If your predecessor beat the guy by using platform A, it stands to reason that a pretty safe campaign strategy is to not deviate from platform A very much.

I have a password manager with a family plan so my wife can use it. Does she? Absolutely not. And that’s why we don’t share bank accounts.

Do you often hear whooshing sounds?

How about a 750ml bottle? Weighted with some sort of liquid, of course, so it goes all the way down. They’re pretty high up too, so you’ll probably have to lob it in. You’ll with a handle of some sort, maybe made of fabric, so you can get a nice lob throw and land it right in the stack.

You’re supposed to know what you’re talking about before commenting, yes. Otherwise people will point out you’re wrong.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

You had an out of date pc five years ago and you want to know why the same pc runs bad today?

It’s time for an upgrayedd my friend.

The easiest way for a manager to justify a raise is to increase the headcount under them.

I got one of these calls last week. I told them for $10m they could have it. We haggle for a bit but they weren’t willing to even meet me half way.

I don’t like Kevin Costner.

I think we’re talking past each other. By ‘popular’ I do not mean ‘well liked’. Just that it was used by a lot of people. 2004, in my opinion, was when steam took off and the downloading updates from random websites phase of pc gaming died. There was a transition, to be sure, but the writing was on the wall. We just didn’t know it at the time.

We can argue all day over when steam “got popular”. For me, I’d consider the launch of HL2 to be the most reasonable point in time to choose.

I think I just have responded to the wrong comment. My bad.

That’s a valid opinion. It’s not one I share but if you preferred that situation then that’s fine. I feel pretty confident saying you are in a pretty small minority though.

-edit I just realized what you said and if it’s true that you did most of your pc gaming before steam got popular, you may be out of your depth in this conversation. It’s been like 20 years. If you did most of your pc gaming more than 20 years ago, I don’t see how your opinion is informed at all.

No, the problem steam was originally created to solve was distributing updates for pc games. Before steam getting updates meant visiting shitty dev websites or ad farms that also hosted update files and manually patching your game.

It was awful.

Again, you are very naive. What you’re describe is cost-up pricing which hasn’t been a generally used method of pricing goods and services for decades at this point. The reason is that doing cost-up pricing is a really good way to go out of business.

The way pricing works today is that sellers set pricing based on what they believe the customer is willing to pay. From there you work backwards accounting for retailer margin, cost of goods, transport, discounts, etc… To find your maximum cost per unit. If you can’t produce the product for less than the maximum cost, you either need to scale back your features, add a feature that would justify a higher sell price, or abandon the project.

Your notion that companies would lower prices if they had to give retailers a small cut is not borne out by theory or by observed real world outcomes.

You’re wrong. Doubling down won’t make you less wrong.

Bullshit. Games on steam that hit sales thresholds pay less to steam and the prices remain the same. Games on EGS only pay 12% and prices haven’t dropped.

Reality does not comport with your argument at all.

I’ve been in product development and management for 10+ years. I know how pricing decisions are made. You’re very naive.

Literally all pricing is set by the devs and publishers. The guy you’re responding to has no idea what he’s talking about. The Steam store terms of service are public and easily available to read through. I know, I’ve done it. The only pricing requirement they have is keys sold off store can’t be significantly discounted under the store price. That’s it.

Valve doesn’t set the prices for any of the products you buy through their store. The game developers and publishers do.

The exception is valve developed games which are mostly free to play and make money on useless cosmetics. Most of their successful games are built on mods that are only possible because valve takes the very consumer friendly position of supporting and encouraging modding of their games.

Hell, they even allow and promote fan made remakes like Black Mesa and unofficial sequels.

If valve is a monopoly, it’s only because they’re the only corporation in the pc gaming space (OK maybe include gog too) that respects their customers. They’re not perfect but they’re orders of magnitude better than the competition.

Yeah, I’ve been using a Google coral to identify people, cars, animals, etc in my security camera feeds for years now.

The US has so much red on its ledger it will never be balanced. And there are plenty of apologists for atrocities in our history. They’re just as bad as the Chinese or Russian (or pick whatever country you want because they’re all guilty to some extent) when they do it.