Oh boy! Not all ads! Oh yippee! I have been blessed on this fine day! 🥰

Oh totally, Linux is in the same ballpark as, if not better than, Macs when it comes to RAM usage. Windows is just a hog

I own a 8GB MacBook Pro for work, it’s definitely better than a PC with 8GB of RAM, but not better or even close to a PC with 16GB. Just the amount of stutters/freezes while the swap file goes is insane

That’s just an APU, see consoles and laptops. The unified memory is basically just the above, but Apple also claims that due to Apple Silicon having the storage controller on board, the swap is magically faster 🤷

Also Mac OS/Linux use less RAM than Windows which certainly helps.

8GB is “fine™” on a MacBook Air, but it’s criminal for a Pro machine, and it certainly should not cost £200 for an extra 8GB. That’s genuinely insane pricing

Whoa, that’s like 32GB of Windows RAM. Seems excessive to me tbh

Lmao, the article is literally talking about children under the age of 10

An insurer is an interesting one for sure. They’d have the stats of how many times that AI model makes mistakes and be able to charge accordingly. They’d also have the funds and evidence to go after big corps if their AI was faulty.

They seem like a good starting point, until negligence elsewhere can be proven.

If the CEO was lying to the investors that’s akin to being lied to about the odds of a slot machine. It should totally be prosecutable.

At the same time I don’t feel sorry for them, and think they should be last in line after all the other victims

Like literally every American company does. I’m not a tankie and I’m definitely not a fan of China, but this is one of those situations where the US government doesn’t actually care about the issue, just that they’re not the one doing it

I’m fairly sure the vouchers are sponsored, they’re so low it’s essentially advertising for Uber Eats

You can look it up yourself, I was just giving a worst case scenario

$0.025 per GB is the most expensive option on S3 I could find rounded up. It would be absolutely insane if Steam were paying those prices when they have their own servers. I also used 100GB game size as a large number, and $30 as a small price tag (for an 100GB game).

I was trying to be charitable with the numbers and it still came out pretty positive

Download. It’s also rounded up. Storage is negligible compared to bandwidth, especially considering Steam’s business model

No harm meant. I do think Steam is the golden example of a big business done right. All I’m saying is that there’s room for improvement.

However do we know their full PNL/balance sheet?

We can make an educated guess. Amazon’s S3 charges roughly $0.025 per GB, so an 100GB game would cost $2.50 for Steam to upload to a user. For a $30 game, that’s around ~8.5% or just over 3 downloads before it’s unprofitable.

Obviously Valve isn’t paying consumer level S3 prices, and obviously users can download multiple times. But I would be extremely surprised if they didn’t make a rather large margin on each sale

I agree with you, but justifying anything by saying they’re successful in a free market is really iffy. There are plenty of large evil companies that are incredibly successful. That said I agree with everything else you’ve said.

I personally think 30% cut is too much for any app/software store. But if anyone deserves it Steam does

You pay less because you get less. I’m selling a product. The last thing I’m going to cheap out in is sales. I’m not going to see great sales from the EGS because A)Nobody uses it

That’s exactly it, Devs have to accept Steam’s cut because it’s essentially the only place you can sell things. It makes logical sense, but do you not see why this is a disadvantageous position for the Devs to be put in?

It’s like trying to sell your hand made Combs. The gas station on the corner is happy to take only 20% of the profit. They’re all over the place and accessible. But you really want to sell it at the boutique shops because they have more comb-seeking customers.

This would be a fine analogy, if there weren’t a single digit amount of storefronts. Steam and EGS are more equivalent to supermarkets. Sure the odd person is going to go to speciality stores on occasion, but the vast majority of sales are done through supermarkets. Steam is a supermarket competing against speciality stores. The only other real supermarket in town is EGS and as you’ve discussed, it’s such a dumpster fire no one shops there.

I’m not disagreeing that Steam deserves its position, it does for sure. But we live in a world where it has no meaningful competition, and one of the ways it exercises its position is by maintaining their 30% cut. A cut which was established by stores that had to manage the logistics for real physical copies of the games.

My point is that there isn’t a reason that Steam has such a high cut, other than it wants more money, and has the market saturation to command more money

Taking a different and hopefully more productive stance than the other guy, I just want to explore people’s thoughts.

People already have built these alternatives. Itch.io, EGS, Humble Store, Microsoft Store, GOG. These platforms exist, but they struggle to achieve the full market dominance that Steam has as the “default” platform, meaning Devs are borderline forced to accept the 30% cut if they have any hope of making sales.

As shown by Steam’s huge profits, they certainly take a higher cut than they have to, and they can definitely stomach a smaller cut

I get what a lot of you guys are saying about Starmer and the Labour government not being as left wing as Corbyn. I would also like someone who would use this majority to implement some really hardcore leftist policies.

But please can we just take a step back and look at what he wants to do:

• Massive amounts of NHS funding

• Nationalised green energy

• Tax private schools

• Allow regulators to hit company executives with criminal charges

• Nationalise the railways

• Increase the minimum wage to a living wage

• Free school meals

I don’t know about you, but that seems at the very least, left of center. Sure, he’s not making drastic sweeping changes right off the bat. But this country needs an era of stability, whilst we make small but consistent steps in the right direction, and that’s what Starmer will give us

Only because everyone’s on edge, give it a few years and they’ll need “anonymised” data collection to “help improve their service”

Also want to point out, most of that is container, not spent fuel. The safety standards are so ridiculously high that they basically guarantee zero risk.

More people (per plant) are exposed to elevated levels of radiation due to coal power, and that’s not even including the health risk of all the other shit they release