Totally! The market has spoken!

It just so happens that all major service providers have the same 30% figure irrespective of their specific vertical focus, the geographic component of their industry or even the developments in their vertical over the past 20-25 years?

That’s how a market works! Right?

P.S. You can also set it to 100% (you physical can if you want), that’s not what we are discussing though.

I meant market in the real sense not the American polemical form.

A real market-driven price/cut is determined by supply and demand, the 30% figure was chosen by some American oligarchs that Valve decided to copy.

Have you ever wondered why it’s not 29.1% or 34.5% and the 30% figure never changes (other than than for well connected insiders?). How can market driven price never change, especially in a highly dynamic globalized market like gaming?

This looks really cool (I enjoy Port Royale), no saving/loading is a bit of blocker for me though in strategy games (even demoes).

Hope to hear more about your game.

Steam/Valve are not the good guys, they seem more normal because they are not complete shit like all other large gaming companies.

The 30% cut is clearly not market driven. Network effects are not an inherent property of Steam itself.

They also pioneered lootboxes and tried to do their best to scam on refunds (typical American bullshit).

This may be true, but forms of social organisation can and do change and improve.

It’s not possible to put the genie back into the bottle, so to speak, when it comes to technology.

You can have both, convenience and DRM-free games via something like GOG installer packages. It’s even relatively easy to patch them to work on modern systems. It would be best if the updates were present in the installers, but you got to start somewhere.

You can’t have that with optical discs or Nintendo style DRM’d broken SD cards.

You don’t need physical media at all. You can still buy MP3 / FLACs without being tied to a streaming provider (it’s pretty universal at least with electronic music).

So you’ve played it?

How can you trust PR contractor output? This is not even a Star Citizen thing, one does not take advertisement and press releases literally.

It has been crowdfunded by all the contributions that went toward Star Citizen

That’s not true. You don’t know how much went to the Roberts family and inventors (which have extremely beneficial put options as per published financial reporting). It’s a fact that Chris Robert lied about the scope and nature of external investment.

Heart of Darkness

You’re saying SQ42 will be like Heart of Darkness?

I find this difficult to believe. What makes you say that?

From my perspective, just a mere dark and foreboding presentation doesn’t mean anything. Wing Commander: The Movie was supposed to be serious, but it transforms more into an unintentional comedy for trash space sci-fi and b-movie nerds.

better than anticipated actually

In what way? Genuinely curious? What was the expectation and why was it overcome?

Some games beat out the vast majority of Hollywood. A small selection (with a focus on more indie titles, because that’s I play):

Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream Citizen Sleeper I (and to a lesser extent II, albeit if II was released first it would beat I) Lone Survivor Cloudpunk Don’t Escape Consortium Age of Decadence Roadwarden

Didn’t know about that.

That being said if you look at any of the advertisement videos released by CIG; It’s all very vanilla. More so considering that their video advertisement budget is almost certainly very substantial even in a relative basis.

Ignoring the political context (which I actually agree with), Roberts has always had those pompous militaristic themes in a space sci-fi setting posture. It’s almost what makes Wing Commander the movie so good (it’s so bad that it’s fun sense).

I am actually a big fan of Chris Roberts’ Wing Commander movie. Freddie Prinze Jr., Matthew Lillard, Saffron Burrows :) ; trash sci-fi, the space bulldozer, weird cat aliens, hiding your spaceship in an asteroid while getting hit by WW2 era anti-submarine bombs, this is top class stuff if you are a connoisseur of sci-fi b-movies.

I still remember catching the movie on TV (I wonder why it was available on TV even in my country so close to the release), I tuned in during the scene in the early part of the movie where they were flying through some gravitational bla bla to get on the Tiger Claw. Fun times.

Unfortunately PR contractors report that just the intro is 5 hours of cutscenes. I don’t know if I will have the patience to watch 50 hours of cutscenes even in second monitor mode. 50 hours of scifi b-movie trash in video game cutscene form is a whole different proposition from 2 hours of laughs.

I honestly wouldn’t mind if investor types were duped into giving Chris Roberts money for a Wing Commander II movie. I would even go to the cinema to watch it.

Damn, it’s been almost 25 years (and going to be 30 years since HL1 soon).

I am wondering, how did I watch the video back in the day?

This is actully a pretty funny game even though it’s an FPS.

Fair point, with Steam sales, I don’t really feel the need to resell.

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

Corrupt:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/03/google-and-epic-look-to-bury-the-hatchet-with-new-app-store-settlement/

That’s just the annoying American style of corruption (I say this as someone who is not American but who has lived in North America for ~10 years).

Dishonest:

https://www.thegamer.com/tim-sweeney-grok-controversy/

Specifically:

This is a vile lie by PC Gamer. I criticized a government official for pressuring Apple and Google to block a speech app owned by their political opponent, deplatforming 500,000,000 users on the pretense of stopping a small number of users from distributing disgusting content.

This is clear bullshit aimed at local (i.e. American) degenerates.

When Elon Musk went on a crusade against texty (a tiny Ukrainian new source), did genuine free speech believer Tim Sweeney care? Of course not, because American polemics about alleged beliefs in “free speech” are lies.