Competition has failed. Repeatedly. The history of the post-industrial world is full of examples. There used to be a ton of competitive general stores in America before the Walton family destroyed them all. Competition is the most common way monopolies are created.
The problems the regulatory capture and the government’s lack of teeth. Which are issues for sure, but not ones solved by increasing competition.
I’ll say it: competition can be bad sometimes. If Valve ever starts to conduct business unethically, the solution will be government regulation, not competition.
I know that today in most English-speaking countries, competition is worshipped as an all-powerful god that solves every problem. But the reality is that competition is often detrimental to a lot of stakeholders in an industry. Competition optimizes for specific parameters in a downward spiral- that’s why every streaming service sucks, and is worse than Netflix was 10 years ago.
What would you hope to get out of a Steam competitor? I will guess that you are talking about price pressure. But Steam does not set the prices- publishers do. That’s why the same game is $69.99 whether you get it on Steam, the PlayStation Network, Xbox store, Epic Games Store, or buying physical copies from Amazon, Wal-Mart, Target, or wherever else. In that way you could argue Steam already has tons of effective competition putting pressure on prices, just outside of the specific PC digital storefront space.
So maybe if Valve had more competition, Steam might be forced to reduce their fees to publishers, but there’s no reason to believe that cost savings would be passed on to consumers.
If anything, having competition just repeats the fixed costs, or in other words reduces the population of users that fixed costs are spread over, driving up the total and per-unit costs of the whole system.
Now I certainly am not saying anything so dumb as “In GabeN we trust” or “I have faith in Valve to conduct business fairly as a monopoly in the long-term”. But the solution is regulation, not competition.
The other notable place monopolies fail is servicing less profitable populations. Valve has so far done the opposite. Epic has outright refused to support Linux, while Valve has made their own free gaming Linux distro, with tons of work put into Proton for free to ensure compatibility. VR is a tiny niche, but Valve still put out one of the best VR systems kn the market. The “handheld” PC market was incredibly niche, but Valve released the Steam Deck and I would guess sold an order of magnitude or two more units than anything before or since in that space. I don’t really see any underserved niches asking for a competitor.
I can’t say for sure, but it looks like it includes the controls based on this mock-up from IGN:
The Switch 2 is supposedly going to be 206mm L x 115mm W x 14mm D.
The Deck is 298mm x 117mm x 49mm. So still 1.5x the length of the S2 and 3x the width.
I can’t find any reports of the Switch 2’s weight, but I expect it to be significantly less than the 640g of the Deck. The Switch 2 will have a slightly larger screen, but is a smaller device overall.
But all that aside I still expect Nintendo to offer another, smaller version of the Switch 2 within a couple years. They had the Switch Lite, 2DS, DS Lite, DSi, GBA Micro, GBA SP, Gameboy Pocket, and probably more I’m not thinking of. So they will probably do a Switch 2 Lite or something.
I would also add other handhelds like the Legion Go that are starting to use Steam OS.
Even outside of being kid “safe”, the Deck is too big and heavy for kids. Heck, I know a lot of adults who have that issue.
It’s also fairly expensive and while I would not call it “fragile”, I don’t the Deck would survive being owned by your average 10 year old as well as a Switch Lite does.
I rewatched the first one a couple years ago and thought it had aged pretty well. I don’t remember any of the jokes being mean or really punching down on anyone.
I could be forgetting something and I haven’t watched the sequels since they first came out though. My guess would be that Fat Bastard is probably the part of the franchise that aged the worst. Even when he was introduced the whole joke was “hey it’s a fat guy!”, which was one of the weaker jokes.
I also watched The Pentaverate when it came out and thought that was great. It’s a Netflix miniseries sith very similar humor where Mike Meyers plays like half the characters. It’s a parody of conspiracy theories like the Da Vinci Code, not spy movies, but still pretty good.
I agree. Throughout the whole years if I want something, I buy it. If I don’t want something, I don’t.
But all of a sudden around November or December I need to hold off for a bit because someone else wants to buy it for me instead. And it’s usually not quite the same thing that I wanted- I don’t want to be rude, but I would have rather just done the research on my own and made my own purchase.
Or worse, I get gifted stuff I have absolutely no interest in. So I need to make space in my house for it and remember to pretend like I use it on occasions when I see that person for a couple of years until we are past the statue of limitations on getting rid of it.
Just more plastic and emissions. More money going to big corporations. It’s an inefficient purchasing process propped up for the sake of the emotions of irrational people. And corporations like Hallmark seem to exist specifically to amplify these traditions for the benefit of modern shareholders.
Victor Gruen is widely considered the inventory of the modern shopping mall. He was an Austrian Jew who immigrated to the US when the Nazi’s annexed Austria.
I can’t find much specific on his political views, but I’ve seen him described by historians as “far-left” and “socialist”.
Shopping was originally a small part of his vision. He wanted to make an indoor, air-conditioned version of European pedestrian areas. Residences, schools, libraries, hospitals, parks, etc. He hated how the mall he envisioned became the shopping mall. He was influenced by Disney Land - trying to make a planned neighborhood that optimized the human experience. In turn, Disney took a lot of influence from him to make EPCOT.
So I don’t know that he was a Marxist, but he denounced the capitalist hellscape that his malls eventually became.
Just looking through my HLTB at things I’ve done recently:
The Ace Attorney series Sucker for Love Coffee Talk Haven (good for co-op)
If you want a bit more gameplay, but still chill:
Paradise Killer Braid Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
More gameplay focused:
Control Portal Wargroove Cat Quest Knack (I know it’s a meme, but the games are actually pretty fun)
The whole world uses both for various things. Even the countries that “officially” use metric. Specific global industries still use imperial. Canadian and British people are perhaps the most famous for combining the two, but most of Europe also mixes things in here and there.
And of course the whole conversation is Euro-centric and ignores the historical use of traditional measurement systems in Africa and Asia, but somehow that never gets brought up.
You think most adults were 100lbs heavier than me at 18?
No. I never said that. I have no idea why you think I did?. According to Guinness, the heaviest baby ever birthed was 22lbs in 1879 (and only lived a few hours). I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess you were born weighing less than that, and spent a considerable portion of your early years weighing less than most adults.
I think you’re construing this into specifically abusive and destructive people. Those do exist, but my comment was referring to a broader scope. Anger can be a valid emotion, and there are healthy and unhealthy ways of handling it.
Ultimately, my point is that the original comment I replied to was ridiculous.
I straight up don’t believe that you were never in a room with an angry adult as a child. Personally I was never sexually or physically abused, but I know plenty of people who have been. A lot of strides have been made over the last several decades to improve parenting, but no one can be perfect for 18 years. Plus you add in teachers, coaches, or other community leaders that might be trusted with children.
The most important part of my comment was just pointing out the absurdity of the comment I was replying to. I could also point out the extent of hyperbole they used- the average American adult male is ~30 lbs heavier than the average American adult female, per the CDC. Or… Well, I could dive deeper into it but ultimately this whole conversation is based in bigotry and isn’t worth looking at much more closely than that.
On the contrary I think you’ll find close to 100% of them were indeed children at one point.
And the question was designed to create this divide
It’s literally just a classic page from the bigot’s playbook, but since it’s being used against cishet men for some reason that makes it okay?
If JK Rowling said she would rather go to a bathroom with a bear than a trans woman I think we would all rightfully call that hate speech.
If a white supremecist said this about black people it would be dismissed as racist nonsense. I’ve seen a lot of defenders saying that this is somehow different because violence by cishet men against women is real. How many years have racists loved to use the good ol’ “did you know x% of crimes are committed by x% of the population” tactic for?
And I see the “not all men” getting tossed around. How is that any different from saying “I know not all Muslims are terrorists. The good ones know we aren’t talking about them”? Change the conversation from cis men to anything else and it gets called out as hate speech. It does nothing to help solve any issues or lead to a better society.
I really miss front-facing speakers. It’s one of many features that phone manufacturers have removed from phones over the past decade.
Incorporates 3rd-party DRM: EA on-line activation and Origin client software installation and background use required.
I’m good thanks
Counterpoint: what if older societies already put in place censorship laws that were so successful, they effectively scrubbed any cultural memory of similar “works”?
Perhaps we should write our rules based on what we want in the future rather than what our ancestors did?
I think that’s our fundamental misunderstanding here, because that’s not the regulatory solution I had in mind. I would look to other heavily regulated (or even nationalized) monopolies. Forcing Valve to split Steam up into either competing horizontal segments or disparate vertical segments would only make the service worse for the consumer AND the publishers (maybe you could make stronger arguments for some segments than others maybe hardware and game development could be split off from the store with little impact, but I don’t see the benefit there).
If you break the store up into competing units… Then what? Eventually one beats out the others and we are right back to where we started. Or worse, an equilibrium is reached between a small handful creating an oligopoly, like we see in so many other industries today.
Instead, I would leave Steam mostly as a single entity, subject to regulation about how it conducts business. From pricing to what it does with user data, to making sure that quasi competitors like Amazon, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo are all able to have fair access to distribute their games on the platform too. Create a regulatory board in charge of effectively managing the monopoly.
This whole “just add more competition” has led to a dystopian capitalist hellscape. It doesn’t work for more than a couple decades before the government needs to step in anyways.