Luckily they live in the United States of Amoneyca and they are Coinageans praying to the all mighty green and papery Georgod Washington. They can serve both God and money because they are one and the same.
pandacoder
joined 1 year ago
If it works it's likely not supported officially by any carrier (this probably also applies to Canada and possibly Mexico), but it's at least not for sale in the US. Not sure if it's sold to all of Europe or just the EU/EEZ however.
Can the Portal really be called decent quality if it's on a short tether and is beat for quality by nerds on the internet who made Chiaki?
To me it felt like the Portal was a limited-usage first-party cash grab, and as a Wii U owner that's saying something (the extra screen was honestly not worth the space it took up, the money and materials would have been better spent elsewhere).
Most of my experiences with my first-party PlayStation related hardware and software has been mediocre at best, and that includes the operating system on something like the PS4.
Perhaps I am just jaded after my collective Sony experienced, but I think that Sony could have created an actually decent product, but instead they saw a nice handheld gaming device and wanted to try to muscle their way into the market without putting in the effort or money to make it even as good as the Wii U controller.
There's a difference between calling Gabe Newell pro-consumer (not what I said), and saying he and his company make pro-consumer choices (moreso recently than in the past).
I can't really come up with anything Epic has done that is actually pro-consumer, and no "trying to create a competitor to Steam" isn't pro-consumer when the way they did it was very anti-consumer (just look at all the Kickstarters they swept up and made exclusives even after they had publicly promised Steam keys — it's not like Epic couldn't have added clauses to exempt Kickstarter backers from the exclusivity restrictions) or very intentionally locking people to one platform by force. Their support of anything non-Windows for anything besides Unreal is terrible.
Honestly saying that Steam killed physical ownership of games and citing HL2 is a poor example. Just off the top of my head Blizzard beat Valve to this with World of Warcraft. You could buy a physical copy but you couldn't play it without their servers. Keys were locked to a single account as far as I'm aware.
Ultimately physical size constraints lead to the demise of physical purchases. That said, Valve in theory has a set-up to allow us to retain our games even if they disappear one day. How that works or how long it would take to happen is a different story, but they do apparently have something like a kill-switch in place.
TF2 was certainly the first major western game to have loot boxes, but extremely similar gacha systems already existed before this. It would be disingenuous to blame Valve for this, they just hopped on the train.
MFN clause is really only an issue if it can be proven that it is in place for anticompetitive reasons, and Steam's rule is not completely inflexible. Also, if the copy is being sold without Steam integration, fine, I can totally see why you shouldn't need price parity — but if you were to sell a Steam key price parity is entirely fair since the end user is getting access to Valve's servers. Also if a developer sold a game for the same price with no Steam integration on somewhere like GOG, Valve wouldn't be getting any cut, the developer would just be making more money (though ironically with less feature integration, it's not like Steam doesn't add value).
On the flip side instead of acting like we said all of Valve's decisions were pro-consumer and cherry picking a few decisions that aren't, I can cite:
- Valve's work on Wine/Proton
- the open SteamOS
- repairability and part availability and compatibility for SteamDeck
- all of the features Valve adds to Steam and the improvements they're making over time (it has gotten better), Steam is arguably easier to use and functionally superior to something like EGS
- the community marketplaces and discussion boards that Steam hosts
- their work to support users on a variety of platforms with things like Steam Link and even cross-platform support for their utilities and games
It's really not like they do literally nothing that is pro-consumer.
I don't think it's Linux.
I think Tim Sweeney is just like all of the big publicly traded companies where they do not want the best thing for their customers and only want to control them.
Valve, and thus Gabe Newell, is actually making pro-consumer choices, which is success that Tim Sweeney wants.
I think the grudge is against Gabe Newell and Valve.
There is a chance that Tim Sweeney would actively shit on Linux anyway, since that would reduce control over consumers (and yes with all of the deceptive practices Epic does and how they fight lawsuits in court, they definitely are not trying to give control to the users).
Fortnite loads fine on Linux but closes after reaching the main menu. It doesn't crash, it closes. They're actively blocking the community from self-supporting.
Because it's showing how garbage the Portal is.
The Portal is first party hardware that:
- Can only do one job as opposed to the Steamdeck
- Does its singular job worse than the Steamdeck does the exact same job
None of this is mutually exclusive with what I said and you got really close to my point...
that have no empathy for the civilians plight and that have deep pockets
I keep seeing everyone talking about only a few groups:
- those who do not give a shit about/hate Palestinians
- those who only care about Israel
- and those who actually give a shit about innocent people not suffering
I'm not seeing anyone mention the group of people who do not care about Israel as a people either and only want to protect their money and power and view Israel as a tool to do so.
That last group is currently escaping the headlines which are essentially all about people who are vocally pro-/anti-Israel or pro-/anti-Palestinians and not about the group who care about neither. The last group needs more attention because they will be funding the next war too.
I think that's part of it, but I the government is also using Israel as a proxy, and we do have silicon manufacturing there. The government has a vested military and security interest in Israel (money and power is far more important, the votes are a bonus).
Unlike all of the other countries in the Middle East, Israel is surrounded only by enemies. Israel can't turn on the US without a replacement military superpower, so they're effectively bound to the US for guaranteed protection.
Example: Despite Iran's posturing they weren't going to attack knowing they'd get a military response from the US if they did. They almost certainly could get away with attacking a different country the US isn't protecting though without anything more than sanctions.
I feel like you just made something up so you don't have to like EVs.
- The fact that this is your takeaway from my messages (in addition to your general tone) just shows you are trying to push a self-righteous agenda without properly identifying who are your allies and opponents. I abhor ICEs and would have bought an EV by now if not for the scummy companies producing them, and the fact that I basically do not drive anymore so switching my relatively unused car out for any replacement vehicle does not make sense. I'd sooner just sell the car and wash my hands of them entirely.
What a weird outlook you have.
- Not likely subscription services and the car manufacturers tracking me is not "weird" it's well justified. I don't like my insurance company tracking me either which is why I heavily restrict the permissions their app has (and use a second phone for it). ICE and EV manufacturers have immense overlap and I've yet to hear of one that actually respects their customers and doesn't turn their products into drivable spyware.
I don't even have a way to rebut it.
- Perhaps you should quit the contrarian behavior since you're not putting in the effort to be one. You've already demonstrated you aren't putting in the effort to read my messages by openly misidentifying me as an EV hater.
I don't have a headphone jack.
Even if I had one, I haven't been able to buy wired headphones that aren't crap quality that don't hurt my ears. Last time I bought wired headphones (more accurately earbuds) they were tinny knock off garbage being sold on Amazon as a legitimate product, and that was years ago.