I’m hoping Steam Machines usher in good TV/movie streaming apps for Linux. I’d love to use a miniPC with a remote to replace AndroidTV/Roku

It does look really good. Hoping that the Steam Deck, Machine, and Frame are all successful to a point where there’s more interest in TV/gamepad centric UI applications for Linux. Don’t need much variety. Pretty much media apps

Steam has been the primary indie platform for games for like 15 years. Xbox had a moment in the early Xbox love arcade but the time the Xbox One came out, it was Steam and it has been ever since especially after Greenlight and early access

More like there’s more weird blogs than ever but not interest in any to really become famous at least for some day time talk shows to joke about (another format that’s now in an ocean of content rather than a pond).

The machines the least appealing thing to me. It’d have to be Steam Deck priced to be worth it in my opinion. RDNA3 but less compute units than an RX 7600. Controller looks like a buy. Possibly that VR headset too

Going back to the spike TV days, it has always seemed to me that Geoff just wants glitz and glamour in video gaming that he can enjoy. And then with age that makes the glitz and glamour crowd for him also get older. Video game developers, welcome to the art gallery world, film/book/music/stage/television awards. It’s a bunch of old people with money and glitz and younger glamour that call themselves producers of any kind they can think of predators trying to party and network and that’s about it. Thing is with the game awards is that award shows peaked back in like 2005-2010 before YouTube and social media really took over media gossip. The game awards has been trying to make some prestige event out of a dying format that lost credibility with how non-inclusive these awards actually are. And I’m not talking about American social politics inclusiveness, I’m talking awards shows that want to be American/Euro-centric in a media landscape that is increasingly not that. So awards shows we know out here are declining marketing platforms for their potential domestic sponsors too because they’re just not able to appeal to people like they used to when these shows aren’t recognizing peoples super favorite game from like Colombia or China that was a hit on Steam but never paid a dime in advertising to American and European media organizations so get no media coverage

Remind people that a monopoly isn’t illegal. Abusing a monopoly to prevent competition and using a monopoly as a means to create unfair market conditions in other categories - Windows and web browsers in the past or Apple’s monopoly on iOS software distribution.

Consoles are even more restrictive than an iPhone is still in the US and was in the EU. Complain about Steam all these devs and people want, unless it can be proven that Valve is using their market share to stop other companies from competing well, it’s a moot point calling them a monopoly. That Wolfire lawsuit when I read the initial court filings they put out was a joke. It was citing Twitter posts and blogspam articles citing anonymous forum posts

Steam was not the first PC digital distribution store. It wasn’t even great until like 2006/2007. In the early days Impulse could have been competitive but Stardock sold it to GameStop who in dumb move of the last 2 decades did nothing with it. Desura did not improve. GFWL was terrible. Windows Store used to have issues with making storage unreclaimable without a reformat of the drive. Direct2Drive never improved. GamersGate just stayed a key seller. GoG was never going to grow without regular day one games which wasn’t going to be competitive as DRM free. Humble Store stayed a key seller.

Amazon and Epic’s idea was to just give away games. Ubisoft and EA stores barely even had games they didn’t publish. So sparse I bet they didn’t have self publishing tools. Those 2 puzzlingly regularly had issues maintaining login sessions persisting over time. PC gaming is dieing was the mainstream meme until like 2015. Epic on Android doesn’t even have a library of owned games view and it’s been almost a year since that released.

Valve didn’t make Amazon, Microsoft, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, Stardock+GameStop, Direct2Drive, … all under invest and/or mismanage their PC game store platform efforts. It’s not up to Valve to stop making the platform more appealing. EGS is 7 years old. Those other companies have been doing PC game stores for much longer. I remember buying and downloading PC games from Amazon before Prime gaming. It was just like Direct2Drive. Since 2004 Direct2Drive was always a storefront for any publishers game whereas Steam didn’t start listing 3rd party games until 2005.

If any service was comparable to like end of 2013 Steam, that would easily be second best store platform. Instead every store is at best like 2010 Steam with nicer animations, bigger buttons. And today there’s way more resources to make a competitor. More cloud service providers with mature onboarding tools. NPM install. A lot more open source databases. Kubernetes. Git. Etc. Should be able to do better than 7 year old Steam in 7 years from these companies that were far larger than 2002/2003 Valve when they got into PC game distribution. The big publishers were probably all wealthier than Valve up to like 2015

It’s not Sony and Nintendo’s fault that since the Kinect on the 360, Microsoft hasn’t been able to manage their studios to be competitive with Nintendo and Sony studios

At least it’s a practice what you preach example. I know far more people that love to preach and the attention it gives them and then mostly does the exact opposite. Sometimes so much to the opposite that they’re more predatory than things/people they preach against

I do like durians. I’ve also never had issues with the smell. After learning how many people don’t like the smell, I do notice that the smell does linger for quite some time

I think the competition is fair. People put music on the Internet, get the limited spots in music venues, work their way to being opening acts for different popularity levels of music artists. It’s more fair today than ever

What I’m saying is that good music spreads itself but not in a way that makes a viable career. You can get a following that from just the raw listener numbers may look good but the payout being low. Like in the 80s if someone had 800,000 people that listened to their album, they probably made a good amount of money. To hear the album they probably had to buy the music or go to a concert. Today streaming you can get to 800,000 listens for an album and that may not even be a years worth of rent depending on where you are in the world.

On Spotify I’ll listen to music where their profile says 40,000 listeners and I really like their music. They’re making no money. Both impressive to have 40,000 listeners but it’s not a good income. So like ya good music spreads itself but not well enough to make traditional music studios not needed if someone wants to live a better life than constantly on tour in cheap motels or couch surfing

Ultimately my point is not solid because there’s no solution. Most will fail regardless of their hard work and skill. We understand it sucks that so many talented artist fail to make a living on their art but since Napster and iTunes we still don’t have a solution

Music taste is super subjective and the barriers of entry are incredibly low now. There’s a lot of sour grapes in the art fields that I side eye. Like incredibly gates open for all and equality in their persona but among close friends they’re complaining about how much competition there is how they wish it was like how it was back in the where it was way harder and more expensive to get into music as if they’d be the one to make it through the gatekeepers like Harvey Weinstein and P Diddy

There’s a ton of good music. Every year thousands and thousands of new quality music artists put music on YouTube and music subscription services. If you live in a big city, look up all the music venues including small stage coffee shops, you’ll see hundreds of good artists you’ve possibly never heard of. All these artist either local or going on a national tour, they’re all mostly paycheck to paycheck.

Broke musician/singer/writer was the standard in the 90s and before. Broke musician/singer/writer is the standard today just there’s a whole lot more of them and the Internet to hear the bitterness of not succeeding in making a lot of money off ones art

Besides that, the “best” music spreads itself on its own to a small niche of people. On one hand because of the Internet, you can be incredibly cheap on marketing compared to the past. On the other hand there’s so much music out there that marketing and knowing the right people is more important than ever. More competition than ever before.

Like before you pretty much had to pay money to get money on radio, television, play in any venue, get your music heard by industry influencers to have a shot as someone selling their own music. Now you don’t have to but really from what I’ve seen, the Internet indie to mainstream success seems pretty dead to me so you have to spend a lot of money to actually make a career out of your own music. Even just being a freelance studio musician, good luck. World class classical musician, good luck getting into any orchestras that pays well. Better off private teaching and recording holiday music covers

Context, if it’s ten years and your most popular song on YouTube has 4 million views and that was over ten years, you made some money. Not a lot and that was spread over ten years. You better have another income stream besides album sales and Internet streams or else you’d be homeless. Got to your hard. Sell merch. Write songs for other people. Work at Wal Mart. 4 million views in ten years is both an incredible success and not much money. That’s not even taking into account how much money was spent on production/studio time/etc to get 4 million YouTube views in ten years

So traditional music industry is incredibly important to success because they market. They have money to place music where people hear it. Most people don’t search for music they like, they stumble on it passively which means what’s marketed to them. What gets in Spotify playlists. What is on radio and television. What’s used in a major movie. Used by their favorite super popular influencer. Today you have greater access to reaching people but so does everyone else so marketing and networking matter an incredible amount and that’s where traditional music companies come into play

This complaint feels like 2009 again. It was entertaining to me the period of time of younger people complaining about millennial grey/beige. A complete rejection of millennial minimalism to make way for popping colors and crowded tables of purchased knick knacks. Now it’s back to minimalism, spending won’t make you happy. Whatever the latest cope trend is

It sucks but my impression is that people familiar with releasing games on Steam all seem to immediately see why this could happen and gave feedback. Also it doesn’t seem like a beloved early access game in general by those that bought into early access. It had its hype period a long time ago and limped out of early access. Now Valve is trying to help them market

Steam for the most part is the primary marketing platform for indie games. Not just for PC, also PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo because of how lackluster those shops are for discoverability of games that aren’t front page advertised with large thumbnail/poster placements. Success on Steam is viral marketing for other platforms

Still recommendations are always to try to build a following both on and off Steam. Twitter for a while were the major social media accounts indies should spend time building up a following. Now it’s Tiktok. YouTube and Twitch influencers are also a good choice for getting viewers converted to customers but you can’t just pick a popular person, got to be mindful for if their viewers watch for game recommendations or for the personality only. So in that way, it’s not as simple as pay a popular streamer to play your game and their fans will play the game

Regardless Steam is the best for marketing. Steam curators are way smaller than YouTubers, streamers, Tiktok but it’s highly directed at spending customers. Some Steam reviewers have followers. You can follow game developer/publisher pages. That’s how I learn of some games. I get emails and check out publisher Steam pages of games I like.

Until any competitor actually tried to compete with Steam as a service, I’m not going to knock Valve heavily over Steam. They keep improving. Itch is not anything close to marketplace that can compete with Steam. It’s even more barebones of a service than Desura over a decade ago. At the basic level to compete with Steam, it needs a desktop client and social media functionality for developers to build followers. Maybe it needs to open source and join under the Linux foundation or KDE or something to help guide it to the next level

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/lawmakers-tiktok-ban-pro-palestinian-content-1235016101/

Always remember

That’s everything of value. All a well decentralized ledger could do is make it incredibly hard to block transactions, change the parameters for total coin supply and dispersion rate. Don’t know why anyone expected anything in terms of more even wealth distribution. Wealth distribution is determined by off chain factors. Factors no different than any other value store

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