He appeared in little snippets over the course of several HOURS, so it is hard to catch just him. It was not a direct copyright infringement of Ezio or Arno or any other Ubisoft property because the costume included a fencing mask and had different details, but yeah, the first thing I thought was “Assassin’s Creed”.

The band was Gojira and I posted translated lyrics here: https://beehaw.org/post/15211295 and @squirrel@discuss.tchncs.de kindly posted a streamable link.

Oooh. Personally, I don’t mind that, but now that you mention it, yes, there totally ought to be search/queue options to let us hide demos.

Sweet! I like the idea of allowing for demos to have their own page instead of being part of the full/finished game page. Not sure if demos should have reviews. That seems kinda beside the point.

Vance outlines the only two principles he feels are important: get more money, get more power

I was just posting about Vance in this post of the 1941 article, “Who goes Nazi?”, and this piece reiterates the same sort of concerns.

Back in 2021, indie developer Wolfire filed an antitrust lawsuit against Valve that accused the gaming giant of anti-competitive business practices—including a long-standing habit of taking unfair cuts from game developers on its store. Valve’s 30% fees have come under criticism before—and they are notably high when compared to some other online platforms.

Ouch. I didn’t realize they took such a big cut. On the other hand, authors trying to publish to Amazon’s kindle get hit with commissions from 30%-65% before any other fees, so Steam seems downright reasonable for that particular comparison.

From where I’m sitting, though, I’ve plenty of complicated feelings. Steam might be the best option out there, but monopolies aren’t great for anybody—at the same time, business is business.

Steam’s absurd efficiency could be a product of merciless penny-pinching from indie devs, but it’s just as likely we’re watching a well-oiled machine continue to belch out cash in an expected fashion.

Is it really a monopoly with everyone from EA to GoG delivering games? I guess it is dominant enough to count. I have a hard time complaining when employees are getting good pay and I’ve continued to get good service from them. It might get scarey if/when Gabe steps down, but this all feels pretty fair for now.

NOTE: I just downloaded the game and on my first attempted launch, it complained that the port it wanted was not open. My only option was to close the game. I ran netstat and did not see the port listed, so I tried again. THAT time, it complained about my older video card :-/ The warning is clunky and there’s a typo, too (within -> withing). It says (if I transcribed accurately):

You are using an: NVIDIA GEOFORCE GTX 1080. This video card is currently not recognized withing the recommended specs. We only support a limited amount of NVIDIA GTX graphics cards, all NVIDIA RTX graphics cards or all AMD RX graphics cards since the local AI requires a lot of performance.

So please note that the game might not work properly. Refer to the Steam guide for more information.

When I closed that warning, the game loaded.

After decades of sci-fi/fantasy entertainment to prime us, the primal part of the human brain that reacts to in-group and out-group members suddenly changes in every human and we start reflexively and unintentionally classifying all earth life as friends and space/environmental threats as enemies.

Humanity immediately gets serious about climate change, CO2 reduction, and the like, but we also get way too zealous about deploying space lasers.