MudMan

So like Facebook and Reddit? Social media isn't in English specifically. People who speak other languages often post in their native language for some things and in the lingua franca for more international conversations. The Internet is the Internet regardless.

I am fairly sure that the rest of the world already existed. And those formats keep being in use in newer places, too. This is not just a Reddit thing. Even you mentioned Facebook, which was instantly popular globally.

I've heard this more times, and it's kind of baffling. The US isn't even the biggest individual country on Facebook. What do people who assume everyone is from the US think a non-US "forum" looks like? Where do Americans think everybody else hangs out online?

Look, I know it's not the point, and that is an insane story that should have serious consequences for those responsible...

...but "PTO time" is bothering me more than I'd like.

Man, I know that clamshell Ayaneo is too expensive and that form factor isn't as good as I think it is... but I still really want one.

Oh, hey, is that you, Barbra?

This is a requirement of modern right-populist politics. They won't play defense, so they just say crap and you're always chasing the latest nonsense and never get to make a point.

Of course the counter to this is for Walz to make this a non-stop couch-fucking roast from minute one. I'm talking opening statement is about upholstery, fabric texture, visualize choices for lubricant and material combos. Just go all in on the furniture abuse right away.

It's not The Purge, it's Kristallnacht.

"Forced exclusivity is bad" is an angle that has always baffled me a little, because some of its proponents seem to also be going "what exclusives does the Xbox have" like two posts down the road.

Or maybe it's because I'm old enough to remember where the "I will never buy anything on Epic because they pay for exclusives" was instead "Square has betrayed its customers by moving to the PlayStation" (or, you know, Konami for having Xbox ports).

Gaming opinions are weird, and get weirder if you track them over time.

It says (pretty explicitly, if you go back and read interviews), that Gabe Newell really doesn't like Microsoft in general, that the feeling is mutual and that the fact that his multibillion dollar empire is stuck as a Windows application MS may try to muscle out at any point has motivated him to bring PC gaming out of Windows from very early on.

Granted, MS has been sucking at attempting exactly that for a long time, but that's the ultimate motivation here. That's not a particularly disputed fact.

Well, that and the several billion dollars in Gaben's bank account.

Private companies are still corporations, guys.

I don't think this tracks. Steam's model is developing software to automate or crowdsource expensive effort. Now, anyways. It originally was to fix PC piracy, but they achieved that ages ago.

And hell yeah they have a natural self-reinforcing monopoly. Even ignoring the mass of captive users with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars committed to the platform, Valve has been doing feature work on that storefront for decades. When others try to compete people immediately bring up the expansive value added features. They make their own controller drivers. They make their own compatibility layers. They make their own OS, FFS. In what world bringing a PC storefront to that level would "not take much"? It's an Apple-style ecosystem model, and much as it terrifies me that it's an ever growing monopoly, it's still impresive that they managed to build it within Microsoft's own.

Yeah, if it isn't it will be. If you extrapolate their current moves to a world where PC gaming is entirely controlled by them, maybe even from the OS level downwards, and there is also a set of console-like standalone platforms on handheld, set-top and VR segments.... well, that's a level of control over a massive media industry that I don't think anybody has had before. Especially not a private company whose ownership is two cheeseburgers and/or an unfortunate knife sharpening accident away from changing overnight.