MudMan

A bit more than exit polls now. The official fast count gives him more than half of the overall vote, so that should be it.

Nope, they’re nearly identical. The yellow and blue are ever so slightly different, but… yeah, the bad part about that tweet wasn’t the flags.

The flags were the funny part, though.

Not even a little bit. And posting “I am the new president of Chad” is absolutely fricking hilarious and extremely on brand.

It is also horrifying and chilling in light of the actual results, because you know he’s following the MAGA playbook and depending on how close the diaspora made him look in the end he was hoping for a version of the US capitol raid.

But if I’m going to have an opinion about this tweet it’s going to be about that, not the flag thing, for obvious reasons.

I don’t think so, that’d be Moldova 🇲🇩, about which he seems to have… eh… interesting ideas.

It’s a popular set of colors. And that’s before you get into 🇧🇪.

To be clear, these are the two emojis in question:

🇷🇴 🇹🇩

I mean, when you’re running for president you should probably double check, but… you know, he’s done far worse today.

Would have confused it with Moldova instead, I suppose.

But yeah, of the MANY things I can throw at this guy, confusing 🇷🇴 with 🇹🇩 when tapping it on your phone is not it.

Mostly because I’m pretty sure I’ve done it myself more than once.

I wonder if shapeshifters would struggle with profile shots since they mostly see themselves head-on.

Two hours refining the eye size, then turning around to find your nose is twice the length it should be and your cheekbones are concave, somehow.

Well, for one thing the “GoG doesn’t support Linux” narrative runs strong (I believe it made at least one appearance in this thread), so there is that.

For another, GoG doesn’t get the same hate for the same reason in Sega vs Nintendo the Turbografx or the Neo Geo didn’t get the same hate. They are simply not in the same race.

Ubisoft’s platform does get the hate, though. And EA’s. And Acti/Blizzard’s. And Microsoft’s. Gamers love a good narrative, though, so EGS took over when Origin stopped being the bad guy du jour. Ubi had a brief period in the spotlight, though.

So after some soul searching I’m going to say I absolutely don’t have a rage boner for Steam (considering my Steam library is in the thousands and I own both iterations of the Steam Deck and a Vive that’d be a very confused boner anyway).

I don’t know that anybody is, and that’s concerning, no matter how satisfied with Steam’s service people are.

I’d prefer GOG to climb the ranks, but since I also wouldn’t want them to abandon the DRM-free mandate, I don’t see that happening, either.

I had managed to keep myself entertained this morning and not fret about this but… yeah, nope, there you are, anxiety, I guess you didn’t go far.

Here’s hoping that a bunch of Romanians woke up a little. With how low participation typically is people could figure this out if they could get over their whole “politicians are just thieves” deal for five minutes for anything but supporting Russian nazis.

I’m gonna go see if I can get myself distracted again. Good luck to everybody voting today.

I’m not “defending” anybody. I’m not taking sides at all. The only reason I even jump into these is that the absolutely cult-like zeal grown-ass men deploy in defending large corporations over each other is both some Sega-vs-Nintendo console war crap I wish we could get over and not particularly good if you want a PC market not dominated by a single player.

I don’t know what percentage of the Epic Store’s funding goes to feature work versus other areas. I can guess Epic is investing very heavily on content, and I can guess that’s because it’d be really hard to meet Steam on content when every developer of any size is effectively forced to be on Steam first and everything else if and when. I don’t know how much funding that leaves for client development.

Like I said, I’d probably have refocused on client features a bit further, but I’ll also acknowledge they probably wouldn’t see that much tangible return from that investment, given that Steam fanboys already don’t give them enough credit for the very noticeable improvements they’ve actually made and they have no effective means to run PR against Steam.

Hell, if you look at it objectively they’d probably be better off focusing on their legal fights with Apple and Google and on having a decent mobile client, which Steam very much doesn’t. Maybe there’s a path forward there. I don’t have enough of an inside view to know.

Not really how that works, though.

To be clear, I’d agree that the prioritization by a bunch of competitors has been wonky, but Steam ONLY does client. They are a very lean company that actively builds stuff to be hands-off and has stepped away from focusing heavily on game development for a while.

Could Epic invest more heavily in their client as opposed to spending all that money on giving away free games and acquiring content? I bet. I also bet if they looked at GoG building a whole interoperable client and getting nothing in return or some of the work EA wasted on their version (twice!) for also nothing in return, then prioritizing redundant features that Microsoft provides at the OS level seems like a worse investment. Particularly when the store loses money and they could be spending that on Fortnite content or Unreal features or whatever else.

Steam is a weird outlier in that their ultimate goal has been to ditch Windows/MS for a while, so their whole consolized controller-based UI, the controller layer, the background recording, the overengineered chat all make sense in the context of SteamOS having been in development for a decade. For everybody else it’s a leap of faith.

Do I think it would have been a better choice for Epic? If it was up to me I’d have given it a shot, I think. But let me be clear: I’d have done that in the understanding that the minute you match a Steam feature the cult of Gaben shall move on to a different shortcoming as the justification for their adhesion. When Steam was behind on their refund policy nobody raged against them and nobody stopped raging against EA Origin depite offering no-questions-asked refunds. Now you hear about it as a differentiator. When Epic didn’t have a perisistent shopping cart that was the dealbreaker for a while, when they implemented it’s their store design or the library paging or whatever. Nobody complains about games only being available on Steam when they aren’t elsewhere, but Epic exclusives are a travesty. This is not about the feature set or policy.

But starting to match the feature set at least would take a talking point off the table and offer a selling point.

Did I give your trolly post way too much credit and took it too seriously? Yes. Is that an apt metaphor for this entire conversation? Absolutely.

Yep. As I understand it it’s via affiliate links, so if you buy GOG games through the storefront in the Heroic UI they get a small cut, but the Heroic devs say they have spoken to GOG reps and they are broadly supportive, so unless that changes I don’t think their ability to support GOG features would be compromised any time soon.

Gog, then? Itch? I’m not even going to try with Microsoft or the publisher stores because people were so mad at them they effectively killed them.

Turns out nobody is competitive in any way against Steam, which seems to be the whole problem of lacking competition and having a single player dominating a market.

While I’d like to see more advanced features in other launchers (or, ideally, at the OS level in both Windows and Linux), I don’t think it’s realistic to expect new competitors to get to that level of support with 80% of the market fossilized around Steam.

They have a twenty year head start and a ridiculously dominant position. You’re not going to get a proprietary controller translation layer or a full on video capture software right off the bat. It makes sense to focus investment on getting content first, since Steam gets all content by default by having an iron grip on the marketplace, and for business reasons other launchers prioritize multiplayer features first.

I don’t root for any rich guy over another, but I do think competition is the best way you’re going to keep them in check for a commodity market with little regulation, at least.

On that front the cultish adoration of Newell and all the actively rooting for a Steam PC gaming monopoly is… worrying.

So I learned recently that GOG actively funds Heroic. Which really takes some weight off of Heroic’s support for GOG game autopatching and cloud saves, meaning it may be a bit hacky and officially in “beta”, but it’s very unlikely for GOG to object to its presence.

They may not “officially” support Linux, but they don’t “explicitly” lack support.

Also, tip of the hat to Heroic, it works extremely well and very reliably. I was frustrated with Lutris and I am bummed out by how Galaxy didn’t quite get there as the one universal support launcher to handle all your libraries, but Heroic is good enough as a replacement I don’t mind nearly as much anymore. Even on Windows I’d consider it over Galaxy.

I’m inclined to agree. I mean, this case is a bit different, in that it’s a person that supposedly could have done this properly taking a bad shortcut. But still, don’t take shortcuts on money stuff. That’s kind of on you (and what you get for cryptobroing anyway).

That’s not to say it isn’t impressive how helpful machine generation can be for trivial tasks where there’s no security risk or a huge stack of dependencies. It’s not even a bad way to learn to do it yourself if you are at that point where you can sort of know what you need to do but struggle to implement it.

It’s weird to be in the agnostic region of this stuff because there’s a bunch of garbage applications being incorrectly used or implemented I’d happily discuss, but I’m not ready to make cultish hatred for machine generated content a significant part of my personality.

But hey, Google has managed to make its spellchecker unlearn the difference between “its” and “it’s”, I suspect by plugging it into a language model. I’m not here to say it’s all good.

Oh, this I like, because I assumed some of this was universally known, but maybe you have to be a bit of a specifically focused nerd.

So for question 1… well, what’s the point of doing the work as an individual? The software that comes out of the other end is still free and open source, so people can still get it freely and modify it however they want. And if you have a successful org you may be able to actually pay and hire devs and grow as a company does without requiring constant growth or prioritizing a sellout.

To question number 2… because having standards is good and you still get a bunch of benefits from free alternatives existing. You’d have to ask the specific corporate sponsors, but it’s pretty clear why Epic would benefit from a free 3D modelling suite people can use to make Unreal Engine content without them having to build and maintain it. Likewise for Nvidia, which will happily sell you the render processing power for your 3D movie project without having to also give you the tools (or share your budget with a paid software alternative). Other sponsors benefit by selling stuff for use with Blender. 3D scanners, plugins, assets… lots of side markets where people can benefit from everbody having access to the toolset. People who sell tutorials. People who make games and have some budget they’d rather spend here than licensing a hundred seats of paid software…

There are tons of tangible benefits from having a powerful, effective open tool for key tasks that aren’t taken advantage of because commerical competitiveness prevents mutual benefit in a bunch of situations. Do you think every artist that is stuck hating Adobe but having to use Photoshop wouldn’t prefer having a free, open alternative to the same quality level? And they’d all be more than capable of financing one with a fraction of the cost of PS, I’m sure. It’s just hard to coordinate and justify that level of support when your benefits aren’t hard revenue pouring in. There are more examples, too. Smart home hardware sellers really DO like Home Assistant providing an inexpensive option for people to plug their devices to without having to pay Google and Apple for the privilege or having to develop an alternative in-house.

The best thing that could happen to open software would be for that pipeline from an obnoxiously overmonized task with no alternatives to a self-sufficient, non-profit-driven open alternative to get refined and standardized. I have very little belief in one-off devs working for nothing and a lot of hope for organizations capable of paying people for their work without having to endlessly prioritize revenue and growth.

I really do like OSS, but I have to say this train of thought isn’t particularly helpful. Especially in professional and prosumer software that just doesn’t cut it. If the free version is worse, then it’s not the version you want to use. The end reseult ends up being that cheaper but proprietary software like Affinity’s suite or DaVinci Resolve catch up, become dominant and the cycle of enshittification starts anew.

Instead of naively making disingenuous arguments about existing alternatives I’d be more concerned with figuring out ways of getting OSS to keep up with the joneses. I’m often less excited about a solo dev doing “freeway out of the kindness of his heart” and more interested in seeing OSS software gather around a foundation scheme with some corporate sponsors, Blender-style