipse in Canada on April 8, 2024 (www.asc-csa.gc.ca)
On April 8, 2024, a spectacular and rare celestial event is set to unfold over Canada, the United States and Mexico – a total solar eclipse. As the Moon aligns perfectly between Earth and the Sun, temporary darkness will sweep across parts of the country, captivating countless spectators.
Hypocrisy and gaslighting rule. (sh.itjust.works)
Serious rule (i.ibb.co)
Edit: Blocked the author’s name, because it’s not my tumblr. I didn’t expect so many people to misinterpret it and respond in this way....
deleted_by_author
Palworld server costs near $500K per month as network engineer is ordered to 'never let the service go down no matter what' (www.pcgamer.com)
it could happen to you rule (lemmy.cafe)
see if your instance is one of them here: https://fedipact.veganism.social/