They could (and probably have) tried to get to where apple is with its app store on macos/ios.

They did.

The Windows 10/11 “S Mode” only allows installing software through the Windows store. It was mostly relegated to OEM installs for cheap x86 and ARM laptops, thankfully.

It’s actually getting kind of hard to think of new, stupider ways to ruin the economy and raise the cost of living. Parody is getting close to being indistinguishable from reality.

• Blanket tariffs for goods with low domestic production? Done.
• Imprisoning laborers who do domestic farming? Yes.
• Deporting legal, tax-paying noncitizens? Yep.
• Pissing off citizens of countries that contribute significantly to local tourism? Indeed.
• Asking potential tourists to pay extra for the privilege of visiting a to-be-sold-for-industrial-logging park? Why not.
• Cutting healthcare and replacing it with a bonus for the 0.001%? Might as well!

Isn’t it kind of ableist to assume that when somebody says they are “not able to physically do” a job, that they’re lazy or classist? For all we know, they could have mobility issues or be unable to do sustained manual labor.

Brought to you by the party of white supremacy common sense, white supremacy reason, and white supremacist family values.

That makes much more sense now.

Yeah, I agree with you on that.

If discoverability was better, I’m sure Android would get way more ports of good games. With the way it is right now with shovelware and Google pushing microtransaction-riddled crap over one time purchase games, though, it’s treated as a second-class platform because it’s not nearly as profitable as other platforms.

Which part of my comment was denigrating indie devs? Indie games are great. Android gaming is currently not.

If I’m looking for a good non-mobile game, I don’t go looking in the mobile game store. I go looking on PSN or PC, where the focus is on the kind of game that wasn’t designed as a phone-first experience.

The fact that Android has some good traditional games or ports of indie gems isn’t something inherent to Android. The overwhelming majority of those games were on PC or console first.

Oh, there’s no doubt about that. I’m not disagreeing that Android has some good-looking games. The problem is that games like GRID Legends Mobile are the exception, not the rule.

The Switch is crap, yes.
The Play Store is also overwhelmingly crap, though.

If you exclude all of the mobile games from both stores, the Switch simply has a better catalog of games.

You’re comparing apples to oranges.

The mobile gaming market is leagues larger than every other market combined. That doesn’t mean the games are even remotely comparable to console games.

It’s an entirely different target audience. Mobile games are focused on quick sessions and design patterns designed to encourage spending money on microtransactions. Games made for the traditional gaming market are mostly designed for longer play sessions with more mechanically complex gameplay. I as well as many others prefer the latter.

Nintendo’s store is full of shovelware, but at least you’ll find more traditional games than just ports of indie hits. Or, buy a Steam Deck and enjoy something better than both.

The OP is really blowing smoke up Android’s ass when it comes to the quality of native Android games. Most “top” mobile games are freemium crap riddled with microtransactions.

What it does have, however, is emulators. Including one for the Switch itself. Paying $350 for decade-old hardware and $80 for games is just bad value compared to a $300 used S21 and $0 games.

5.6% of [respondents] users said they wouldn’t pre-order [on Epic] knowing it would influence exclusivity, 2.7% said they would.

They really brought in those big dollars with making Borderlands 3 a timed exclusive on Epic. A whole 9%. Meanwhile, 91.6% of respondents preferred Steam. Bravo, Randy. Bravo.

Disappointingly, 53.9% still would buy it on Steam if it influenced exclusivity going forward. Even if it is Steam—which has a record of providing better service than its competitors—exclusivity helps nobody.

GOG being pushed out of the market. They’re one of the only stores that actually give you ownership of your games, and they don’t have the same indomitable foothold that Steam does.

It would be all too easy for Microsoft to strangle one of their key markets by taking a loss on sales and offering publishers 150% sales price in exchange for exclusive distribution of 90s and 2000s era PC games or console ports.

Steam will end up pushed out of the market

This has been explicitly attempted 3 times already, and that really didn’t work out well for anybody who tried it.

Epic Games Store still resorts to bribing people with free games to keep their monthly active user numbers up, hemorrhaging money to attract users who are rarely interested in anything more than freebies.

EA and Ubisoft tried to forgo Steam releases in favor of their own stores and launchers in an attempt to keep 100% of the revenue. They eventually relented, releasing their games on Steam again. Even Blizzard joined in, adding Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 to Steam.

And Microsoft’s attempt to dethrone Steam by releasing games through the Windows app store just ended up with Valve funneling considerable resources into helping Linux and WINE become a viable alternative to Windows for gaming.

Unless Valve enshittifies or legal shenanigans ensue, they’re pretty unlikely to be pushed out of the market. No single game or game series is good enough to capture the entire market of Steam users and permanently drive them to alternative platforms. On top of that, Steam has a huge following of users who are loyal to the company, which is both insane and insanely hard to compete against.

or they will also become Streaming Platforms

Maybe, maybe not. I don’t see it happening, though. Valve makes money hand over fist from digital sales alone, and they have more to lose in pissing off their customers by selling subscriptions than they have to gain by selling subscriptions.

I am concerned about GOG and PC hardware prices, though.

I can give it a try.

We’re going to make America great again. Not great, VERY great. Tremendously great. Great economy, great people, great science.

Science today, it’s not great. All these WOKE theories and hyperthees. That’s not science, that’s wasted money. The scientists today, they take our money. They give it to Harvard, woke Harvard. Spend it on DEI, not SCIENCE. They’re cheating, taking advantage of HARD WORKING Americans. We don’t pay them to ask questions. I KNOW science, that’s NOT science. We tell them to do science, they don’t DO science. They do SOME science, then they do it AGAIN, asking for money. That’s FRAUD.

Linux isn’t derived from Unix, just originally based on it. The BSDs and Darwin (Mac) would be the unfortunate casualties, but at least most of the country won’t be stuck with Windows?

Edit: And, I guess, Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4/5. The former “borrowed” the networking stack from OpenBSD, and the latter are based on some BSD variant if I recall correctly.

I actually wouldn’t put it past them to help bulldoze the entire planet to make an intergalactic highway if it meant they’d get Earth money in exchange. They’re already doing that with the environment, so…

It’s pretty commendable that you’re trying to educate that person. I wouldn’t have even bothered since it’s clear that they’re asking questions in bad faith.

Paraphrasing it:

So you believe in Satan? That’s stupid.

And

So you’re atheist? With useless extra steps, too.

Hail Satan!

Jokes aside, it’s good to see more Satanists out in the wild. TST has been doing great shit, and I’m all here for it.

It’s not that everyone owns a gun, but that some people own a lot of guns. And it just so happens to be that those people support this kind of government tyranny.

It would be a very different story if the “tyranny” was punishing people for hate speech. That would be the wrong people being hurt, and that’s unacceptable.

I mean, hey: it worked to make Apple finally drop their proprietary charging connector. As long as the cost of losing business in the EU is higher than designing an EOL transition for games and hiring developers to actually do it, it’s in their best interests.

what I just outlined as what would have to happen.

The backend server stack hosts a set of tightly intertwined services that conform to an Application Programming Interface. You quite literally do not need to provide the entire stack designed for multi-hundred-thousand concurrent players just to satisfy that interface the game clients are expecting. It costs time and money, but they could damn well just create an implementation designed for simpler, small-scale hosting.

Oh yeah, just do that, as if that’s a super duper easy task to do.

If you designed it for that eventuality, yeah, it’s easy to do. Trying to retrofit that into an existing system designed solely to run at cloud scale is a bloody nightmare, and that’s not at all what SKG is asking for.

because “direct connection” means no concept of an account anymore, and if everything is tied to your account, the whole damn game doesn’t work now.

Counterexample: private World of Warcraft servers. They implemented their own, and it’s worked fine for them.

The account system is just another API. The client uses it to authenticate, and the dedicated server uses it to verify the client authentication. Fuck, even Minecraft and it’s poorly-designed multiplayer can do that. As long as the client and server use the same auth provider, you can still have “accounts” without relying on Mojang’s insanely censorship-happy official login system.

It’s possible, sure, but by this point you’ve effectively remade a very large amount of the game from scratch so who cares now.

I’ve made this exact same argument you’re giving here, and yeah, I know it’s not easy. I sympathize with indie developers who are over-designing their server architecture and might not have the resources to do this, but a AAA game studio can afford to hire more developers for their next game instead of C-suite bonuses.

what if parts of that executable have still in use proprietary pieces that are used in other games they own?

I also made this argument before, and it is valid criticism. It’s worth pointing out that the valuable and reusable proprietary parts are the infrastructure and design, not the game logic.

I’m not an entitled twat. I understand that there are legal challenges and big, open-ended questions on how developers could actually pull this off. Making large, consumer-exploitative developers like Epic, Bungie, or Blizzard have to hire more developers isn’t a good enough reason to make me discount an entire consumer-rights movement.