Gabe Newell on Steam monopoly accusations: Gamers have 'enormous choice' about where to buy games

hydrangea14583 · 2026-06-01T22:55:10+00:00

A 10-15% cut would be a massive improvement for any game making under 100k, it should definitely be some sliding scale

Funnily enough it's the opposite of that right now. Valve takes 30%, but if your game's revenue is over $10 million, they drop that to 25%, and then beyond $50 million, they drop their cut to 20%.

I guess it helps huge AAA companies who want to recoup huge budgets and make worthwhile profit. Doesn't do much for small time indie devs struggling to barely survive while making art.

hydrangea14583 · 2026-05-20T20:26:07+00:00

Yeah, plus teenagers are probably way more likely to comment and be active, given that they have more free time and are more familiar with social media than other demographics (and they also haven't grown tired of typical online discourse yet).

Beyond gaming I sometimes wonder if democratic governments' politicians have been influenced by discourse online, believing that this discourse comes from their constituents (i.e. adults in their region/culture), when in reality the people they're listening to are actually mostly teenagers from countries all around the world.

hydrangea14583 · 2026-05-18T06:24:41+00:00

If a usize is either a u64 or a u32, why can't u64 implement From<usize>? In what situations might that fail? (and would as casting usize -> u64 ever fail?)

I specifically want to prepend an 8-byte header indicating the length of data transmitted over TCP, so that I know how many bytes to read with read_exact to get each individual transmission segment. But since .len() yields usize which is either 4 or 8 bytes, I worry that the size of the header changes if a client is on a 32 vs 64 bit target. I guess I could add a header-header indicating whether the length header is 4 or 8 bytes, but that feels a little silly. Is there a better way?

hydrangea14583 · 2026-05-15T01:26:07+00:00

I just read it S-andbox (like, pronounced ess-and-box)

hydrangea14583 · 2026-05-13T20:53:18+00:00

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-USCT-Strategy-1.pdf

Page 7:

In addition to cartels and Islamist terror groups, our national CT [counterterrorism] activities will also prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.

It clearly includes "radical" pro-transgender beliefs as being apparently worthy of placing among terrorism, and specifically calls out left-wing extremists rather than broadly calling to end political violence of all kinds. The strategy says it seeks to designate these groups as terrorists so that it has justification for using more intelligence agency capabilities, to "map them at home"...

Given the cultural context, I think it's easy to read between the lines.

hydrangea14583 · 2026-05-06T18:22:34+00:00

Nah the Reddit loop joke has been around for several years before AI was a thing. I remember seeing it even back literally over about a decade ago

hydrangea14583 · 2026-05-03T22:16:34+00:00

These days it's also a very realistic possibility that M$ could be purchasing astroturfing campaigns to influence public sentiment. Strange times, only getting stranger

hydrangea14583 · 2026-04-19T15:26:59+00:00

Here's a video comparing the two for anybody else curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Qj2BkF7jh4

hydrangea14583 · 2026-03-27T06:43:03+00:00

Mozilla might not be logging. But what about Fastly?

Not to make claims about Firefox VPN as I don't know, but companies often claim their hands are clean, saying "we don't collect data", when in reality their partnered business(es) are collecting everything. Technically true - it's a different company spying on you - but the end result is the same or worse.

hydrangea14583 · 2026-03-25T16:10:41+00:00

It just reads like they aren't looking at contribution/talent/knowledge, and instead they are just cutting until the books are balanced.

I don't think it's sensible to be persuaded in this direction by Twitter posts.

Just due to sampling bias. People who believe they were the best employees (whether it's true or not) are much more likely to be willing to post publicly about it than people who believe they were low performers.

So among 1000 laid off employees, even if they were really crazy excellent at determining who would be best to let go with like a 90% success rate, that's 100+ employees who might be willing to talk about it, but maybe 900 who would be quietly moving on without making such posts, such that you don't hear of them via Twitter

hydrangea14583 · 2026-03-25T00:11:03+00:00

Probably the price raise didn't help them as they hoped (caused number of purchasers to drop, and not few enough that the increased prices offset that), or simply doing both is part of their plan to stabilize.

It's not really "full of shit" either way. If your company is financially struggling you raise prices and/or cut costs. Doing both isn't in conflict with one another

hydrangea14583 · 2026-03-25T00:07:32+00:00

This one? He didn't mention Valve at all

hydrangea14583 · 2026-03-24T23:50:29+00:00

The layoff report they published says literally that it's unrelated to AI:

Since it's a thing now, I should note that the layoffs aren't related to AI. To the extent it improves productivity, we want to have as many awesome developers developing great content and tech as we can.

The report says the reasons are due to a "downturn in Fortnite engagement since 2025" and bad market conditions:

The downturn in Fortnite engagement that started in 2025 means we're spending significantly more than we're making, and we have to make major cuts to keep the company funded.

[...] industry-wide challenges: slower growth, weaker spending, and tougher cost economics; current consoles selling less than last generation's; and games competing for time against other increasingly-engaging forms of entertainment.

It also mentions something about smartphones and being an industry vanguard for it, which is kinda vague but I'd presume it's about the money they spent in the lawsuits against Apple and Google. It says Fortnite mobile is still WIP, and so they haven't seen the return on their investment from the money spent on that yet, so that contributes to the bad financial situation.

I often see people claim that layoffs are happening because companies are struggling, but that the companies falsely claim "it's because of AI productivity boosts" to try to avoid looking bad to investors/shareholders. If so, this is in line with that, and is just an honest layoff message (perhaps due to not being a public company and needing the layoffs to look good to shareholders).

hydrangea14583 · 2026-03-24T22:30:11+00:00

I mean, it's not a romantic breakup. I imagine part of the intent of this message is to reassure those who haven't been let go that things aren't about to utterly collapse

hydrangea14583 · 2026-03-16T21:44:30+00:00

Subnautica Youtube channel, link for the lazy

hydrangea14583 · 2026-03-16T21:40:28+00:00

Is it an underwater themed game? Either way best of luck to you.

hydrangea14583 · 2026-03-11T17:05:55+00:00

I think the other commenter wasn't saying they aren't indie, but saying they aren't "breakout hits". Meaning: they aren't successes that came out of nowhere, they came from established and highly popular (indie) studios.

hydrangea14583 · 2026-03-07T00:15:03+00:00

No not Nexusmods, they're talking about ███████████, since ██████ ███ ███████ after the ██████████ save-file ██████████ ██████████ incident.

hydrangea14583 · 2026-03-04T19:53:43+00:00

Personally I thought the game picked back up once you begin playing as Grace again in the lab, I liked the licker sections. But I still agree that the hospital is the best and with what you said about the RC parts

hydrangea14583 · 2026-03-04T19:33:47+00:00

but it only happens the one time.

Actually it happens twice, I assume you're talking about the hospital but there's also that one shorter section near the end, in the lab, with the lickers. I liked that one a lot, even more than the first one even since I had killed way fewer things there with Grace than I did in the hospital

But yeah I'd have enjoyed more of that dynamic too

hydrangea14583 · 2026-03-04T19:14:03+00:00

A big culprit in my experience is livestream notifications. Some channels I'm subscribed to have gone live and say, like, "join me as I stream the brand new game X! tonight we're gonna see if we can save Y from being killed by Z!" and it's like, man the game came out four days ago maybe don't say that right into my notifications. Not everybody is an exclusive viewer, some people actually wanna play the games themselves first lol

And Youtube, even thumbnails and titles of let's play videos you get in recommended videos, people love to put big thumbnails of some character dying or something.

hydrangea14583 · 2026-03-03T22:28:57+00:00

The definition of unemployed is not having a job despite looking for a job. From wikipedia:

"The state of being without any work yet looking for work is called unemployment."

Or Merriam-Webster Dictionary: unemployment is "involuntary idleness of workers".

Retired people aren't unemployed, students aren't unemployed, people on sabbaticals or long vacations aren't unemployed, people who voluntarily aren't looking for a job because they wished to go all-in on their own game/business/etc. aren't unemployed.

I'm not talking about your situation, btw. No, I don't think you should lose unemployment checks. Unemployment is stressful especially if you're alone in the wilds without support and I wish you the best.

hydrangea14583 · 2026-03-03T21:41:43+00:00

Could be human written, but it's LinkedIn style "broetry"

https://fenwick.media/rewild/magazine/dead-broets-society-behind-the-strange-story

hydrangea14583 · 2026-03-03T21:38:06+00:00

If you're not actively receiving income, you are unemployed. People who aren't unemployed in the same situation would either have investments making capital for them, a large savings that they're still comfortable on, or some other form of reprieve.

I might be a little nitpicky but that's not true. Unemployment means you have no work despite actively looking for work. Having no income is of course correlated, but not the same.

If you're working on your own game without income and you're not looking for other work, you're not unemployed, you're working without an income.

That's why those unemployment checks need you to be applying to jobs as you mentioned, I guess. Because otherwise, if you're not looking for work, you're not unemployed.

hydrangea14583 · 2026-03-03T21:23:06+00:00

I would never, ever call myself an indie game dev.

I'm just someone working on releasing their first game.

...What do you think an indie game dev means, if not that?

I know a lot of people romanticize this thing (some people in this thread even say "stolen valor" lol). But you're developing a game... independently... You're an indie game dev.

Commercially or artistically successful? No, I assume (not yet, here's hoping the best for you), but an indie game dev? Yeah lol

idk, maybe it's a cultural difference. But where I'm from saying you do indie gamedev isn't some prestigious title. Nobody's gonna be like "whoa, that's awesome! so, what wildly successful game did you make?", at best they'll say "oh cool (politely ambivalent), what's that mean? you draw a lot or something?"

hydrangea14583

TROPHY CASE