Skill Up’s review perfectly summarised all the criticisms. One of the most damning indictments was the feeling that HR was always in the room. He brings receipts for all his complaints. Some of the most unbelievably stupid, juvenile, and ham-fisted writing I’ve ever seen in any video game. This would be a failure if it came from any other studio, but to see BioWare fall this far is really difficult to see.

I think Villeneuve has been working on some screenplays, including Rendezvous with Rama, which is going to be sick. His screenplays are always 11/10 and are in part responsible for his incredible movies.

I don’t think feature parity would entice anyone across. It would need to be much better than Steam to entice migration, and it’s hard to conceive how much work and money that would require.

Can you point to a historical time when large fascist movements were defeated with a means other than violence?

I suspect you’re setting up a motte-and-bailey and you’ll equivocate over your use of “large” (which you didn’t define) when offered examples but I’ll try anyway.

1. Finland (1930s): The Lapua Movement was a fascist organization that attempted a coup in 1932. The Finnish government resisted through legal and political means rather than outright violence.

2. United States (1960s-1980s): George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party and later neo-fascist groups never gained electoral traction.

3. Greece (1974): The military junta (1967–1974) was overthrown, and the neo-fascist Golden Dawn party (2010s) was later defeated electorally and legally.

4. Italy (Post-WWII): The neo-fascist MSI (Italian Social Movement) failed to gain mass support and was absorbed into mainstream conservative politics.

The fact of the matter is that democracy staves off authoritarians on an ongoing basis. It is a pressure release valve for unheard citizens to express their dissatisfaction with the government in a healthy way. Fascism arises when the government suppresses the voices of the people, and drives them into despair and material hardship. You don’t win hearts and minds with suppression and violence. In a democracy, you do that by convincing others that your way is the better way. The reason we don’t use violence to settle our political disagreements is because that immediately devolves into might is right, and we have a near unlimited number of examples throughout history of why that’s terrible.

You guys always stop halfway through Poppers writings of the Paradox.

“I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument. They may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.”

Popper never argued to strip people of the right to free speech. Even immoral free speech. He makes the line very clear: when people begin using fists and pistols. That is, tolerate up to the point of physical violence.

Epic is the second largest online store by revenue, so you are objectively wrong by a wide margin. Users are spending a lot of money on the platform. Much of it goes to their flagship games like Fortnite. Similarly to how much of Steam’s revenue comes from their flagship games like Counter-Strike.

Does it? Lets envision the minimum viable product for a game store. You have a very basic web interface and you download games or installers from it. Something like itch.io, or similar to GOG. Is using Epic’s launcher better than just downloading the installers from a browser? I’d argue not, given the hastle of creating a new account, installing the launcher with all its spyware and using it, rather than the bare minimum of just downloading an installer, running it, and then running the game directly.

I support DRM free games too but I think you’re making a large assumption here that most people prefer that to one-click launcher install/updates/management.

Look at how other platforms have eaten into Steam’s control most successfully without resorting to anything too shady. Humble Bundle and Fanatical offer unique bundles with better deals. Itch.io works more closely with devs, esspecially smaller devs. GOG cut out a niche by specifically seeking out old games to licence or fix themselves, as well as by ensuring everything is DRM free.

I have seen no evidence of either Itch nor GOG eating Steam’s lunch. Quite the opposite. Steam continues to grow fast, while GOG is barely breaking even. I can’t find the financials for itch.io so I don’t know how well they’re doing.

Just to be clear, I would love for Epic to invest more into their launcher. I’m merely putting my product manager hat on and accepting that that is unlikely because the business case is bad.

And you think Epic implementing some or all of these would encourage Steam users to switch? Why would they? Steam already offers all of that.

Maybe I’m misreading that link of yours, but it shows that four specific policies have popular support. It certainly doesn’t show that all of the Democrat Party policies have overwhelming support. The recent election proved that about as definitively as is possible in American election history.

Let’s remember they are already the second largest games store. Okay, let’s assume they try to compete with Steam on features. What do you think it would take to get users to switch?

Only 28% of adults voted for this

Uh, isn’t that how American elections work? It’s decided based on the proportion of people who voted, not on the proportion of all adults. Trump won the popular vote 49.9% to 48.3% with the second highest number of votes in U.S. history. I don’t think any democracy divides votes by the total number of adults. How would that even work?

I think the vast majority of users only use launchers to launch games. For that purpose, it does that perfectly fine. I suspect that even if Epic invested billions into bringing their store up to feature parity with Steam, users still wouldn’t switch. They’d need to be leaps and bounds better, and that’s hard to comprehend in terms of features and cost. I think they’re making the smart move sticking to their wheelhouse.

Especially because most users respond to this with “good.”

good.

Your comedic timing is impeccable.

IMHO, the UX is bad, but the user base is also repellant. It’s further left than Reddit so most people who jump in bounce right off. That’s going to be difficult to change organically. Especially because most users respond to this with “good.” So there’s definitely no appetite to appeal to a wider audience. I predict Lemmy will become increasingly ideologically partisan and isolated.

I agree with Linus Torvalds. Linux is too fragmented. This makes consistent software deployment and support expensive and far too varied. Maintaining documentation alone requires an unlimited number of distros. From a user’s perspective, I really think Linux needs a universal install method like .exe. No user should ever need to use the CLI install software, no matter their distribution. Radarr, for example, is a very popular home media server application. It is one-click install on Windows. It is fucked on Linux.

Everyone has a side but every man has dated a woman who did something just like this. More than once.