TBH if you didn’t want hostile people that know the planet better than you manipulating sandworm aggro to kill you, why did you install a Dune survival MMO

That’s like, the main form of factional interaction in Dune

I mean, this article was spawned by The Alters, which had a bad machine translation segment (a thing since long before we called it AI) and… Some lorem ipsum in a background texture.

It’s already in every game in the background. Do you think paid graphic designers are instructed not to use the AI features built into Photoshop/Illustrator?

The guy who used ai to make some technobabble lipsum for an asset was an artist hired by the company. You can see a huge list of the artists that worked on The Alters in the credits. They all got paid. This artist would take home the same wage for typing “gshsjajfkfksiwn” in that asset, or copy and pasting some numbers that were in a readout from a space telescope, or literally using lorem ipsum. If we’re really micromanaging every art shortcut as “potential pay to hire more artists” now, why not start counting how many rock/plant/sky/water textures and models in The Alters (or FF7 Rebirth, or literally any UE5 game) are pre-baked assets included with the UE5 license? Game devs actually use those instead of billable hours / salaried hires.

The translation flub is the only part that mattered here. The Alters was getting a ton of praise and good press for its story, characters, mocap, VA, mechanics, visuals, you name it. Finding out that someone used GPT for some glorified lorem ipsum to paste on a random background object doesn’t change the quality one iota. The art team for this game was paid and hired and they did a phenomenal job with the game, but one of those paid artists took a shortcut for some assets. It’s not a “the ayy eye is letting corpo CEOs skip out on paying real human artists!!!” situation here.

Do you know what else paid artists / game studios do other than pay a human to create an asset from scratch? They buy models and textures on the Unreal/etc asset store. The same exact boulder model is present in everything from ffviiR to Clair Obscur to Death Stranding, because it comes free with the engine and is “good enough” just like an AI generated rock texture would be.

Ever hire a professional photo editor? They’re using generative AI. Every last one of them. They’ve been doing it for like 15 years ever since Adobe introduced “content-aware fill” algorithms that generate backgrounds to replace random bystanders or objects in a shot. Is the scary robot stealing someone’s job and burning the planet there too?

However, using machine translation without even a proofreading pass is hilarious. Using a conversational model for translation is double hilarious. Surely purpose-built translation tools exist and are more efficient than “asking” chatGPT to “translate this line into Brazilian Portuguese”.

A second device on site is still infinitely more resilient than just letting it rock. Most use cases where a backup would help can be covered by an occasional one way sync or scheduled copy to a USB drive. Offsite is for catastrophes like your home burning down or flooding.

you’re not particularly worried about “someone”, you’re worried about bots that are scanning IP ranges and especially default ports. A lot of people will install a program, not really understand what it does, and forward a port because the setup told them to. Then proceed to never update the program (or it’s a poorly secured program in the first place).

if they got in…

You’re trusting Jellyfin to not have some form of privilege escalation attack available. I’m not saying they do have one or that anyone’s exploiting it in the field, but yeah. Also if your Jellyfin admin account is allowed to download subtitles to content folders, a “just fuck shit up” style vandal-hacker could delete your media probably. If you mount the media read-only that wouldn’t be a concern.

Do note that without that layer you were using Pangolin for, your system might be compromised by a vulnerability in Jellyfin’s server or a brute force attack on your Jellyfin admin account.

Everyone I know that actually keeps backups has the same kind of story. It’s sad that no matter how many other people talk about keeping backups, it always takes a tragic loss like this to get people to buy hardware/subscriptions.

I settled on Tubesync. Pinchflat mysteriously stopped downloading new vids from a playlist I had it monitor. Surely I could have fixed it by checking logs or whatever but Tubesync has the exact same feature list and no downsides, so I just killed my pinchflat container and spun up tubesync.

Can “your apps” access it when their device isn’t on your home LAN?

LibreWolf: every time it’s forced to pick between privacy and convenience it picks privacy. If you like that, it’s the browser for you.

Waterfox: if you just want Firefox with zero ability to send any data to Mozilla, without necessarily “hardening” anti-fingerprinting features, this is that. It’s a downstream fork that removes all telemetry and non-local features (it removed Pocket before Mozilla did).

Yeah, there’s less reason than ever before to play something like Stardew or Isaac or Hades on the Nintendo box where your save file is hostage to their system and you’ll never be able to use mods and the developers have to outsource the patches to a third party so the game’s always a couple months behind on the new features…

When the Switch 1 came out it was also the only console that had the “half-handheld” form factor. A lot of indie games like Isaac, Hades, and Slay the Spire got PC gamers like me to double dip (or in Hades’ case, actually choose Switch over Steam) for the gameboy factor. The Switch (2) is no longer unique in that regard. I haven’t touched my Switch 1 for anything but exclusives since the Steam Deck came out.

In 2025, a company that is just looking to make a shitload of money is enough to automatically “win”.

Valve: “What are you selling?” Video games, video game hardware without vendor lock-in, and in-app purchases. “Who are you selling it to?” PC gamers.

Literally everyone else in the space except for Itch, which is decidedly focused on too-indie-for-indie games and is small enough to be acquired if it ever gets popular: “What are you selling?” The promise that we’ll make more profit next year than this year. “Who are you selling it to?” Shareholders or a corp that’ll buy the whole company.

It’s an absolute no-brainer. Until anyone else can answer these questions in the same way Valve does, Valve is automatically the best player in the space. Even if another store sells games for cheaper, or has exclusives, or bans DRM, or manages to make a better storefront program, or pays developers a bigger cut. I’m not on some “good guy Gabe” circlejerk shit. There’s no morals to ascribe here. Valve makes enough money and is okay with making enough money, forever. MS, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, Nintendo, Sony, CDPR, Apple, Amazon, ActiBlizz, and every other storefront operator will be considered a failure if they don’t make “more more money than last year” every year forever. I know which platform I want to maintain a library on. I’ll happily use GOG and Itch to buy DRM-free installers though, those will outlast any enshittification the platform does in the future.

If there weren’t enough people put off by Origin and uPlay to not install them or use them to buy games, Origin and uPlay would still exist. Steam didn’t kill them, all it did was exist and be a better platform that people actually wanted to use. There’s a whole graveyard of companies that tried to make “our own Steam”. Fucking Discord tried to do it. What’s that going to do for a marketplace where you’re selling “licenses” to users? What good’s your licensed copy of Fallout New Vegas on Amazon Prime Games Launcher when that launcher no longer exists? Say what you will about Steam, most people are pretty confident it’ll still be around in eight years.

If there weren’t enough people put off by the Epic Games Store, the EGS wouldn’t still be paying developers to put their shit on the store. Steam hasn’t killed it, and isn’t even attempting to kill it. It’s just existing and being a better platform that people actually want to use. If EGS can’t compete with Steam while giving shit away for free, that’s not a “Steam monopoly” it’s an indicator of how dogshit the opinion of Epic as a corporation and storefront is.

Origin failed because nobody wanted it. uPlay failed because nobody wanted it. The perks (being able to buy exclusives) weren’t worth the downsides (literally just making another account and installing another program on your computer). I think that’s beautiful. I hope it happens to Epic next.

Steam’s existence as an IPO/enshittification-proof platform has prevented the PC gaming storefront market from going the way of Netflix. Remember that? We had cable channels, pay-per-views, piracy, and VHS/DVDs/blu-rays as the only way to watch movies at home. Then a Blockbuster-over-mail company started getting licenses to let you pay to watch movies at home with one subscription, which was a massive success. Then every other IP holder went “hey wait, why are we paying Netflix when we could just eat the whole pie ourselves” and now we have Netflix Disney+ Max Peacock AppleTV+ Amazon Prime Video Fandango Paramount+ AMC+ Philo Hulu Tubi Fubo Dippy Weeno Poob all trying to be the new Netflix. And because Netflix itself is a shareholder-value-driven company, it’s putting ads in its paid product and jacking up prices and paying for exclusivity.

Y’know what people do seem to like? Microsoft Gamepass. I’ll never install it myself, same reason I’ll never install the Epic Games Store. But Microsoft is using an even less consumer friendly strategy (timed access to games with a subscription) to propose the same “upsides” as EGS (you don’t have to pay full price for games).

For me, it failed because I wasn’t willing to install some shareholder-driven company’s storefront app on my computer just to play Mass Effect 3, so I pirated Mass Effect 3. Then I got to watch it fail because it turns out I wasn’t the only one willing to skip/pirate games because they came with Origin attached to them.

Epic’s exclusives are the exact same.

I get my PC games from five sources. Steam, GOG’s website, Itch’s website, standalone launchers (I’d probably be okay with a “store” of games as small as the Riot launcher, but I don’t use that because I don’t install rootkit anticheat), and piracy. Launcherless Itch and GOG have convenience parity with piracy with the added benefit of the devs getting paid (and the ease of acquiring updates), and I’ll usually use them over Steam if available. Itch could easily get bought by a corp like Humble did and CDPR is already a shareholder value company, but they sell DRM-free products that I can use even after the stores die / sell out.

A recent launch I paid for and didn’t use Steam for is “The Bazaar” - it has a standalone launcher. The game went pay to win so I uninstalled it, but its lack of presence on Steam didn’t keep me from playing it.

I’ll use stuff other than Steam no problem. But I’ll always cheer when a platform owned and operated by a shareholder backed company dies in favor of one that isn’t. My experience in the hobby space of PC gaming is better when there aren’t exclusives locked on EA Origin or UPlay or Microsoft UWP store or Epic, because I might want to play those games without installing a stock-ticker company’s adware on my computer. Having the space “capitalism free” is unrealistic, unless we’re talking “pirate everything”. I’ll settle for “profit driven” over “YOY growth driven” leaders in the space any day of the week.

Now, if Steam’s position as the best distributor/launcher platform is a de facto “monopoly”, what’s the solution to that? Anecdotally I know plenty of people that play non-Steam games while not playing any Epic games. Epic tries to fight Steam by directly paying developers to not publish on Steam, and also effectively guaranteeing studios a financial success by cutting a deal to put their game up for “free” on the Epic storefront. Plenty of games have been “Free” on Epic while full price on Steam. Valve tries to fight Epic by… Acting like Epic doesn’t exist. They don’t chase exclusives or get into a price war with Epic.

Steam is the most popular platform for PC game releases. A subset of users will not consider ever using other platforms. If we accept this as the definition of “monopoly” the way we’d say Windows has a monopoly on x64 PCs, how would changing the revenue split for devs (which appears to be the issue this company’s suing Valve over) alleviate this “monopoly”? Sounds to me like forcing Steam to explicitly allow “the game is more expensive on Steam” tactics would just make Steam even more of a no-brainer for devs over stuff like Epic or their own platform.

You could say that paying the devs/studios a better cut is the point, and I’d see the validity in the argument. But it’s completely unrelated to whether or not Valve operates as a monopoly.

Ah yes. Massively unsuccessful games like… checks notes League of Legends. World of Warcraft. Fortnite: Battle Royale.

The magic part of the PC is that if your independently distributed game does fail, you can still, after the fact, decide to slap it on someone’s storefront in a desperate attempt for eyeballs - see Overwatch 2. Why not double dip? It only costs you hypothetical money you haven’t made yet. Am I supposed to be sad that E fucking A failed to install their shareholder value store on my computer?

Valve will never IPO, yes! I don’t care why. That automatically makes it better than any other launcher/storefront platform that’ll exist in my lifetime, barring one that commits to staying private, succeeds as a private company, and is content with “staying profitable” for x years. Platforms that IPO universally get worse and worse as they wring every drop of shareholder value from their users to feed the infinite growth machine. We’re having this conversation on Lemmy instead of on Reddit for presumably this reason. Platforms that have shareholders (which includes Epic and CDPR’s GOG) have a primary motive of “being more profitable than last year”. If, let’s say, Epic made ten billion dollars in profit last year but also made ten billion dollars in profit in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, it’d be a failed company.

I’ll happily take the only company in the PC gaming space that’s content with one money printer over every other option that’s always thinking about how to make a second one, or reduce the ink costs, or blah blah blah. It’s just a happy coincidence that in the PC gaming space (unlike pretty much every other space), the shareholder-free thing is also the most popular, and best thing. I’d use the worse less-popular thing if that thing were the only thing free from growth capitalism.

If a game dev doesn’t value their presence on the Steam store higher than the cost of Steam’s service, they don’t list on Steam. Simple as. It’s just that a lot of dev studios consider “visible on the Steam store” to be very valuable indeed. That’s what they’re paying for, not the stuff about Steam that benefits the user (client features like Input, Workshop, Cloud, Community, etc).

CDPR judges that selling on Steam is enough of a boost that it’s worth the cost. Riot (for example) doesn’t. If you think every game company or indie studio feels mandated to use Steam, that’s a hugely consolebrained take. Nintendo has a monopoly. Want your game on Switch? Follow Nintendo’s terms and list on Nintendo’s store. Apple has a monopoly, challenged recently. Want your app on iPhone? Follow Apple’s terms and list on Apple’s store. Want your game on Windows PC? Upload an EXE somewhere. Sell a disc. Run your own launcher. Or license out to Steam/Epic/whoever.

The only reason you get more sales on Steam is because the PC gaming userbase overwhelmingly prefers Steam. Hell, I play Guild Wars 2, a 12 year old MMO that “launched” on Steam a couple years ago. You can still buy and play that game without any third parties getting involved at all, and always could. It doesn’t have any Steam achievements, doesn’t benefit from any Steam features, and has a decade old community in spaces other than Steam ones. ArenaNet decided that exposure via Steam recommendations was worth losing $x/player to list on Steam.

If Steam had an exclusivity clause, that’d be another matter entirely. As it stands, listing on Steam doesn’t prevent you from also listing your game elsewhere or bypassing the entire storefront middleman scheme.