Helps that steam’s DRM is piss-easy to crack, and good indie devs give you DRM-free redeemable copies if you show a proof of purchase (Klei my beloved)

No problem :)

Well hey old man, go to bandcamp and pay a quarter or an eighth of the price of that frisbee to get lossless audio files that you can download and backup to your heart’s content.

Spotify was always for chumps.

My GOG games aren’t, my Steam library’s still chugging along after 11 years, my Linux installs haven’t failed or started spying on me and my offline, modular 3d printer still works.

It’s all about understanding what you’re using/buying and what’s the incentives for those on the other end. We shouldn’t have to think about that all the time, but on the bright side there are cool things happening outside of enshittification by publicly traded corpos.

Also VLC is free and is one of the best media players there is, and yt-dlp is so easy to acquire music with I’m surprised people thought spotify was a good long term idea for their music consumption.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoMaps

History section, conflict arose related to control and potential profiteering by the shareholders (with a whopping 7 citations to confirm it holy cow)

If the world diversifies locations for medical research sites, that can only be a good thing for humanity as a whole.

The issue isn’t the percentage, it’s that inverse of growth. Most investors desire growth to see returns on investment for their upfront capital. If growth isn’t occurring, that’s a good sign to read the room and pull your funding.

Similar issues occurred with streaming services. Netflix is still profitable, but because the userbase isn’t growing, investors and the financial world stopped seeing it as a valuable platform to invest in.

WINE’s gotten a lot better since that statement was first made years ago. Thank the Valve money.

I decided to move to FreeCAD from Autodesk Inventor as I figured it would be easier and more beneficial to make the switch earlier in my engineering career, and I really like the experience so far - lots of good documentation and tutorials.

Mistake after mistake after mistake.

I’m sure the predators have ample disposable income they’d spend on Roblox (/s)

That’s the depressing part.

I’m of the opinion that Luanti =/= Minecraft, and can’t provide a similar experience vanilla or modded, but it’s still a useful development tool and sandbox for those who understand its capabilities.

Ah apologies, never heard of Kinoite.

Not sure if it’s the same source, but People Make Games (Independent Journalists) made two excellent documentaries on the subject:

https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ

https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY

Honestly at that point the bottleneck would be Windows if he’s using that as the operating system, and RAM. I still play modded Java edition to this day, since 2014 :)

I would rather kids pirate Minecraft than play Roblox - even if Microsoft is making the Bedrock Edition microtransaction hell, Roblox is exploitative in every layer of platform - developers, players, parents, employees, everyone except the shareholders gets sharked and abused.

Oh 100%. But I guess this is sort of a liability thing, Valve saying “Look. We want to sell the porn games and Postal 2 either way. But we’ll verify the customers so you wont get heat for ‘handling the transactions of minors’.”

My money’s on this being implemented as a compromise/capitulation to the payment processors Valve’s feuded with. Visa and MasterCard probably asked for this.

Oh hey lembot, I see you’re still on iteration 4. When’s 5 releasing?

Anyway, Valve has no interest in the personal data of their users - their ideology has been on providing excellent, transparent service through their store platform, not aggregating and selling user data to the highest bidder.

This change was likely implemented as a compromise with payment processors - the fact that the verification is through a credit card transaction is quite telling.