I mean I don’t really need any studies. Was Einstein as good of as a writer as Shakespeare? Nope! Although I’m sure he was generally “smart” his main focus of intelligence was physics.
However, after re-reading my comment I was a little unclear. When I said:
“Intelligence isn’t general it’s specific“
I should have said:
“My (And I think others as well) definition of intelligence is how well educated you are in a specific subject. I would never ask someone how smart they are (not useful) but I could ask if they are good at calculus (intelligence in math)”
I mean it’s not their trademark to enforce. Is just having “Doom” in part of your name enough to confuse people with the game? I think not, especially because this isn’t even a video game.
Can you tell me the difference between a 4.0 and a 3.9? Usually I find it to be a ~1-2%! That 1% difference is just one sign error, rounding mistake or miss read question on a midterm! However that difference between how that looks on your transcript is extremely substantial. I feel like 1% is just waaay to “accurate” for teachers to handle! Finding a good teacher is much more important than working hard or understanding the material. I think it should just be pass or fail
Redoing tests is actually amazing! Worst case is that you learn the same amount and best case you really get a good understanding of the material! I’ve had two classes with test redos and I always learn more with them!
Redoing things until you understand them thoroughly is the point of homework assignments. The test is supposed to assess if the material was learned, not teach it.
Yeah I rarely ever “like” a company but Valve has done so much it’s honestly amazing. The 30% they take is soooo worth it for developers who don’t have natural Linux support.
0. They manage the most popular games store in the western world.
1. They provide a community forum for your users.
2. Host downloads of games (sometimes 100s of GBs). They distribute the content all across the world and handle region specific laws about what can be sold, etc. They host content at edge so downloads are super fast.
3. Process refund requests.
4. Have one of the better VR abstraction layers for game devs.
5. Provide networking and social integration (chat, anti-cheat, friends, etc).
6. They allow you to generate steam keys (at no cost to you) and sell them on your own website.
7. They process payments (PayPal charges ~3% for this, Stripe is 2.9%)
8. Achievements, time tracking, etc. These are useful for game devs who iterate on their formula (most use achievements to see what percent of a user base does X).
That's what I can think off the top of my head benefits the game developers. The list of things that benefits the users is also pretty big (steam sales).
I don't think any company is good or bad but Valve's offer to game devs is a pretty decent one.
> Anecdote: some one else's account of this was that it was really helpful because the Linux portion of the community (while much smaller than other segments) provided consistently high quality feedback/bug reports.
Apart from a few games purchased on GoG, everything I buy is on Steam. It’s been a very consistent experience for a long time. My first Steam “purchase” was me plugging in the CD code from a copy of Half-Life purchased ~1999. Everything I’ve purchased since then is playable in minutes—most of it playable on Linux.
The killer feature of Valve / Steam for game developers is customer trust. For me, that trust has translated into a resolute refusal to buy games on any other platform.
Considering all the broken or neglected games on Steam I've lost trust in them. GOG has started slipping in quality as they've grown, but at least they strive to host playable games and without DRM.
Competition among stores and hosting is good IMO, even if a modest inconvenience.
Platform loyalty in gaming has always struck me as an odd phenomenon. You don't hear people raving about netflix or hulu being superior, but for some reason there is a huge fanbase for Steam itself.
I mean, I don't mind steam, but I'd really prefer to have software that I purchase not check with a gate keeping entity before launching itself.
I bought several games in my childhood. Games that mean a lot to me personally because of how much I had to scrimp and save to be able to afford. It took me nearly a year to cobble enough money to buy Warcraft III. And I can’t play the game anymore because I’ve lost the CD. Ditto with Halo, CS, AoE and others.
Every game I’ve purchased on Steam I can play right now with one click. Obviously others offer the same thing now but Steam offered it first. They also have region specific pricing, a huge pull for me at some point.
There are other good store fronts, I’m sure. But the amount of trust they’ve built with me over the last 10+ years can’t be replicated overnight by anyone else.
>And I can’t play the game anymore because I’ve lost the CD. Ditto with Halo, CS, AoE and others.
The disadvantage is that your game is locked now to your account, I cant just gift my games to my son. I have to make sure to keep my Steam version in Offline mode before he tries to play from his PC using my Steam Account. I wish there was a way to create family accounts and share the game or even gift them to your children, you could add some rules like you can't re-gift same game for say n years or whatever.
The problem with Family Sharing is that it requires that the donor account not be playing any of its games while the recipient does. The workaround is to kill the internet connection to the donor account, then both accounts can play to their hearts' content! Er, as long as the donor doesn't mind single-player content.
Which is essentially what grandparent is already doing. Alas!
I know it's unusual for HN, but I read both the GGGP and am a user of the thing under discussion! Steam's settings in that regard aren't "sticky" enough for me. I've set myself to Offline, quit, and then found myself Online often enough under both Windows and Linux that it's just easier to write a little script to keep Steam from connecting to the internet.
Worth pointing out to others that even if offline mode fails and one intemperately starts a game while someone else is using one's library, that user will get a minute or two to save their game before Steam closes the game for them, but my cousins have found this annoying enough that I figured I'd take OS-level action.
Ensuring that the recipient also has the ability to deny Steam internet access allows my cousins to log into actually-offline Steam as me, and play single-player content, while I'm actually-online and playing multiplayer.
But seriously, you need Family Sharing. Make your kid an account, then set your account to Family Share with his. Now, he can play games from your library as long as you're not playing any, even if your account is online too.
So, when you want to play some singleplayer stuff, log into your account and buy and download the game as you normally would, whilst your son plays with his friends. Now kill Steam's internet connection on your computer, and play your freshly purchased cheap singleplayer game without bothering or having bothered your son.
So we don't need sharing, I want transferring/gifting. Basically i have a ton of games , very old not this last years AAA , that I won't play again but my son will play, like Gary's mod that can import content from Half Life games and Portal if you have them installed, so I would like to create a new account for my son and completely transfer half of my library to him.
Most people don't care about privacy much, so they don't notice that if you try to use Steam in offline mode permanently it's impossible. Valve like most other big tech companies wants all their user data too.
I don't think that's the reason. Valve is too small to really achieve anything with our user data, nor do they have any impetus to collect it. The Hardware Survey is technically optional, and my recommendations are so unbelievably poor that I can't seriously believe that feature ingests any individual user data.
I suspect it's more to do with the fact that without requiring a new Steam Ticket every once in a while, I could go and install much of my library on a friend's computer (or any number of friends!), rig the OS to deny Steam internet connectivity, and thereby allow them to play games with my licenses indefinitely and undetectably! The horror!
This is already possible if you just download a cracked version in the first place, and it is technically more demanding (of the users), and more inconvenient. So what is it achieving exactly?
They also have quite a bit of useful Middleware nowadays, like Steam Input and Audio, which are both great.
Their controller wrapper obsoleted all of the messy third party tools you used to need on Windows, and they have a sharing platform for controller profiles.
Mod support via Workshop is pretty sweet, too. I don't use mods much but when I do, and the game supports it, workshop makes it incredibly easy to plug an go.
> They allow you to generate steam keys (at no cost to you) and sell them on your own website.
Only if you charge the same as Steam, i.e. you can't pass the 27% (still pay payment processing) savings on to customers, unless it is a limited time sale.
Well yes, they don't want you to generate code sand then sell for less than you sell at steam because that's a suicide level business model for them. But you can still sell the codes yourself without cost to you. I don't understand why what you're saying is relevant.
You are bringing in new users and locking them into Steam.
Steam only allows it because they want to be one centralized hub with more and more people locked in through social features, existing libraries, recommendation traffic, etc., but it is only allowed if it isn't price competition so that consumers can't feel the weight of the 30% directly.
no one is locked in anywhere. It's the developers choice to put in DRM or not. Steam by itself doesn't force it.
No business plan makes sense if they give away their product for free without taking any form of revenue. Casting that as evil is odd and misleading. That they allow devs to generate codes that give steam no revenue at all is pretty incredible.
> you can't pass the 27% (still pay payment processing) savings on to customers
Well yeah... whether you sell your game on Steam or via Steam codes on your website, the soft-, hardware and business infrastructure in the background handling the sale and distribution of your game is the same.
So why would they let you use their infrastructure without letting them have their cut?
It wouldn't make any sense.
They've also got a network of servers to help reduce latency in P2P games, which is actually pretty impressive to me. I don't know how effective it is, but as a GAMER any solution to latency is a great boon.
> I do not like the app store model. I rather buy from the developer.
You, as a person might not like it and you as a developer might like to directly sell games, but as pointed out above, Steam/Valve does make it easier for the developer to be legally clear in terms of taxes, refunds, etc. and also makes it easier to distribute by leveraging their "warehouse" which some do prefer.
From my point of view the store model simply is more convenient for consumers and worth the extra price. I know that I stopped pirating games, music and movies when I started using Steam, Spotify and Netflix.
Don't know about I_Byte, though I could have written what he has written.
I can now actually afford games (in the quantity I consume them) now, so that question is fair. But thankfully the video landscape fractured, now you better have NowTv, Netflix, Prime and Disney+ and you still can't watch all. I've started pirating again after 10 years or so of complete abstinence. So I think it's causal (if you have money)
With games, an important part of the equation is DRM. I prefer buying (DRM-free) things from GOG where possible, but steam has provided developers with a decent bit of DRM that is not too intrusive for consumers. There's plenty of older games from before Steam became dominant that I refused to buy because of their draconian DRM solutions.
I have to say that Spotify completely changed the way I listen to music, and I would really struggle to go back to buying individual albums.
I think of the three, movies are the only one where the "more disposable income" part of things is the dominant component of why I changed behaviours.
This makes me think of GabeN's 2011 commentary on expanding Steam into notoriously hax0r-infested Russia: the smart money scoffed at the prospect, keenly aware that the Russkies will just steal your product and why not make it that much harder for them to get their hands on it?
“Russia now outside of Germany is our largest continental European market [...] The people who are telling you that Russians pirate everything are the people who wait six months to localize their product into Russia. It doesn't take much in terms of providing a better service to make pirates a non-issue.” [0]
"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable." [1]
I for one absolutely have more money than I once did, but to be honest I stopped pirating long before that in '09 or '10, once I realized that the then-ridiculous Humble Bundles and Steam sales reduced the actual expenditure required from "gotta save up" to a mere "gotta skip buying takeout tonight". Of course the sales have decreased in quality since then, but so too has the number of games I want to play, and the time I can spend doing it.
I still pirate most movies and some TV shows because the selection on streaming services is bad, particularly for movies. I don’t pirate many new movies, it’s almost all back catalogue stuff.
I don’t pirate games and music because Steam and Spotify (or Apple/Amazon music) are a better experience than piracy.
Anecdote: some one else's account of this was that it was really helpful because the Linux portion of the community (while much smaller than other segments) provided consistently high quality feedback/bug reports.
That was just one company though. Other devs have said it isn't worth supporting Linux because the majority of the bug reports they get are distro specific edge cases.
That anecdote is in part due to the fact that the engine that was used was already Linux-friendly and was already ironed-out, so it made sense that more agnostic bugs are reported, whereas other developers resent (native) Linux support due to distros not even fully following LSB or outdated libraries, which in Windows has at least the concept of side-by-side libraries.
I saw an RPG maker who’s been making games for over 20 years on GDC recently. He talks about steam’s 30% cut. His basic takeaway, is that he used to need to employ an entire fulltime employee to handle all the things that steam now does for him. For him, the steam tax pays for itself for support and distribution alone.
Yes but that’s not what I said! If you make a game that doesn’t have native support I will not buy it. 70% is much bette than 0%! I’m sure if they had the choice between no fees or 30% fees and Linux support they would take the zero but they don’t.
Maybe I wasn’t clear but if you dont have native support then it’s really worth the 30%! If a game does it’s more debatable. I also always try to buy the DRM free version if it’s available!
I think there is probably a genuine desire for people to play a realistic game w here you're in large, heavily armoured weapons of war. The game in question has tanks from almost every nation that has ever produced tanks, so I'd wager it's either a consequence of propaganda rather than propaganda for military per se.
Yeah each one has pros and cons. However if your doing POST and GET requests (Or monitoring network traffic in general) Firefox is much much better than Chrome!
