• 2 Posts
  • 61 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • The exploit’s sophistication and the feature’s obscurity suggest the attackers had advanced technical capabilities

    exploiting a vulnerability in an undocumented hardware feature that few if anyone outside of Apple and chip suppliers such as ARM Holdings knew of.

    according to Russian officials also infected the iPhones of thousands of people working inside diplomatic missions and embassies in Russia

    the devices were infected with full-featured spyware that, among other things, transmitted microphone recordings, photos, geolocation, and other sensitive data to attacker-controlled servers

    Sounds like government espionage

    puts tinfoil hat on












  • I love the theme for it, but was expecting an actual city builder, as advertised in the description. Instead, it’s a pretty boring puzzle game with pretty graphics, very unrelated to something like Cities Skylines. I am hoping something like this with more in depth management comes up in the future.

    I do like ‘cozy’ building games like Townscaper and Dorfromantik but they aren’t advertised as city builders, and the puzzle elements in Dorfromantik don’t get in the way of building pretty stuff as much as in Terra Nil.



  • Yeah, I’m going to reserve my excitement for when I see gameplay footage or actually play it. Quake Champions looked really good in the beginning and then it ran like an internal pre-alpha. Tribes Ascend had so many OP hitscan weapons on release you thought you were playing Call of Duty. Waning general interest in “boomer shooters” and disastrous releases make these games more nostalgic memories than interesting future games in my mind.


  • Thanks. So TLDR:

    1. PMFN (Platform Most-Favored-Nations clause): Valve forces publishers to price games on other platforms at the same price or higher than Steam. This is an anticompetitive monopoly because publishers can’t sell the game at lower prices on platforms with a lower cut than 30%, which would improve competitiveness. Very valid point
    2. Keys that publishers can sell on other storefronts are limited. This point is moot. The fact that Steam allows you to activate a product that was purchased elsewhere and then use their infrastructure to download the game is way more than they have to do. They can completely make the rules here as this is basically a free service that you get from Valve.
    3. Some murky points about Valve policing review bombing that isn’t explained properly.

  • I’m also curious what the allegations are. The only ones I ever heard were from Epic, which was basically making a big fuss to promote their own competitive platform (which was so shit it didn’t gain any traction apart from the free games).

    I’ve tried all the online stores ever since the cloudification (remember Impulse?) but none have ever been able to compete with Steam in terms of features and value to the customer. Steam didn’t get to the top by being anti competitive, it got there by being competitive and offering a better product to all stakeholders, not just to shareholders.

    And as you mentioned, there is plenty of competition for Steam. Don’t like the monoply? Get it on GOG or Itch instead.