Yeah, but when this happened proton wasn’t a thing yet, and running windows games through wine was very hit or miss.

I bought Rocket League because it had a Linux version, and Linux games were scarce before proton. Epic bought the developers of rocket League, and made it Epic exclusive. People who bought the steam version got to keep it, except for Linux users because Epic cancelled Linux support.

Epic loves to act like they’re anti monopoly, but they only care about that when they’re competing for market share. They’re extremely pro Microsoft and anti Linux.

Also one of the biggest concerns about Valve having a monopoly in the PC gaming space is that they could use their marketshare and money to block rival stores from getting popular games, making it hard to compete and removing user choice. In reality, Valve hasn’t done this, but Epic is leveraging their big pile of fortnite money to do this. It makes people think that if Epic ever gets into a dominate market position, that they’ll absolutely be an abusive monopoly that makes the market space worse for everyone else.

AI is starting to get really smart

Truly the end of an era

Clearly this shows that North Korea is the peak example of a successful society, and that the rest of the world should aspire to mimic them in all their wise practices.

That’s the part of France that I want to visit.

WB doubled down, after Suicide Squad failed horribly and Hogwarts Legacy sold fantastically they decided they needed to stop making games like Hogwarts to focus on more live service games.

I’ll add that according to that site:

• switch has 11,439 total games
• xbox series has 3,285 total games
• PS5 has 2,699 total games

Nintendo switch had 527 games released this year

Xbox had 355 games

PS5 had 395 games

I’m sure there are other factors (like quality of the games, platform exclusivity, etc), but switch is still doing pretty good for an 8 year old console that’s too weak to run new multi-plat games.

This seems cool, but hasn’t Windows 11 started blocking some different apps that replace parts of the UI?

Yeah, I’m fine with it.

That lawsuit is from 2021, and was thrown out later that year for failing to meet “the most basic requirements of an antitrust case,”

they also protected themselves against that by including a clause that prevents selling games cheaper on other stores

Is that even a real thing? Other stores sell games cheaper all the time. Even when buying steam games it’s usually cheapest to buy the steam key from another store, because someone else will have it on sale for cheaper.

It’s still the market standard for digital stores, and if steam was greedy they could absolutely charge more with their market dominance.

For comparison audible has audiobook market dominance, and takes a 75% cut. If you agree to make your audiobook audible exclusive, they’ll “only” take 60% of the profit, and many audiobook authors take that deal because getting an extra 15% cut on audible is worth more than the sales from other audiobook stores.

Audible is what you get when a greedy corporation has market dominance, in comparison Steam’s cuts are very tame for all the benefits they give.

That’s only a useful change if their warranty support was actually helpful to begin with. Now you get two years of them trying to bait people into unnecessary out-of-warranty repairs.

I would hope so, but Asus has been doing things like this for at least 10+ years which makes me doubtful that anything will change soon.

Trying to refund through Asus will result in them dragging their feet, being as unhelpful as possible, or claiming you damaged the product.

After using Kagi a few months I’ve switched to Brave, and been pretty happy with it. It can be low on image results, but for regular web results I haven’t needed anything else.

Kagi was pretty good, but it didn’t really seem good enough compared to Brave search to justify $10 a month.

Problem is that regular Google results are also getting worse. Google has to change something about search, and they’re most worried about chatgpt being a better alternative to Google search.

Brave does have an option to use anonymous Google results as a fallback if their index doesn’t return enough results, but it will ask you before it does it.