Fubarberry

These cards sound good, but I'm generally soured on Intel as a company. It'll be years before I feel comfortable buying hardware from them.

30% as industry standard

That's the same as app stores/etc, and is still a common cut to take. I'm not convinced the cuts that Epic is taking are actually sustainable for offering downloads/updates/etc for a game indefinitely, but it's hard to tell since the Epic store is already bleeding money.

I'll also mention that Audible (which has a monopoly in the audiobook space) reportably takes a 60-75% cut of audiobooks sold on their platform (they take only 60% if you agree to sell exclusively on audible, but they take the full 75% if you want to sell the book somewhere else as well). Monopolies abusing their position is really common, but I haven't seen anything similar from Steam that makes me think they're abusing their position. I suspect PC gaming would be in a far worse state if another company controlled the popular storefront.

Being a small game dev has a lot of uncertainty and risk. I wouldn't blame any small dev for taking a guaranteed paycheck from Epic. Larger studios with safe prospects should be blamed though imo. Gearbox with Borderlands 3 for example.

Except they're trying to strongarm people into using it by using huge amounts of money to buy exclusivity rights.

People don't want monopolies because companies can abuse their position to hurt consumers. But steam provides a very user friendly experience with lots of benefits and features like mod hosting, remote play together, etc. Epic provides a store that people hate using, and people only put up with because epic abused fortnite's success to buy exclusivity deals*. Despite being the much smaller storefront, Epic already feels like the abusive monopoly in the PC gaming space.

*Many people also play on Epic because of free games, which is a valid and pro-consumer way to attract users. I'm 100% cool with this strategy, although giving away merchandise at a loss is also a common monopoly strategy.

There was a request to halt sales until the specific mechanics were removed, with the mechanics being throwing pokeball like items and riding monsters.

That lawsuit might take years, and the requested damages from Nintendo are only $66,000. Palworld isn't going to be shut down anytime soon, even if they lose the case.

Great game, it and the original Pixel Dungeon were my most played phone games for years.

Another high quality mobile experience I can't recommend enough is Slice & Dice. Gameplay is quite different from Pixel Dungeon, but it's basically replaced all other phone games for me. Been playing it almost continuously now for the past 3 years.

Some HOAs are better than others.

"A man chooses! A slave obeys." - Andrew Ryan, BioShock

In general a lot of Andrew Ryan quotes are captivating, but that one transcends thanks to both the events happening, and the realization of the plot reveal.

I wish Sony would just back off. It's clear that they're willing to drag their studios through mud to push PSN and other stupid requirements, and I hope any new studios they try to acquire will be paying attention to that.

Many new PCs (generally the cheaper priced ones) come in S mode now, where you can only install Microsoft store apps. You can turn this off to allow regular PC programs too, but they require you to set up the Microsoft store before you can disable it.

If you're trying to set up a new PC without a Microsoft account (which is getting increasingly hard), you can't disable S mode. There was a workaround that involved booting into recovery mode and running some commands/registry edits, but I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft has blocked that too by now.

This is also the biggest reason Valve supports Linux and ChromeOS. Microsoft really wants full control over what software people can use on Windows, and Valve is worried about getting pushed off the platform.

Yes I've seen it before. Once Microsoft even updated their virus definitions to auto-delete the chrome installer when downloaded. Thankfully they reversed that one pretty quickly, but I had to completely disable all Windows virus protection to install chrome for a relative.