Tipping is ingrained into our basic economic culture. Restaurant staff (waiters and waitresses in particular) make 80%+ of their money through tips. Federal minimum wage is about $7.25 USD, and almost no states have a minimum wage that low (some places it’s easily double that), but it’s completely legal to pay wait staff $2.25 an hour and expect them to make up the difference to $15-20 per hour in tips almost anywhere. A standard “good” tip at a restaurant is 20%. Even going to a grocery store you’ll often see a tip jar on the counter that people toss their spare change into. Outside of restaurants, no other job is completely dependent on tips to live, but in many service industries it’s still customary to tip as a way to show appreciation for a service rendered (especially if they go above and beyond).

I forgot about the whole MSI furry arc

I didn’t mean that Ubisoft’s was better than Steam - just better than Epic’s store when comparing both against Steam. I hated the uPlay store as much as everyone else.

As for your question, once you have feature parity, it becomes about finding a niche. GoG has its list of old games and lack DRM going for it, for example. Nobody is going to pull large groups of people from Steam immediately without some major draw, obviously, but if you offer a similar service that doesn’t exclude people on other platforms like Steam from playing games with people on your own platform, then people will be drawn to whichever they like better.

The big reason I think we don’t see any real competition for Steam is that the companies with the funding to do so all wanted to force a piece of the pie rather than actually compete with Steam on quality of service. If EA, Ubisoft, and Epic had tried that, we would probably have a much more diverse ecosystem of storefronts - especially with crossplay becoming common. As it stands, Steam’s biggest competitors are the consoles, and that’s largely down to hardware preference rather than storefront/launcher preference.

Steam has so much impetus now that competing with them is very difficult, but as I saw somebody else in here say, if Epic had done something like offer their lower take from devs on sales at the agreement of a 5% lower price on their platform instead of spending all that money on forced exclusivity, people would have a real reason to go there instead of Steam (if the quality of service were comparable).

A. The technological landscape is very different today than it was 21 years ago. Many other companies have launched a better copy of Steam - including Ubisoft themselves. People didn’t like when Ubisoft and EA did it because they tried forced exclusivity, like Epic, and couldn’t offer anything beyond their own games. And you couldn’t even sync friends between the 3, needlessly splitting your friends between different platforms. GoG has been doing fine for years now.

B. Maybe if Epic had provided basic stuff like a shopping cart - you know, a basic feature that you can find on any webhost service’s website maker - instead of paying companies for forced exclusivity, maybe people would’ve been more willing to give it a chance.

Forced exclusivity put them on a bad start. The lack of basic features that were standardized for online storefronts 25 years ago killed any chance they had to gain any kind of traction. And the series of bad decisions following guaranteed that they never would have a good reputation. Remember when they had a sale on unreleased games without asking the devs of those games?

I wish I had the source on hand, but you’ll just have to trust my word - after all, 47% of the time, it’s right 100% of the time!

Joking aside, I do wish I had the link to the study as it was cited in an article from earlier this year about AI making stuff up even when it cited sources (literally lying about what was in the sources it claimed it got the info from) and how the companies behind these AI collectively shrugged their shoulders and said “there’s nothing we can do about it” when asked what they intend to do about these “hallucinations,” as they call them.

This kind of stuff used to be really funny on old Tumblr because you’d find these hyper-niche arguments between a bunch of drunk biologists in the middle of scrolling through the vast sea of porn. 2 posts down would be furry porn followed by a 1,000 word Obama x Dr. Who fanfic or some shit.

I wouldn’t say that he’s a well-known queer icon, but well-known enough that there’s been an enduring myth that the early Apple icon was a reference to him - the apple with a bite taken out of it and colored like a rainbow. However, the designers have said that they had no idea at the time and it was purely coincidence.

I’m getting flashbacks to Tumblr’s “female-presenting nipples” censorship rules during the porn ban.

That’s a very different food pyramid from the one that I was taught at least. The 90s/2000s food pyramid made no distinction between different kinds of meats but did make a distinction between grains, fruits, and veggies, with grains as the base of the pyramid.

Don’t feel bad. The part that sucks is that we have to even check nowadays whether or not our memes were ethically sourced.

I totally get that, I tried to make art a job and stopped drawing for a decade because of it. But we fall back into the issue of supporting corporate abuse for convenience when there’s plenty of other images of anime girls out there. AI art has the same issues as sweatshop labor but is much easier to avoid.

Plenty of images of anime girls online to make memes out of without supporting corporate abuse.

Also, talent is simply applied skill. The only thing keeping you from drawing like that is time and effort.

The green thing could be part of a stylized plant, but the most damning thing to me is that left eye where the reflective part of the iris is in the border around her eye.

Especially since the stats saying that they’re wrong about 53% of the time are right there.

Advertising or scams usually. A high amount of posts, comments, and karma makes an account look trustworthy.

The only way these “play to earn” games can work is as a pyramid scheme. Everybody wants more money out of the pot than they’re putting in, and the company sure as hell isn’t going to run at a loss. Many of them seem to only deal with currency through their own exchange (for fiat currency directly) or through markets backed by coins that are also backed by fiat currency, like bitcoin, for exactly the reasons that you laid out. Can’t make money if everybody is buying your funny money with other funny money that lost 99% of its value 3 months after it appeared.

The only other way somebody could make this work is if the players are the product, but at that point, why wouldn’t you just sell ad space on a website.

People have been doing it for years as far as I know. It’s kinda where this whole “review bombing” thing comes from. It seems like Valve’s policy is to label these kinds of mass reviews as “off-topic activity” and remove them from affecting the normal rating for the game. If you see a game with an asterisk next to its score on Steam, hovering over the asterisk will tell you that some reviews have been removed from the score for this reason. They’re still publicly there, and you can go into the details of the score to see those periods highlighted, but they no longer affect the score that you see on the storefront.

Steam has a very generous 2 hours played policy where the system will basically refund you no questions asked so long as you have played less than 2 hours of the game (refunds beyond that are totally possible but usually require manual review before approval).

This means that you can buy the game, open it once, leave a negative review, and get it refunded. Which is more impactful on Sony’s bottom line than leaving a review on Metacritic or something because it directly affects the game’s rating on the largest platform for PC gaming, and is therefore more likely to see action taken to fix the issue. Sony doesn’t care if people make angry social media posts, but they will care if they can directly see it impacting their profit margins.

You’re right, that’s the more accurate definition. A state of change, moving from one state of being to a new one.

I think trans still works fine in this context because gender is a cultural label designated to you entirely based on what the doctor thought at the time of your birth and what society assumes from things like secondary sex characteristics and behavior, and the cis label was retroactively applied to describe “anybody who isn’t trans” after the trans label had been in use for decades. So there’s nothing really scientific behind the label beyond the concept of that state of change. Gender itself is a cultural concept instead of a state of being too (as well as a performance that we do every moment of our lives) and so falls more into an active event than a passive state.

Not even the internet specifically, but often media in general. It comes from the use of “slop” as the mix of garbage that you pour into a feeding trough for pigs. Basically junk that companies think people will gobble up regardless of the quality.