cttttt

I vaguely remember having on the order of 5mbps "broadband" when Steam worn me down enough for me to give it a shot over the alternatives 🙄. It was pretty bad at first, but it worked. But maybe broadband adoption was more of a thing in Canada back then.

Before Steam (esp. right before Steam) it was common for a disc to have nothing but a 100mb installer that attempted to download the game, or an actual game build so buggy that you were forced to download patches that required you to be online.

Prior to this, games came with serial numbers and needed to be activated online. This made reselling PC games no longer a thing as you needed to trust who you were buying the game from.

In both cases, the physical disc was yours, but it was pretty useless. It wasn't the game, but also was required to play the game.

Before that, we had truly resellable DRM: "Enter the 3rd word on the 20th page of the manual 🤣".

I think the answer was to introduce a law which would force digital market places to clearly describe what users are paying for, for folks who weren't around during the controversial time when Steam and Xbox Live Arcade came out and can't grasp the concept; folks who didn't observe the reality before and after this shift.

Even though it was abundantly clear already, this is what the California law is all about.

If, with this clear explanation, you still want to merely get a license to use games via a service, you should be able to do it.

Valve isn't doing anything wrong: far from it. Steam is awesome and I understand that one day, it could all go away and with it, all the games I have access to.

I also understand that, at any time, Valve may decide that they don't want me to use Steam anymore, or that someone may hack into my account and I won't have access anymore.

Finally, I get that even now, things that I could do with physical games; I can't do with my Steam library (eg. Easily play a game on my Steam Deck while someone also plays another game on my desktop, or sell a game disc that sits on my desk).

I understood this when I reluctantly signed up to Steam to play Half Life 2 back in the day when it was a complete dumpster fire of a buggy mess of a service. But it has improved so much since then.

Hey, do you, but I don't see what the big deal is. We've already protested that Steam was a bad idea, and Valve was literally the devil, but it's actually turned out to be objectively more convenient than any alternative to play games, and it's no longer Valve forcing us to install Steam to play their games. Practically the entire industry has shifted, plus there are now alternatives (besides piracy) like GoG. Hopefully this law causes more competition in that DRM free space.

Dev's gonna have to pull a Flappy Bird 💰💰💰

Don't get it twisted. We definitely agree.

This will effectively add any computer it's installed on to a botnet and create another attack vector (via Vanguard).

The tradeoff I described, tho, is one on the Riot side. And as much as this form of anticheat is ridiculous, it makes sense given Riot's business model. A bunch of cheaters can easily waste their money and engineering effort. They made the deliberate choice to narrow their market of potential players to those who are willing to install Vanguard and feel that Vanguard pushes most cheaters out of that narrow market. It makes sense.

Re: That tradeoff, tho, users aren't involved. The tradeoff users have is between installing the game or not.

And again we both agree, installing this to an important computer or on your home network carries a tonne of risk.

Not that I'm defending Vanguard, but Riot's choosing to invest in developer resources for Vanguard (and in finding cheat developers) so they don't have to invest in server capacity or developer resources to support cheater only lobbies.

As long as their anticheat is effective, every cheater they can repel is some amount of server capacity that legitimate players can use.

Also, cheaters in the types of games Riot makes will cause some amount of opponents to simply leave the game in frustration. So part of this is just trying to keep players who are willing to install the game happy.

They've chosen to make free to play games, so this tradeoff actually makes sense for Riot. But again, kernel level hacks aren't something everyone will or even should install.

It's all about tradeoffs.

Yah. Makes more sense for Valve to spend their time improving Proton or working on their reference handheld device. A reference desktop device is a solution looking for a problem.

They're completely different implementations of systems that steam video/audio/inputs.

Valve's is pretty buggy but has deep integration with Steam and allow NAT traversal, while Sunshine/Moonlight are way more reliable, have features that reduce latency but are pretty barebones as far as features: they just do streaming with no tight integration with what's being streamed.

And Sunshine is a reverse engineered version of Nvidia's game stream server, since Nvidia sunset Gamestream a few months ago.

If all computer hardware was a single solid colour and just worked, there would be fewer reasons to replace it or pay more for different models. It's like skins in an online game: if you give people a choice, some will pay more just because something looks different...some will buy yet another one because it, too looks different.

I've always found this take on in-product purchases and subscriptions weird.

You are right that they're allowed to do whatever they want, but...this is just my personal take...the value proposition for Nitro is pretty low as it is. Trying to get more than a subscription from me is a bit of a turn off and makes me want to reach for the cancel subscription button (actually, my subscription is currently in this state through to the renewal date because of the nags about paid borders and stuff).

I do this with this and also other services that want to upsell beyond a premium or support the platform experience. If I'm already supporting the platform, the first time I'm asked to support it more is when I cancel the subscription. Then they have the uphill battle of convincing me to resubscribe in the future.

Stated differently, if they don't remind me I'm subscribed, I'd just keep paying. If they remind me by asking me to pay for things over and above a subscription, I'm suddenly trying to find the true value of the new thing, and also in the next subscription payment. If I can't decide within a few minutes, I always just hit cancel.

You're not alone. Especially over the past few months, fonts on mobile seemed slightly off. The new design looks way better in comparison as the typography is consistent across the entire app.

I dunno. Just speculation (here's a grain of salt but) people may be sick of Nitro because of all the features that Nitro users are asked to pay more for. It's weird to remind people who are paying a subscription for an app that there's a store where they can pay more for stuff.

It's weird how I didn't really care about the pinhole camera or my Pixel 5 weird dimensions until Ambient Mode started highlighting it. When ambient mode shipped (silently), I seriously thought I forgot that the aspect ratio wasn't 16:9 and the pinhole was so visible all these years. Turns out the bars hid these distractions.

The feature looks great on Desktop, but on mobile, I kinda prefer the bars actually hiding the edges of the screen, esp in fullscreen mode in a darker room.

It's cool that you can just turn it off, and hopefully, in the future, they let you toggle the feature in fullscreen and portrait mode separately.