cringepirate
Anyway this is distraction from the general point I was trying to convey that store specific exclusives doesn't promote competition, it actually retards it.
If Epic had a store and just offered the same games for cheaper. I would be fine with it.
Also everyone keeps pretending that EPIC is this tiny company when nothing could be further from the truth.
People have to remember perfect is the enemy of the good. Considering Steam's position in the market they don't seem to abuse their position. Anecdotally I know people that have developed indie games and they told me they are generally quite happy with Steam.
We are talking about stores acting as if they are publishers (because with a exclusivity deal that is what is really happening). Steam is a open market place for all intents and purposes.
If Epic is successful we will have every store front acting as a publisher. This won't benefit the consumer (publisher tend to interfere with the creative process) and it won't benefit the developers because those low commission rates will suddenly vanish.
I am all for free markets. But this is not what is happening here. EPIC is flush with cash from Fortnight and dominating the game engine market with UE3, UE4 and probably do the same with UE5 (they have over 25% in a very fragmented market) and they are trying to artificially divide what is an open ecosystem.
The way you frame it is totally incorrect and completely misrepresents
Steam (who is obviously relevant in the PC space) doesn't "charge" developers 30% of the revenue. Steam is acting as an affiliate. Affiliate agreements work on the fact that one party will get a commission for driving sales of a particular product.
Steam drives sales of a particular product by providing the market place, they provide the payment mechanism, the hosting and update infrastructure and probably a bunch of things I am not aware of.
Also the 30/70% split for an affiliate relationship is standard across many industries. This could be Travel, Gambling, House hold items.
> Also, the PC is an open platform. Game developers don't have to use Epic's or anyone else' store to distribute games on PC. With iOS you have no choice.
You are getting wrong way around. If would be fine if the EPIC store offered the same games as Steam at a lower price (by taking a lower commission). Then that would drive competition and that would benefit the consumer.
However that isn't happening here.
They are artificially dividing an open market by making some PC games exclusive to their store. This stops competition because the two store fronts can't compete because they cannot offer the same games. In the same way that if you wanna play Halo you aren't doing it on a PlayStation.
GoG and Steam will have many of the same games sold on them. I end up buying them on the GoG store, why is that? GoG is guaranteed to be DRM free. That choice cannot exist when some games are exclusive to one store. So GoG competes with the Steam store and offers a better refund policy (you can refund for any reason and at any time) and no DRM.
Now it may benefit developers to be exclusive to the EPIC store but this will ultimately make the PC ecosystem less open for the consumer.
No. They were drunks (I was becoming one myself). I told you in the sentence before that once I didn't come to the pub they weren't interested in spending any time with me. That what addicts are like.
This really isn't difficult stuff to understand. The acquaintance relationship only existed because of substance abuse basically. There is no friendship of shared interest outside of that.
I was thinking about writing a rebuttal to everything else you said. But there really isn't much point because you can't even understand this part of social interaction.
All my real friends btw, keep in touch via email, text etc. As for me demanding I use a communication medium, everyone has a cell phone with SMS and everyone has an email address. If people can't be bothered to do that ...
For me LinkedIn for me was a total waste of time. Good you find it useful use it, but I don’t and I don’t like the company so I am deleted my account.
Also most of the contacts weren’t other devs or dev companies but recruiters. A lot of those recruiters flooded the feed with bullshit recruitment feel good articles and other trite. That combined with all the estalking and slimes dudes on there it just isn’t somewhere that is worth being around.
If I had friends that didn't bother with me because I wasn't on the platform (facebook) they probably wasn't worth bothering with in the first place.
You can always find an excuse as to why you keep on using these services, some odd thing that you claim you need. I just decided I wasn't going to use them anymore and stop making excuses for having to deal with companies that couldn't give a fuck about me.
I bought a NAS for backups with freenas and moving my email to a domain with a provider literally took me a few minutes (plugging DNS entries into my domain provider). It not that hard.
People should be making tools for helping people move away from platforms. I am personally going to write it all up and identify pain points.
I get plenty of business through (gasp) word of mouth and ex-colleagues. So I am fine.
Also the same rule still applies. If I had to use some terrible software everyday I would leave a job if it was that bad. I had to develop on a terrible CMS, once I realised it was never going to change, I looked for another job.
Also Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Yes I appreciate there are edge cases such as the mentally handicapped. However realistic I am talking about the majority of the population which are capable of looking after themselves.
Again this much like another reply I received. You are making it an all or nothing scenario.
Realistically it will be a combination of regulation and people starting to get wise to what these companies are doing. At the moment the regulators don’t have the power or aren’t up to speed. So instead of waiting for the shit to hit the fan you can protect yourself and start mitigating risk.
I really don’t like this attitude of people that you cannot try to protect yourself.
You should diversify your social media presence then and let your followers know "look if I am not here one day this is my website or you can find me here".
> If you've an iOS app and you've run afoul of the app store, you can't take those iOS users with you without asking them to switch to another platform or asking them to use a web app instead (both of which are forbidden, I think)
This is probably the only valid scenario presented due to there being only two players realistically in the mobile phone space.
> If you're on gmail and your account gets suspended, you can't set up a magical redirect that sends all your mail to another address. Can you even use Google Takeout?
This actually happened to a friend of mine (he got locked out of his account). He ended up learning from the experience and owns his own domain and uses one of the other email providers.
The government might fix these issues in another 10 years ... maybe? You are actually validating my point about people being ignorant of the risks of using services that can suspend you account for any reason at any time. Don't use them, or if you must then mitigate any potential fallout from losing access to that service.
People that have been being censored by large tech companies have already started doing this.
> In too many cases, the switching costs are so high as to be destructive. Yes you can technically switch but the price is dire. That doesn't count in my book.
As we are arbitrarily deciding what counts, I don't think the social media accounts or the gmail issue is a big deal.
They are easily mitigated against as long as you aren't ignorant. Being a smart consumer, smart user will protect you much better than anything else. Which proves my point.
In any event you can slowly move away from using a companies products. It isn't a all or nothing proposition.
If people really cared (as much as they claim) you will make alternatives work for you.
I think it is pretty obvious that if companies are abusing their position to that extent an appropriate governing body should step in. However there are going to be issues that won't fall under such a remit.
Also just because the government/regulator is failing to step in, doesn't mean you can't be doing something yourself. I was getting very frustrated with Google and its products. So I decided to stop using them whenever possible.
As for moving away from industry giants, this works. Firefox (back in the early 2000s) chipped away at IE's monopoly and broke the stagnation.
> That will never happen as long as shareholders are the only people that companies are legally beholden to
The user has a choice not to use products that are made by companies that don't respect them.
> That will never happen as long as developers insist that their happiness is more immportant than that of their users
The user can simply stop using the software if the developer doesn't respect their time (happiness is a completely subjective property dependant on the individual).
So I say this will never happen while people won't actively move for alternatives and put up with crappy products.
I made the effort to stop using products from large companies that don't respect my privacy and don't respect freedom of speech of their users. So whenever possible I don't use any products from the large tech companies.
If people can't be bothered and choose to be ignorant, they deserve what they get.
I am well aware of the story. BTW British rail stopped being profitable back in 1955 (7 years after nationalisation).
It proves that maybe you shouldn't let government take public ownership of companies. Government will frequently provide the worse of both worlds as it tries to appease everyone and ends up serving no-one.
The result for the UK is that we have a very expensive rail service that is horrible to use and it is simply cheaper to drive.
In the UK where I live the government subsidise rail. Rail is very expensive, slow and unreliable especially compared to my diesel car. I would rather cycle to the train station, get onto the train with my bike and then cycle the other side to work. However it costs me almost twice as much to do and takes me 3 times as long.
Even with all the taxes on fuel, emissions and the price of repairing what is now an old car (my Car is over 15 years old and has done many many miles). Driving is cheaper, generally gets me there quicker even when travelling across the whole country.
Rail tickets keep on increasing in price and the service never improves and the whole experience is unpleasant.
In the rest of Europe cars are just taxed heavily and people still buy them. This idea that people don't want cars just isn't true.
The approach I have to many projects is:
1) Sketch out a rough idea of how I will build it. 2) Try to get the fundamentals working, 3) Start building and fixing any obvious defects in the design. Add tests as I go along to catch obvious defects. 4) Iterate from there to completion.
For most of the projects I am working on this seems to be fine.
Also there are lots of extensions that you are kinda just supposed to know about e.g. dba-tools extensions.
One of the problems with the WYSIWYG editor was that the developer effort typically added and extra 50% effort onto any task and like anything with Sitecore you ended up having to dig through PDFs on their development portal.
A slight aside though. One of the best things about Sitecore was its OOP approach to content. Every piece of content was an instance of a template. If you knew what you were doing with it you could build things very cleanly. I haven't seen anyone else implement anything similar in their CMS.
TBH in the example given the above should simply be:
> A language for building reliable and efficient software.
They (Microsoft) say that their inspiration was Korn Shell and Languages like TCL. Microsoft when they still offered Windows services for Unix, they did provide a Korn shell. If you look at some PowerShell examples and some Korn Shell example there are quite a few similarities between the two.
So they obviously were quite aware of the options in the *nix world. I really wish people wouldn't make these sorts of claims when spending like less than a few minutes looking up the development history would dispel these ideas immediately.
Personally I really like PowerShell and I find it fun to program in whereas with bash I seem to have to always relearn it whenever I attempt to do something non-trivial. However I come from a background of programming in OOP languages like Java and C# so many it just suits my mental model better than bash.
I fundamentally don’t think you understand what I am saying from this reply. Therefore I think any discussion past this point on this matter is worthless.