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Man, I never knew that my ISP was working so hard for me.

Holy shit, you made Priiloader?

Kickass, thank you so much for helping 11 year old me not completely destroy his Wii in the name of boredom.

Y...yeah... same. I mean, Ken Penders? Hahaha, who? Hahahaha.

Is this image not from a comic?

But why male models?

It seems like their pianist might be out for now, still flapping in the wind as it were. Should be able to get a firm handshake deal though, and hopefully that gets the pianist to come on stage again.

(This is all japes, no clue about the real answer.)

My dab rig is microusb, makes me cry any time I get to a hotel and forget to bring the charger for it.

Thanks!

Understood. "AI-run" has a much different immediate connotation these days generally and was a bit of a turn-off from the game until I looked at the steam page, it may be worth rewording the title.

By AI-run, do you mean "you are playing the role of a fictional AI"?

I don't know what a solution would look like here. In your opinion, what should be done to stop Valve from being anti-competitive? What specifics should I be raising awareness of and looking into? What should be done by/about Gabe Newell?

I would like to know more about what you believe the solution here is, because at its core I see Valve as the end result of very talented and self-driven people doing an amazing job at delivering a very good product. I would hope that would lead to success, and I am given to understand that Gabe (to focus back in) is not a disinterested corporate figurehead as the position is with other software companies.

There's some amount of anti-competitive behavior that is just... Doing business in a space with competitors. I write private code that I use myself and within the company I work for that I choose not to share with my competitors, is that anti-competitive behavior? This is a dumb example, but also I haven't seen a direct convincing argument as to what Valve is doing to deserve the label.

In many ways, to provide my viewpoint, they've directly supported both unofficial modifications to their storefront by users (Decky Loader, for loading steam deck mods), modifications to their hardware (OLED screen mods, replacement parts on iFixit for reasonable prices), and even support Windows on the deck and are beginning (through reading commit logs) to support competitors' hardware in their custom OS. They've singlehandedly pushed gaming on Linux into the mainstream eye and are doing well with it.

All that to say that I don't think the way that Gabe became a billionaire was bad, and while I would prefer he use his personal wealth to better society I both don't know enough about what he does with his money to know whether or not he's already doing that and also think that any solution here would genuinely go against fundamental liberties and personal freedoms that I personally agree with. I'm not an absolutist on this, but enough of what I do know about the history of Valve and Gabe in specific lead me to lend him some amount of goodwill, because he has through his works and actions earned it from me.

I don't disagree that billionaires are bad. Personally, I strongly believe in a Star Trek post-monetary future.

I wouldn't call Gabe Newell a friend, although I suspect I don't disagree with many of his opinions.

You are able to email him at [email protected], as is anyone else. I've emailed twice. Once when I was 13 to inform him of a bug in portal 2, and once a few years ago to inquire about steam being ported to arm.

There was a lot to explain about my position there and it may be a bit disjointed. If there's anything I can clarify on my thinking, I'd be happy to.

I don't see how posting to lemmy in general is going to influence people that disagree with you both because I don't think there are many people here that do and also I think that your comment in particular is so far removed from the topic of this article that it borders on being a non sequitur entirely, and I'm worried you may get the feeling that the people downvoting you are against your message and not the fact that your message isn't relevant beyond being a knee-jerk reactionary cry against Valve, one of the only privately owned companies that seems to listen to user feedback as thoroughly as the article demonstrates.

I don't believe Valve is a monopoly and I've directly been able to talk to Gabe Newell via email multiple times over multiple years. Maybe some of their inter-business dealings could be better for their business partners, but as a lifelong steam user that so far has felt comfortable buying almost every hardware product they've put out I continue to feel comfortable supporting them because they seem to actually care about their customers from what I have directly experienced.

I don't mean any of this in a confrontational tone, and I apologize for the general shill vibes of that second paragraph. I'd be happy to continue the discussion, I think your message is correct and good and I think there are better more effective ways of acting on it.