Many of the games that actual kids spend time on are the purest expression of gaming slop (half-broken microtransaction gambling hell with schizophrenic flashing colors). Roblox and Fortnite's Islands system are both guilty of this. The problem is kids don't know any better and don't yet understand the value of money. The obvious response is "parents should handle this" and while I agree, there is no system to let them say "here are Robux/V-Bucks you can spend on quality content (e.g., Fortnite's Battle Pass is very well designed, quality content), but gambling slop is disabled".
In my experience, the Epic Games Store downloads faster, installs more efficiently, and launches games faster than Steam. The social features I actually use (i.e., add a friend, join them in a game) work fine. I'm not aware of any features Steam has that EGS lacks that I actually use frequently (Valve's VR, streaming tech, and Proton are great, but I don't use those frequently). It's not just me, many indie game developers are also big fans of EGS (most recent example that comes to mind are Jeff Kaplan's remarks during his 10 hour stream a week or two ago). Gamers' vehement defense of what is effectively a monopoly continues to confuse me.
Nearly every time I add the free EGS games to my cart the checkout fails. I frequently have to restart the EGS client for checkout to work (and even then it fails often).
I launched EGS just now to time some comparisons and it's a black rectangle on my screen with no GUI (probably self-updating). I had to kill the process and restart it.
The Look and Feel for the EGS client just feels slow. Not that Steam is always amazing in this regard either but it's way better than EGS. Go to your EGS library and click between "favorites" and "all games". Switching from favorites to all games takes me ~4 seconds, every time (if you have any meaningful number of games).
The search/sort is slow. Steam's feels instant.
The library list has a ton of wasted space. In terms of vertical space, the Steam library lists three games for every game EGS lists.
The EGS social features compared to Steam are downright anemic (and Steam is pretty bad compared to something like Discord). You can't even set an avatar in EGS. Even EA's Store app (whatever they call Origin now) lets you do that.
One thing that steam does better than any other place is create an incredible store experience to sell games on. I don't think any other game distributor has an algorithm as good as theirs, and all the integrations and hookups that come with it. For example, Nintendo's shop page for each game is sparse in detail and lacks so much information buyers have access to in that game's Steam page counterpart. The store search and other store views display games far more efficiently than nintendo's search and store views, making it much easier to find what you're looking for in fewer clicks and fewer minutes.
if you have the time, try to find a game on nintendo vs on steam. Don't google for the pages, go to their base shop page and start from there. Try to avoid directly searching the title, instead search for keywords as if you're a gamer trying to recall a game suggestion you heard from a friend like 2 weeks ago. You'll notice the plethora of differences that combined puts steam on a whole other level of sales and content distribution if you go about it like that
They could at the very least just package it up to run with Wine, but Sweeney is stubbornly set in his linux hating ways. I could use their store through the Heroic launcher, as I do with GoG, but I won't because fuck you Tim.
If we're being realistic from a business standpoint: Linux is at best, 3% market share. A very passionate 3%, but 3%. Using resources to support such a niche sector is a hard sell.
3% of millions of people is a massive number of people. Given how easy recent work on wine has made porting from windows, it's really hard to defend not having a linux version, from a business standpoint.
I'd hope this community of all places would understand that "just integrate X with Y" is never as simple as "just". It's still something a team needs to do, and the gain is minimal unless Epic is also going to try and make their own console-esque device. That's the incentive for Steam.
Going by the Steam hardware survey, 3/4 of Linux users were not using Steam Decks when they got polled. So I’m not sure if a console-esque device is actually required. A large part of the reason why Linux usage is growing, is probably that it mostly just works these days
Yes, it's not the most optimal business decision as a software company to invest in hardware. The clear move is to either grease Microsoft's palms, or let then outright acquire Steam (or Valve as a whole). Valve not doing that is either in part ideological, or part very long term thinking on the best financial path later, instead of now.
But at the same time: while the ends was "be independent from Microsoft", their means at first was very Microsoft esque. Partner up with hardware vendors, make some Pcs with Steam built in, and brand it as such. Didn't work. Their goal had to be to roll their own hardware because that's what was needed to get the ball rolling (as well as a form factor that accompanied a desktop instead of competed against).
The problem for an also-ran app store is that you need every user you can find.
Linux support may not be a huge deal in the overall market (although it's growing due to the steam os devices) but it's just one more element to Steam's moat.
It's a glorified wrapper around curl, wine and a webview, a few interns could knock this out in a few months. For "3% market share" (growing every day, thanks to Valve) its a no brainer, but Sweeney has no brain.
How is steam a monopoly? People would be excited for EGS just like they are for GoG, except EGS has a track record of anticonsumer behavior.
I fear for valve in a post gaben world, and they certainly aren't blameless. They also aren't a monopoly. Hell, steamOS is the opposite of a locked ecosystem.
It has 90% marketshare and has been shown to use its monopoly uncompetitively to force price parity on devs. Textbook definition.
>People would be excited for EGS just like they are for GoG,
People "like" GOG. I woildnt say they are "excited for it". The revenue of GOG these years don't reflect the supposed enthusiasm.
>EGS has a track record of anticonsumer behavior.
Anticonsumer isn't anti competitive. Especially not as a new player in the game. They can't brute force this stuff with money like a trillion dollar company could.
> Hell, steamOS is the opposite of a locked ecosystem.
I'll believe that when they release a full distro with all the feature the Steam Deck enjoys.
> Gamers' vehement defense of what is effectively a monopoly continues to confuse me.
It is a monopoly but that can be a good thing sometimes. Steam is really good! Is it 30% cut good? Maybe not but I do think Valve has managed to keep Steam good for a very long time and if they lose their monopoly they're going to have a strong incentive to fuck things up.
Another example is WhatsApp. Sure, sucks for Google and Apple that WhatsApp have a watertight monopoly in most of Europe (and probably much of the rest of the world; I haven't checked). But it's pretty great for actually users. We've had at least a decade of totally free messaging that everyone has with no ads and e2e encryption.
Meta are just about starting to fuck it up but it's been a pretty great run.
People are generally okay with monopolies as long as they feel they're benefiting from the monopoly instead of being taken advantage of.
Epic garnered a lot of ill will with all the early exclusives. If I have part 1 and part 2 of some franchise on Steam, and then part 3 comes out as an Epic exclusive, it's going to irritate me.
In my experience, the Epic downloader would frequently lead to degraded performance and/or system instability when I'd leave it running; I've never noticed such problems at all with the Steam client.
That's a weird way of saying "lack of competition". As others have mentioned, why should Epic Games bother supporting Linux?
Considering that I'm gaming on Linux, the number of competitors is pretty small and close to zero, I'm not sure why I should be forced to switch operating systems to support the "better platform".
I say this as someone who's been running Vortex/Skyrim modding on Linux years before there was official support for it and I'm kind of shocked honestly to hear that people are cheering for something I did so long ago (5 years to be precise) I hardly remember the time doing it.
I try out the Launcher every couple years to see if it's improved. I just installed and logged in for the first time since 2023.
Looks like they have finally fixed lag and freeze jank that occured on every action, blocked scrolling, and etc.
Unfortunately just clicking on the "Featured Discounts" items on the store home page.. 3-4+(more like 4-5+ on further testing) FULL seconds of blank until the game details load. An ecommerce site where the items take 3-4 seconds to display!? I flipped over to Steam and everything in the store loads "instantly".
Sigh, I'll check back in 2028.
Edit: It boggles the mind and defies reason that they can't get a handle on table-stakes UX after all this time, energy, and hundreds of millions of dollars sunk into it. Nepotism; gotta be, yeah?
The major feature that EGS lacks and which makes it appealing to indies and repulsive to gamers is user reviews. User reviews are a major influence on consumer choice; and Steam even shows recent vs long term, which signals if a recent change was received well or not.
User reviews, guides, discussions, workshop and shared screenshots and videos: bold social features that are an incredible source of agony for mediocre and bad indie games.
Data centers don't do anything other than sit there and turn electricity into heat. They only emit nothing but heat (which could be useful to others in the building).
In America they have "temporary" jet turbines parked next to them burning gas inefficiently with limited oversight on pollution and noise because they are "temporary".
paying for store exclusives mostly. it was a big deal when borderlands 3 dropped in 2019 and again with alan wake 2 in 2023. its kinda hypocritical when you keep talking about competition and how its important to fight monopolies then come up with a $150M exclusivity deal instead of actually competing with steam.
Setting aside whether paying for store exclusives is right or wrong (personally I don't see anything wrong with it), what does that have to do with the Apple discussion? The problem with Apple is specifically that they use their dominant market position to force anti-competitive terms on other companies. Has Epic been bullying companies into accepting their deals? You can sell a game anywhere, Epic has no leverage in this respect.
"Previous data from the trial reported that 107 participants received the mRNA vaccine and Keytruda treatment, while the remaining 50 only received Keytruda. At the two-year follow-up, 24 of the 107 (22 percent) who got the experimental vaccine and Keytruda had recurrence or death, while 20 of 50 (40 percent) treated with just Keytruda had recurrence or death, indicating a 44 percent risk reduction"
Statistically, if those in the control group had gotten the treatment, then in expectation 9 of those people wouldn't have had their cancer return or died. It must be exciting to run these sorts of trials with super promising drugs, but also a little bittersweet/dark.
You make a very good point. But the other side of it is that sometimes it goes poorly. The vaccine could have some previously unknown bad reaction with the Keytruda and the numbers get 44% worse instead. In this case it would be better to be in the vaccine group, but that's not guaranteed.
Resectable cutaneous melanoma metastatic to a lymph node and at high risk of recurrence
Complete resection within 13 weeks prior to the first dose of pembrolizumab
Disease free at study entry (after surgery) with no loco-regional relapse or distant metastasis and no clinical evidence of brain metastases
Has an formalin fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) tumor sample available suitable for sequencing
Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) Performance Status 0 or 1
Normal organ and marrow function reported at screening
Key Exclusion Criteria:
Prior malignancy, unless no evidence of that disease for at least 5 years prior to study entry
Prior systemic anti-cancer treatment (except surgery and interferon for thick primary melanomas. Radiotherapy after lymph node dissection is permitted)
Live vaccine within 30 days prior to the first dose of pembrolizumab
Transfusion of blood or administration of colony stimulating factors within 2 weeks of the screening blood sample
Active autoimmune disease
Immunodeficiency, systemic steroid therapy, or any other immunosuppressive therapy within 7 days prior to the first dose of pembrolizumab
Solid organ or allogeneic bone marrow transplant
Pneumonitis or a history of (noninfectious) pneumonitis that required steroids
Prior interstitial lung disease
Clinically significant heart failure
Known history of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)
Known active hepatitis B or C
Active infection requiring treatment
Ages Eligible for Study
18 Years and older (Adult, Older Adult )
There are affordances for "this works so well and has so few side effects that we are ethically bound to give the control group the drug too." This happened with AZT for HIV.
I’m a founder of one of these AI music companies and that noise you’re describing (it differs between co’s for us it’s loud vocals, for Suno it’s vocal aliasing/sandiness and mushy instrumentals, etc) is exactly why I think these songs should not be going on Spotify/etc.
We’ll have this (and the corny lyrics issue) mostly fixed in a month or so, then it mostly becomes a recommendations problem. For example, TikTok is filled with slop, but it’s not a problem - their algorithm helps the most creative/engaging stuff rise to the top. If Spotify is giving you Suno slop in your discover weekly (or really crappy 100% organic free range AI-free slop) blame Spotify, not the AI or the creators. There are really high effort and original creations that involve AI that deserve to be heard, though.
I suggest going back and listening to some of the first experimental electronic music. The tools have improved a lot since then and people have used them to do really cool things, even spawning countless genres.
Thankfully, most of it doesn't reach your Spotify feed. I think most of it is garbage, but I'd fight for the right of people to continue posting it. All things algorithmic have this exploration/exploitation, diversity/fidelity tradeoff and Spotify has theirs tuned very heavily toward exploitation/fidelity. I think there is a cool opportunity for someone to put the tradeoff dial into users hands.
The modern AI phone support systems I’ve encountered aren’t able to do anything or go off script, so it sounds better but it’s still a lousy experience.
I've fed thousands of dollars to Anthropic/OAI/etc for their coding models over the past year despite never having paid for dev tools before in my life. Seems commercially viable to me.
> I've fed thousands of dollars to Anthropic/OAI/etc for their coding models over the past year despite never having paid for dev tools before in my life. Seems commercially viable to me.
For OpenAI to produce a 10% return, every iPhone user on earth needs to pay $30/month to OpenAI.
They don't sell their models to individuals only but also to companies with most likely different business and pricing models so that's an overly simplistic view of their business. YoY their spending increases, we can safely assume that one of the reasons is the growing user base.
Time will probably come when we won't be allowed to consume frontier models without paying anything, as we can today, and time will come when this $30 will most likely become double or triple the price.
Though the truth is that R&D around AI models, and especially their hosting (inference), is expensive and won't get any cheaper without significant algorithmic improvements. According to the history, my opinion is that we may very well be ~10 years from that moment.
Not sure where that math is coming from. Assuming it's true, you're ignoring that some users (me) already pay 10X that. Btw according Meta's SEC filings: https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2023/q4... they made around $22/month/american user (not even heavy user or affluent iPhone owner) in q3 2023. I assume Google would be higher due to larger marketshare.
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