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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 15th, 2023

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  • Just a minor correction: the 100$ one time deposit cannot be reclaimed manually. Instead, it gets automatically returned once your game hits 1000$ in sales.

    https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/appfee

    The purpose of this fee is to block low effort automated scam games from misusing the shop.

    Many successful indie devs have voiced that the 30% is actually impossible to beat for them if they tried other distribution approaches. Some even closed down their existing alternatives including self hosted shops which would grant them 100%, simply because the overhead costs ruin the percentage for them, plus a whole lot of time and effort that have to go into maintaining that.

    Yes, steam has a very strong monopoly position on the games distribution market. That is problematic for all the usual reasons with monopolies. What makes steam unique is that the company behind it, Valve, has demonstrated in all their efforts that maximizing short term profits is not necessarily their prime directive. This can obviously change at any time, so being wary is always good, but convenience is simply extremely attractive to everyone involved, devs and customers alike.


  • The device needing more power won’t get it, simple. Depending on what device it is, it will automatically throttle down so it needs less power, but obviously it will also deliver less performance while so throttled. And if the power is missing during a very sensitive part of a process so there’s no time to throttle down, your PC could blue screen or restart.

    It’s very unlikely to suffer any long-term damage from this.



  • Technically true, but I think everybody knows exactly what kind of dlc is meant, and because they still make up the majority of dlc content and addon-sized dlcs are so rare, it’s fair to call them that.

    Moneygrab empty dlcs ( shiny horse armor! ) are stupid, and history has shown that people are not fiscally responsible enough to not be lured into spending absurd amounts of money for very shallow or plain empty content. “Vote with your wallet” doesn’t really work in the face of more and more insidious marketing efforts.



  • But it’s not really true. Switzerland has no naval branch of its armed forces.

    It has a dozen or so of 10t patrol boats armed with a single 50cal MG for its lakes, and those are organized in a single motor boat company, which is staffed and manned by the military engineers branch.

    Their duties are supporting the border guard (police) on the lakes against trespass/ smugglers and assisting (civilian) search& rescue.



  • Laying even 10 times the cable should not be more difficult when you have 60 times the total population (335mio in US vs 5.6mio in Finland) and hence more resources.

    And sure, Alaska definitely it’s expensive and inefficient to service, having a pop density of about 0.5 inhabitants per km². But unlike Northern Finland, most of Northern Alaska is in fact entirely void of human life and more akin to a desert. There really mostly are a handful of oil industry clusters and native communities. And still, the extremely low pop density means it’s only 730 000 people living in Alaska. That is 0.2% of the entire population of the USA. If you were to completely ignore and not service Alaska, you should have a an even easier time providing service to the vast majority of the US population in all the main states. I think it’s pretty clear this is a political failure and not a matter of financial resources or natural obstacles.


  • You are absolutely correct that distribution matters. However, Finland has an even more uneven population distribution than the US. 75% of the population lives in the costal cities, with 30% of the entire population living in the capital region( density of 193 persons/km²). The entire rest of the country is not empty dessert ( which would require no services), but very sparsely populated rural woodlands, down to 2 people per km².

    Density still is an overall useful quantifier given that extra knowledge, as providing services for a small population of only 5.6mio inhabitants is not easy either. Sure, providing coverage for the 75% in the cities is fairly easy. But that still leaves 1.5mio rural residents, which require huge investments in cable to supply with broadband. And due to the vast distances, you definitely cannot cover them with wireless alone, if you were thinking that.





  • What’s your source on the reverify thing? I use matrix a lot, and this hasn’t been an issue I ever experienced anymore since they introduced cross-signing a couple years ago.

    Same goes for the common clients such as element. It has been clunky in the past, but after the past major overhauls ( also years ago now) everything has been silky smooth for me, if not better than others. The one thing left I prefer from Signal is the one-time photo share.

    Matrix is great, clients are great too, only the server part still is annoyingly complicated and messy. Would only recommend that for tinkerers, on that case it’s a great path to learning about the complexity of addressing lots of security concerns that others gloss over.

    Edit: to add - there’s a reason why the French government and the German military decided to build their secure internal IM infrastructure on Matrix. Obviously they are hosting their own private network, but if the concept is good enough for European government and military, it is an indicator for quality especially in terms of security and privacy.


  • Antlion itself an official wireless modmic, but it’s a staggering 150 bucks, was cheaper a could years ago… On the upside, it’s pretty much a lifetime purchase and really good quality. But it’s definitely overpriced.

    If your budget is lower, you can look at lavalier mics or wire mics. Those are the kind that TV/ video guys usually wear. Lavaliers are simply tacked to the top of your shirt, while the wire mics are super thin wires that you wear under your actual headset. Both are light, have good audio quality and nur importantly are available at much wider and fairer price ranges, as they are less of a nice. Lav mics can be as cheap as ten bucks.


  • I have invested lots of effort and research and sadly money over the years into this specific question. And nowadays my recommendation would be: keep it simple.

    That means: get a headset that is well reviewed and uses a wireless connection. Do not use Bluetooth. Bluetooth has good quality now, but no matter what perfect settings you use, you will have a noticeable delay, which is especially noticable during hectic gaming voice comms. Some headsets with a dedicated wireless receiver ( usually a small USB dongle) offer BT as an extra option, which can be great if you want to use it for listening to music or doing occasional calls while moving outside while linked to your phone.

    Second tip: don’t get a combined all-in-one gaming headset. They can be good, but are always overpriced für what they offer. Marketing ftw. Instead get a good headset and get a simple separate mic. Modmic or any derivative works.

    Overall, you’ll get tremendously better quality for significantly less price. The sheer amount of options for good “generic” headphones is immense. Added bonus: because the two are separate, you can swap one out when it breaks. Especially the addon microphones have a tendency to last decades, unlike the headsets themselves, which suffer more immediate wear and tear.


  • I was about to say… What does “suitable” mean? I grew up in the 90s, and “suitable games” ranged from SimCity or the settlers to age of empires, crusader Kings, quake, doom, unreal tournament or half life.

    There is no need to over protect kids from the “simple” evils: when I was very young, I didn’t want to play violent or scary games, even knowing they exist. Later I got curious and explored them. Depending on your choice a game such as the settlers, age of empires or crusader Kings could well be classified violent and “unsuitable”. But violence is everywhere, and those were some of the games that I fondly remember for instilling a huge curiosity in history and cultures in me. And yes, we were marketing victims as well: everyone spent way too much on Magic, Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh cards and related toys. But it didn’t infect every part of our lives.

    Help your kids reflect on their choices and wants. Help them find out why they really want to pay too much money for that shiny Roblox skin. And offer alternatives with free, open content sharing so they realize they are being swindled. Media literacy is much tougher today because companies got much more insidious marketing vectors to infect kids.

    Nowadays there are thousands of games being released per week, in addition to classics such as Minecraft, Terraria, Rimworld, Eco, which still have very strong modding and multiplayer communities.