• 1 Post
  • 61 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
cake
Cake day: December 9th, 2024

help-circle



  • What if I told you that there are roughly 4 million steamdecks in existence. Ref

    And that this is about 1\3 of the Steam Linux market. Ref and about half of the entire handheld PC market. Ref

    Of course, we dont know how many MAU GOG has so maybe 4 million new customers is baby numbers, but Steam seems enamored enough of that market segment to commit huge new UI and store features (deck verification, “Runs on Deck” filters, other deck specific stuff) including the game controller mappings which do help with non-deck also but were clearly a necessary element for handhelds. Maybe deck users, it being a committed gaming platform, spend more on games?

    Anyway, trying to get subscribers (always a teeny fraction of your free users) ahead of converting new non-customers into customers, seems like bad econ to me.

    If GOG is so hot for game preservation why not see if they can score an emulation deal to bring lost handheld titles to PC\deck? Sega might be down, NeoGeo is owned by the Saudi’s, I’m sure they’d love some free money for their back catalog. That’s in line with Lutris’ mission of being the one game launcher for your entire library. A few strategic investments and partnerships could open up GOG as the gateway to classic gaming across devices, but that would require some vision to carry through.





  • Oh so like the music industry where every artist retains full rights to their work and the only 3 big publishers definitely don’t force them to sell all their rights leaving musicians with basically nothing but touring revenue? Protecting the little guy like that you mean?

    Or maybe protecting the little guy like how 5 tech companies own all the key patents required for networking, 3d graphics, and digital audio? And how those same companies control social media so if you are any kind of artist you are forced to hustle nonstop on their platforms for any hope if reaching an audience with your work? I’m sure all those YouTube creators feel very protected.








  • This is incorrect. The C# is valid. Throw in a catch statement simply rethrows the caught exception. Source: I’ve been writing C# for 20 years, also the docs.

    I won’t act like MS absolutely didn’t steal core concepts and syntax from Java, but I’ve always thought C# was much more thoughtfully designed. Anders Hejlsberg is a good language designer, TypeScript is also a really excellent language.





  • It’s an untenable situation because its so much bigger than the tech world and open source. FOSS fundamentally works on a communal model: everyone needs lots of software, no one can hope to write it all themselves, so what if we distributed the labor out among the community so that everyone can work on some things important to them and the whole community benefits.

    Then, capitalist businesses entered the picture and began using more and more open software as backbone for their enterprises. Government entanglements further complicate the picture, but fundamentally the capitalist mindset is incapable of building or maintaining our current technological base. It isn’t capable of maintaining or building our infrastructure either: almost all of that was built on government subsidies, socialism.

    And now that vulture capitalism is the law of the land, everything is falling apart because there’s no more “slack” in the system where people can engage in personal socialism on projects like FLOSS, every bit of our time is being stolen to pad the numbers of capitalists.

    This bleeds over into attitude as well. Every entitled user who thinks their personal issue is more important than any other concern is a trump or musk in miniature, believing that the the blowhard bravado of our current government is a model for forcing work to get done rather than a death spiral there’s no pulling out of.

    You want FLOSS software that’s good? You want less burden on maintainers? You want a safer, saner, more human-centric technology base? You want a better tech world?

    Eat. The. Rich.