I don’t really remember asking for your opinion on what a fair cut should be or what you think is a rip off.
Too bad, this is a public forum. I don't need to ask for your permission to say whatever I want. But if that's how you are going to go about it, then feel free to think whatever you want on your corner.
The only one that goes on Epic's favor is the cut, but frankly I think the whole "old revenue share system that’s hurting devs" is nothing more than Epic's propaganda trying to get marketshare. 70/30 in favor of the devs while Steam handles hosting, community platform, multiplayer and modding tools, so forth, is neither unusual nor ripping anyone off, certainly not worth how maligned it was. I understand devs who prefer Epic's cut, but I don't think Epic is doing this out of fairness, nor that it can be relied on if they ever do gain ground.
In the other aspects, it's either equal or worse. It has as much DRM. Steam provides options for people to trade extra copies they didn't activate but as far as I know other stores don't. Neither allows people to trade away activated copies so that's no points for anyone.
I assume the microtransaction thing is talking about Steam Trading Cards and such, they are a bit of an iffy worthless addition to get people to waste money... but if the person is concerned over how much money the devs are getting, they do get a cut from every transaction, so under that perspective it should be counted as a plus. Which, by the way, is entirely up to the dev to add or not.
Yeah, this particular argument goes back around to validating Ubisoft
People say that theoretically but not only Steam doesn't stop anyone from selling in other places, it delivers better services than any other platform (except maybe GOG that has the big benefit of being DRM-free)
The Steam "monopoly" ends up being less detrimental than the "competition" of locking each game to a different platform.
That's probably the best option. Considering how a Ubisoft exec said we should be "comfortable not owning games", I wouldn't trust anything purchased from them anymore.
Avoid it in favor of GoG. Ubisoft can't be trusted with a single drop of goodwill. As we can see by how they inject their clunky garbage manager even in games they sell through other stores.
Steam is better than Epic at least. On top of all that, Epic makes itself mandatory for third-party games too.
There are valid concerns but there are benefits to using one game manager. There's nothing good about having to install a bunch of them because every other game is in a different store.
It still would be best if games came DRM-free and all of them were compatible with whatever game manager someone chooses, but a lot of them aren't, especially from big publishers.
Not every artist is rich and famous either, most are not. It's disingenuous to pretend they are,
Saying artists want to "collect money without working" when people are trying to get AI trained on their works without permission to replicate their output is a total reversion of the situation. The artist already put on their work, the ones wanting things without work are the AI users.
But I see discussing this won't go anywhere. If you won't even admit what an overblown hyperbole it is calling it "neo-feudalism" then there's no discussion to be had.
Those are not the only two options, and the existence of laws and regulations does not make it "neo-feudalism".
AI use for defamatory purposes, such as deepfake porn mentioned in another post here, applies whether one is a a massive celebrity or a regular person. As the technology becomes more common, don't you think there will be people using it on their school and work colleagues and neighbors, for a variety of petty reasons?
You talk about how horrible it would be for people to sell their likeness, without considering that without such laws and protections they can just have their likeness taken with no consent or compensation.
I am seeing a lot of grandstanding of how these laws are just the powerful taking rights away from the common man, but it seems to be exclusively from the angle of how that affects the AI user, not the regular people whose likenesses might get used by AI.
To be fair here's good reason to be careful over how this matter is legislated, as media companies love to use any excuse for overreach. But the solution is not leaving the internet a wild west of people smearing each other by faking videos.
Consider that the advent of the camera created a need for many laws, because before then even the most realistic image was known to be fabricated rather than a replica of reality. Now AI and other new media technologies are creating possibilities which we never had before, for which our previous laws are insufficient.
Yeah, but for their credit, the bit about having your creatures do tasks for you on your base and having different creatures with different base-oriented skills is not something that Pokémon ever had.