Well, as the guy falling from the top of the Empire State Building was overheard saying on his way down: “well, so far so good”.

Or as the common caveat given to retail investors goes: past performance is no predictor of future results.

“So far” proves nothing because it can be “so far” only because the conditions for something different haven’t yet happenned or it simply hasn’t been in their best interest yet to act differently.

If their intentions were really the purest, most honest and genuine of all, they could have placed themselves under a contractual obligation to do so and put money aside for an “end of life plan” in a way such that they can’t legally use it for other things, or even done like GoG and provided offline installer to those people who want them.

Steam have chosen to maintain their ability to claw back games in your library whilst they could have done otherwise as demonstrated by GoG which let you download offline installers - no matter what they say, their actions to keep open the option of doing otherwise say the very opposite.

To add to your point, it’s amazing that so many people are still mindless fanboys, even of Steam.

Steam has restrictions on installing the games their customers supposedly own, even if it’s nothing more than “you can’t install it from a local copy of the installer and have to install it from the Steam servers” - it’s not full ownership if you can’t do what you want with it when you want it without the say so of a 3rd party.

That’s just how it is.

Now, it’s perfectly fair if one says “yeah, but I totally trust them” which IMHO is kinda naive in this day and age (personally, almost 4 decades of being a Techie and a gamer have taught me to distrust until there’s no way they can avoid their promises, but that just me), or that one knows the risks but still thinks that it’s worth it to purchase from Steam for many games and that the mere existence of Steam has allowed many games to exists that wouldn’t have existed otherwise (mainly Indie ones) - which is my own posture at least up to a point - but a whole different thing is the whole “I LoVe STeaM And tHeY CaN DO NotHInG wrONg” fanboyism.

Sorry but they have in place restrictions on game installation and often game playing which from the point of view of Customers are not needed and serve no purpose (they’re not optional and a choice for the customer, but imposed on customers), hence they serve somebody else than the customer. It being a valid business model and far too common in this day and age (hence people are used to it) doesn’t make those things be “in the interest of Customers” and similarly those being (so far) less enshittified than other similar artificial restrictions on Customers out there do not make them a good thing, only so far not as bad as others.

I mean, for fuck’s sake, this isn’t the loby of an EA multiplayer game and we’re supposed to be mostly adults here in Lemmy: lets think a bit like frigging adults rather than having knee-jerk pro-Steam reactions based on fucking brand-loyalty like mindless pimply-faced teen fanboys. (Apologies to the handful of wise-beyond-their-years pimply faced teens that might read this).

It’s even more basic than that: if there’s no escrow with money for that “end of life” “plan” and no contractual way to claw back money for it from those getting dividends from Valve, then what the “Valve representatives” said is a completelly empty promised, or in other words a shameless lie.

Genuine intentions actually have reliable funding attached to them, not just talkie talkie from people who will never suffer in even the tinyest of ways from not fulfulling what they promised.

In this day and age, we’ve been swamped with examples that we can’t simply trust in people having a genuine feeling of ethical and moral duty to do what they say they will do with no actual hard consequences for non-compliance or their money on the line for it.

PS: And by “we can’t trust in people” I really mean “we can’t trust in people who are making statements and promises as nameless representatives of a company”. Individuals personally speaking for themselves about something they control still generally are, even in this day and age, much better than people acting the role of anonymous corporate drone.

If there is one think we should all have learned by now in this Era is that talk means nothing at all: there have to be hard contractual clausules along with personal punishment for those who break them or some kind of escrow system for money meant to go into that “end of life” plan for it to actually be genuine.

“Valve reps have said” is worth as much as the paper it’s written on and that stuff is not even written on paper.

At some point in my career I’ve actually designed mission critical high performance distributed server systems for a living, so I’m well aware of that.

You can still pack thousands of users per server and have very low latency as long as you use the right architecture for it (it’s mainly done with in-memory caching and load balancing) when you’re accessing gigantic datasets which far exceed the data space of a game where the actual shared data space is miniscule since all clients share a local copy of most of the dataspace - i.e. the game level they’re playing in - and even with the most insane anti-cheat logic that checks every piece of data coming in from the user side against a server-side copy of the “game level data space” it’s still but a fraction of the shared data space in equivalent situations in the corporate world, plus it tends to be easilly partitionable data (i.e. even in MMORG with a single fully open massive playing space, players only affect limited areas of the entire game space so you don’t really need to check the actions of a player against the data of all other players).

Also keep in mind that all the static (never changing or slow changing stuff) like achievements or immutable level configuration can still be served with “normal” latencies.

Further the kind LVL1 ISP that provides network access for companies like Sony servicing millions of users already has more than good enough latency in their normal service and hence Sony needs not pay extra for “low latency”.

Anyways, you do make a good and valid point, it’s just that IMHO that’s the kind of thing that pushes the running costs per-player-month from one dollar cents or less to, at most (and this is likely quite a large overestimation), a dollar per-player-month unless they only have tens of players per-server (which would be insane and they should fire their systems designers if that’s the case).

After over 3 decades as a gamer and tech user this is maybe the single most consistent important benefit for any open platform were you can just install Linux.

The rest is nice but this one means that 10 or 20 years from now your hardware might have been repurposed for something else and still be useful and in use whilst a closed platform will just be more junk in a junkyard or sitting in a box of those things you’ve kept just because you don’t like to throw expensive stuff away but will in practice never use again.

They’re stupidly cheap to operate per user when you have millions of them, which is how companies like Facebook manage to make a profit from merely showing adverts to users and with no subscription fees.

Remember that Sony gets a cut from games being distributed to their platform, so online fees are just them double dipping for extra profits.

They’re stupidly cheap to operate per user when you have millions of them, which is how companies like Facebook manage to make a profit from merely showing adverts to users and with no subscription fees.

I have an Orange PI Pro 5 16GB on a box that smoothly runs a full blown Ubuntu Desktop version and would fit in a pocket though it’s maybe a little too thick (from memory the box it’s about 3x5x2 cm).

Total cost was about $170.

The board itself would fit a thinner box, but you might have to 3D print one.

Mind you, a N100 Mini-PC that costs the same is even more capable as a Linux Desktop, but it’s significantly larger and will definitely not fit a pocket.

You can find cheaper SBCs capable of running a Desktop Ubuntu but in my experience (with a $35 Banana Pi P2-Zero) if you go too far down the price scale Desktop Linux performance stops being smooth, even if the board is a tiny thing.

It was actually quite surprising for me recently when I found out some of these things are perfectly capable Linux Desktops.

Playing Accounting Tycoon on the Steam Deck.

What’s there not to like?!

“Family friendly UI” is “ultra-advanced” stuff for me: remember, before Kodi on a Mini-PC in my living room (and, by the way, I got a remote control for it too) I had been using first generation Media Players with file-browser interfaces to chose files from remote shares on a NAS, so merelly having something with the concept of a media library, tracking of watched status and pretty pictures automatically fetched from the Internet is a giant leap forward ;)

There are downsides to being an old Techie using all sorts of (what was then) non-mainstream tech since back in the 90s. I’m just happy Kodi solved my problem of having an old Media Player hanging together with duct-tape, spit and prayers.

That said I can see how Kodi having all status (such as watched/not-watched tracking) be per-media rather than per (user + media) isn’t really good for families. More broadly the thing doesn’t even seem to have the concept of a user.

I haven’t tried Jellyfin but people’s talk of it doing transcoding (which Kodi doesn’t need to do as it simply decodes the video stream and shows it on the video output) leaves me with the idea that it’s not quite the same and does things I don’t really need.

That would be Kodi which I now use on a Mini-PC with Lubunto which has replaced my TV Box and my Media Player (plus that Mini-PC also replaces a bunch of other things and even added some new things).

Before I went down a rabbit whole of trying to replace my really old Asus Media Player (which was so old that its remote was broken and I replaced it with my own custom electronics + software solution so that I could remote control that Media Player from an Android app I made running on my tablet) which eventually ended up with Kodi on a Linux Mini-PC also replacing my TV box, I had no idea Kodi even existed and was just using the old Media Player to browse directories with video files in a remote share (hosted on a hacked NAS on my router, a functionality which is now on that Mini-PC which even supports a newer and much faster SMB protocol) using a file browser user interface to play those files.

It was quite the leap from that early 00s file browser interface to chose files to play on TV to a modern “media library” interface covering all sorts of media including live TV (why it ended up also replacing my TV box).

It’s wonderful how the expression “humble Arch Linux user” manages to pack a contradiction in a mere 4 words.

How much would that be in Libraries Of Congress if written down?

I disagree: as a Bachus of Programming I have successfully managed to at the same time both be a God of Programming AND having no clue what’s going on.

(The real joke behind the joke is that today I’m doing Shader programming so that’s quite close to reality and I could definitelly do with large amounts of wine or at least beer).

Here too the Schrödinger’s equations apply: a programmer’s state during coding is a superposition of both of these states until actually trying to run the code, at which point it collapses into one of the two states.

This kind of thing just confirms how it’s really all about the Power elites keeping an eye out on the plebes trying to organise and change things so that they can kill any such things in the early stages.

Democracy was supposed to slowly bring Autocracies around to its way of doing things but instead what we’re seing is the very opposite of that.

The amount of effort I do to try and avoid using double parentesis is trully herculean.

I think that stuff is the product of a completionist/perfectionist mindset - as one is writting, important details/context related to the main train of thought pop-up in one’s mind and as one is writting those, important details/context related to the other details/context pop-up in one’s mind (and the tendency is to keep going down the rabbit hole of details/context on details/context).

You get this very noticeably with people who during a conversation go out on a tangent and often even end up losing the train of thought of the main conversation (a tendecy I definitelly have) since one doesn’t get a chance to go back and re-read, reorganise and correct during a spoken conversation.

Personally I don’t think it’s an actual quality (sorry to all upvoters) as it indicates a disorganised mind. It is however the kind of thing one overcomes with experience and I bet Mr Torvalds himself is mostly beyond it by now.

It was about as prescient as “640k is enough for everybody”, but in a good way.