Why? Steam has come out and labelled legitimate criticism of games a 'review bomb' in the past. They're more than happy to bend over for big publishers like this.

Canada either did, or still does, have a law like this. Years ago back when getting chipped cards for satellites was a pretty big thing, a lot of people near the US border could get ones from the US that weren't available in Canada and get the chipped card or whatever it was. At one point the company made a request to the Canadian authorities to crack down on it, and the response was something to the effect of 'your product isn't available here, you don't have standing to ask us to do that'.

It's easier to define it as this:

If you commercially release something and region restrict it, people in any region where you don't also provide a legal way to purchase/use it should be free to get it however they want.

Because until we see it, unedited, we don't really know the truth of what occurred.

Good to see people would rather be ignorant and make assumptions than understand what actually happened in an incident.

B2B contact is generally fine, unless you're going to be a stalker about it. Had one the other day who messaged me on linkedin with her pitch and included the standard 'If you have time and this is interesting feel free to reach out' I saw the e-mail pop up just as I was stepping away to have lunch, as it was the standard lunch time. Before I even got downstairs (work from home) my company's calling me out of the blue to tell me they have a call for me from this person. I declined the call, as we both agreed it was just business spam and after lunch responded and let them know we'd never be interested in their services. 'Feel free to get in touch if you're interested' and 'I'm going to track down your company's phone number and call you 30 seconds after I send this' just don't vibe for me.

Gen AI is best used with languages that you don't use that much. I might need a python script once a year or once every 6 months. Yeah I learned it ages ago, but don't have much need to keep up on it. Still remember all the concepts so I can take the time to describe to the AI what I need step by step and verify each iteration. This way if it does make a mistake at some point that it can't get itself out of, you've at least got a script complete to that point.

are there a lot of new things to say about this after it was posted 4 days ago? https://kbin.run/m/programmer_humor@programming.dev/t/503264/I-Will-Fucking-Piledrive-You-if-You-mention-AI-Again#comments

I find it great when we have a meeting every other half hour. I get a lot done on those days.

https://nightswithalicecooper.com/2020/04/24/flashback-lennon-mccartneys-final-meeting/

The two last spoke on the phone in early 1980.

This was 4 years after they had the chat about SNL.

But there is always an excuse. Epic tried that. Companies complained.

Their sales used to give you a reusable $10 off coupon. That didn't change the amount the companies got when someone bought their game. It only changed how much they paid. When one of the Witcher games had that coupon applied to it, the developer got pissed off and changed the price of the game so that it was a cent or two below the threshold to activate the coupon, and then fans of the dev were excusing it claiming that they couldn't let the price be lower because it would 'devalue' the game.

if a game was $30 on Steam and $25 on Epic (as a regular price), or some other service, you'd undoubtedly hear the same rhetoric.

Epic's cut is 12% not 30%. They also waive the 5% royalty fee over $1 million for sales on the Epic Store if you use Unreal. Epic doesn't control the prices. Devs set the prices. They leave the price the same on Epic so that they can actually get a little more for each sale.

What the should do on a $60 game though is to set the price at like $56 on Epic, it would encourage people to save a couple bucks there, while still getting them more than steam after the cuts.

They do prevent you from linking to your own store within your Steam game though. Even though they don't provide a complete solution for things like microtransactions and DLC.

How it works on Steam:

1. User makes an in-app purchase using the steam wallet integration
2. Steam processes the payment taking 30% and gives you a reference number for that transaction
3. You query that transaction every time the player logs in to see if they've refunded it or not. That transaction doesn't actually contain any information about what they bought though.
4. You then maintain a separate purchasing server whose whole job it is is to keep a record of what the player purchased in reference to that transaction number.

For that Valve wants 30% of in-app/DLC purchases. At that point it's stripe and nothing more. Unlike standalone DLC Or expansions, these unlock purchases don't come with serving any additional content in the form of downloads.

If you make your own service to handle these transactions (with only a 3-4% transaction rate) Valve will prevent you from linking to it, or mentioning it anywhere on your page, forums or within the game itself. You need to direct players elsewhere and then mention it. Even for cross-platform games where having Steam maintain a transaction list for a portion of the users is just a needless additional layer.

Console prices aren't really relevant to Steam. Consoles always tend to run higher.

You can get resin printers under $250. The elegoo mars 4 is $223 on Amazon, if you go second hand you can probably get a 3 for a bit cheaper. If you're going to do miniatures, the difference is still very significant.