Also gave up Thunderbird years ago because of the same reason. Just wanted something stable and chose Spark. Works on every device, not a problem for years.
As an Asian, the DEI idea and how it was executed puzzled me as well.
Apple's first VP of diversity said [1]:
> “Diversity is the human experience. I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT.”
> “there can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blonde men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation.”
She had to resigned [2] for saying so. That really confused me, isn't what she said... true?
From my personal experience as a central European male, they would be missing women and their outputs would have predictable and easily rectified mistakes. Unless their customer base is 90% male and they are OK with that.
And it's exactly that the experience shapes us. In the West, gender roles are still very pronounced, shaping our experiences in certain ways. Males are taught to go for wins, females for maintainability for one.
I don't think it's implied that she's making the claim that this group is going to be perfectly representative of their target demographic. She's simply saying that there is heterogeneity in a group that is ostensibly homogenous through a DEI lens.
Gender roles are just as pronounced in the East; me being in China as I write this. Maybe this says a little bit more about our biology and a little bit less about structural bias.
The point of DEI is to have the widest possible distribution of life experience among the group. Of course 12 white, blue-eyed, blonde men would have different life paths, but if you project them on 2D graph and draw a circle around them, then the distance to the point of white blue-eyed woman would be about 5 diameters of that circle, and to the point of black transgender person - about 15 diameters.
The most meaningful and useful diversity would be that of social class, and yet that's the one kind of diversity the DEI bureaucracy isn't interested in diversifying.
EGS never gave us proton, steam deck, steam workshop, early access, steam link or controllers, big picture, etc. steam and valve in general has great VR support and lots of r&d in general.
No hate nor shade towards epic but man valve kills it. Best video game company (studio or platform) by far for several decades now imo.
Are they getting "squeezed" by Steam? That would imply there is pressure coming from Valve, but the pressure to use Steam is coming from customers.
I'd say that Steam is a great service that customers love and demand that game developers provide, and the 30% fee is the price of that service.
I know that in my own case I've bought games on Steam that were available cheaper elsewhere, or even given away for free on EGS.
And the attempts at creating alternatives have all been unable to create a good alternative. (Except perhaps Good Old Games, which stands out by being DRM-free.)
Well they're getting squeezed by the 30%, but also that the act of participating in the Steam market means they cannot sell their game for less money (to incentivize a better cut for themselves) off platform, since Steam doesn't allow you to do that, at least to the best of my current understanding. I've posted this elsewhere and had one user pretty upset that I had posted false statements, but I haven't seen evidence to the contrary yet (context is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38624916)
I know I've seen games given away for free on EGS while they were also for sale on Steam, and seen lower prices on IsThereAnyDeal, but those might all be temporary.
According to Ars, "Sources close to Valve suggested to Ars that this "parity" rule only applies to the "free" Steam keys publishers can sell on other storefronts and not to Steam-free versions of those games sold on competing platforms."
Thank you for a source. I do link to my source in the thread in question, and while that law firm was working with Wolfire Games who presumably saw agreements directly from Valve, it's not exactly going to be an unbiased account since they were, you know, suing Valve.
After reviewing the article, it's still a second hand unidentified source, but definitely clear the facts are contested.
Payment-processing companies for credit-cards typically take less than 2% of the paid amount, also capped with a maximum fees in the low single digit $ for larger payment amounts. That is "not greedy" in my reckoning, and it pays for all of the hardware and software to make your credit card effective and secure.
Taking 30% as gate-keeping lordship rent is greedy, it treats customers and merchants as serfs of the Apple/Google kingdom.
Just sayin'
Steam and EGS don't just offer payment processing. Bandwidth isn't free, neither is patching, distributaion and "curation" (albeit this one is definitely more debatable).
Even then, payment processing isn't just about taking a $10 transaction. A single dispute on Stripe will cost you $25 whether you are succesful or not. Handling payments in non-local currencies is 3.5% + 20p on stripe, plus currency conversion fees.
I don't think 30% is the right cut, but 2% isn't a fair comparison for the service.
Why are you comparing Steam to a payment processing gateway? Payment processing is just one small part of the services Steam offers. Of course a platform that offers a lot more is going to charge a lot more.
Thanks for asking.
- Advertisement: the free internet has lots of places for adds
- Distribution: there are several very good protocols for transferring files, even ones with DRM!
- Storefront: ...stores don't take a 30% cut of what they sell, and as we all know inventory costs are pretty low when it's all just bits on NAS storage.
- Users: again, this is called the internet, they are there and what they need is curation. I would much rather a proper gatekeeper, say for example Polygon magazine, was able to pay real game testers and journalists to surface the really good game, and make a cut off of this, instead of the wasteland that's on display at whatsonsteam.com
You are not answering my question. You are simply enumerating ways how to do what steam does in other ways. My question is why are you comparing it to a payment processor.
EGS is not profitable as they are spending like crazy to try and gain users. But the EGS is not where Epic makes its money, that’s Fortnite for now.
The 12% is still more then enough to profitably be a platform middleman because it costs very very little and is basically pure profit to stay the course.
Yes. I replaced Docker Desktop with it and I haven't found anything lacking for my use cases so far. It's a great alternative, just install and a few clicks, that's it.
I don't think that's him sticking to a "certain principles", he's just doing whatever it takes to make people think Epic is the "good guy", as long as he's doing the opposite of the competitors.
For example, take a look into his take about blockchain games. At first he was against NFT games [1], then after Valve banned NFT games, Gabe Newell talked about it [2], Tim suddenly was OK with it [3]?
He fought with Apple because he thought he could win it, so his Fortnite could avoid 30% transaction fee. They clearly had a lot of discussion, strategies before suing Apple and thought it was a good idea, they could have won big. It's not a bad business decision if he can win, but they didn't so it looked bad.
I could be wrong but it seems likely his first tweet was about Epic integrating NFTs into their own games, and the second was about allowing them on the EGS?
I don’t really see the NFT stuff as relating to open platforms anyway. Certain kinds of software (the most obvious being viruses and scams) need to be banned from platforms anyway.
