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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: April 29th, 2024

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  • I’ve had games not record time because I was in offline mode on vacation and I pre-downloaded it, or I just played in offline mode or directly from a game’s executable without steam’s crap embedded.

    In the past it’s been trivial to set achievement unlocks and time played with 3rd party tools too.

    I don’t see any kind of discounts mentioned either. I almost never buy from steam directly, usually reputable 3rd party sites like Fanatical, GamersGate, WinGameStore etc that I find through isthereanydeal. It’ll show as being on my account but nobody knows what I paid for it and I almost never pay MSRP.

    Then there’s the countless bundle keys I used to get that I definitely never played and will never play because I wanted 2-3 games in a bundle of 10-20 that was cheaper than one of the games alone.

    It wouldn’t shock me at all if there was 10 billion worth of unplayed games though. I have friends that buy all the hot releases and then barely touch them because a couple hundred bucks a month is not significant to their monthly budget.









  • High paying jobs with tons of new graduates have an oversaturated supply problem. It’s no surprise that when people figure out that becoming a software developer is easy street to 150k+++ WFH that there was a huge rush to get those jobs… now that there are TONS and TONS of young junior devs there is no shortage to hire someone for near minimum wage.

    Why pay 400k for a senior developer when you can hire a mid-level for ~100k to be a manager, and 4 juniors for 60k a piece, and augment them with chatgpt to help them learn what they are skill gapped by.

    Plus junior devs are so desperate you can force them to come into the office, something the dev divas ten years ago refused to do back when there was a huge shortage of coders.


  • All I know is what many have said time and time again. There is one main thread that everything else depends on, so no matter how much horsepower you throw at it you are constrained by whatever logic or calculation that one thread is doing.

    For all I know it’s a memory bandwidth thing or even a disk access thing pertaining to that one thread which makes everything else wait. They use their own homegrown engine and there’s a bottleneck in the code somewhere, obviously.

    I’m kind of surprised they don’t have something that’s more scalable because they built a new engine for X:Rebirth which came out in 2013. Maybe they started the engine rebuild before dual core and quad core cpus were mainstream in the late 2000s.









  • Anyone who thinks their steam libraries will be safe forever is delusional.

    Eventually a for-profit motivated individual will gain control and they will use all their MBA learnings to maximize subscriptions, per play revenue, per download revenue and overall provide a cheaper platform.

    There isn’t an mba on the planet that doesn’t recognize that advertising is highly lucrative and being the company that sells the most pc games means you have metrics no one else has. They’ll instantly monetize advertising and the popups we get when we log in today will turn into mandatory non-skippable ads on the free tier to start a game, and they’ll add their wrapper on top of games in their store, especially games that do not currently need steam to play today.

    It’ll only get way worse. Expect everything to be pay to play… once gaben is gone. They have a monopoly and any leader would think they are too big to fail. No one can just take their games elsewhere… we’re locked in. We’re committed. We can’t escape. They’ve got us by the balls.