wizardbeard

Sounds like a good case for brute forcing the filenames. Just do the proper thing and don't leave your cloud storage publicly accessible.

I don't like subscription based software, and a subscription based game launcher is even more ridiculous. Especially when there are already free open source alternatives.

With the subscription aspect in mind, this reads to me like an advertisement rather than news. Probably because you just pasted in their literal ad copy instead of giving us any of your own thoughts about it whatsoever.

A big part of why I'm on lemmy is to get away from the "natural engagement" ad posts, so in short this sort of post isn't something I want to welcome or encourage.

Personally, this post would have come across a lot differently if it was just the link to their site/blog post and even a few sentences about your personal thoughts on it. This comes across as a poorly done ad.

You didn't "just share news". You just shared an ad with effectively no further context.

They have a deal with Google to allow them to index it. As long as Google stays on top reddit will still be searchable for the majority of people.

The Christian Bible considers rape to be a property crime.

Got any specific verses to cite for this? It's brought up often enough, but I've rarely if ever seen the source. I have a strong feeling that's from the old testament, of which many Christians ignore the "laws" due to the events of the new testament.

Promise I'm not trying to sealion here. It's just that these are big claims that I've not seen reflected first hand in my 30 plus years in and out of Christianity.

I'm also going to softly remind everyone that the old testament writings are also foundational to Jewish faith and Islamic faith, which is consistently left out of most of these discussions of the ills of religion.

Edit: So sealioning and whataboutism, I'm on a roll!

One of my favorite stories to embarass my wife is about how I lent her a book after our second date. Dirk Gently, after I saw Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on her shelf.

A decade later she still hasn't gotten more than two chapters into it. At this point she says she can't break her streak. Says that wanting my book back has kept me around this long and she's not about to ruin a good thing.

We'll gloss over all the other books I've bought her that I end up reading first.

Some additional context to my previous comment: I work tech in the financial industry. I have some experience with payment processors and the stupid amount of bullshit around all this stuff. "They could do both of these things almost instantly" is a big assumption holding the entirety of the weight for your argument.

Anyway.

50 Cent was doing a one off publicity stunt, not trying to ensure continued existence as a company. How many mainstream artists are still doing that? I shouldn't have to say that this is very much an apples and oranges comparison.

Your other idea has legs, but it's still suggesting that Valve try entering a game of financial chicken with Visa and Mastercard. Effectively infinite money. And in the meantime most users would just be pissed off at Valve for making it harder to buy anything. We're already seeing people attack itch.io for not standing up instead of bei g pissed at the payment processors.

Valve can't make purchasing through a different processor a requirement for some games but not others because Visa and Mastercard said "stop selling games with this content entirely, or we stop processing your transactions entirely". So anything they do will have to effect all transactions.

I'm frustrated Valve didn't do more, and that they've not made any public statements about trying to fight this, but Valve isn't just leaving money on the table because they're lazy or dumb.

Changing payment processors/engaging a new one is anything but a short term thing to implement. Otherwise Mastercard and Visa wouldn't be in this situation to have this level of control to begin with.

"your cool friend who's fun to be with"

I see you, sneaking in a little hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy reference.

You can configure loot respawns when setting up the server I believe. It's an option in single player at least. Not perfect, but it's something.

Maybe the "use it for free off someone else's hardware" ones are, but why would you want to trust those with your sad NSFW RP? They make their money by harvesting all that data.

You can self host all of that stuff now, if you truly must.

This restated question is not the problem directly.

The problem is the entire discussion/concept of "exposure to a dangerous idea in a pretend context maybe might maybe make someone more likely to emulate it in reality" when there has been little to no evidence found supporting that concept. Additionally the non-proportional amount of concern given to videogames in relationship to this concept as compared to literally any other form of media.

If there was even one iota of connection between "exposure to horrible things in media" (or even "pretending to do horrible things in a pretend context") and "doing horrible things in real life", the world would already look considerably different than it does. Militaries would be using these games as "exposure therapy" for soldiers. We'd be seeing crime rates of all sorts shifting in accordance with the media industries. There would already be measurable impacts after the decades of these things existing.

And more so than any of that: This discussion has literally been happening for longer than any of us here have been alive. I'm tired of having it.

Please stop letting the vague idea of "but it might help" override the logic of "but there's no evidence to support that except a vague gut feeling".

Tell me again how you've not actually read up on the issues with crypto as payment processor.

This shit has already been tried and the issues discussed at length. I think it was Mullvad that stopped accepting BTC and did an extensive writeup on why.

In short: the constantly shifting conversion rates make this unsustainable, as even if they accepted payment in crypto, they have to pay their bills in fiat currency. So their choices are to have crypto prices change literally every page load to reflect the exchange rate, or to just eat extra costs when suddenly 0.51btc goes from being worth $5 when the user pays to being worth $1 when they try to use it for anything else. Even with constantly updating prices, the shifting rates screwing them will still happen. The costs associated with even offering it as a payment type outweigh the actual revenue generated by an extreme order of magnitude, and even privacy/crypto oriented storefronts see something like under 1% of users using the option when it's available.

And that's my understanding of the short version.

There's a big difference between "prioritizing short term profit" and "committing commercial/financial suicide to make a point".