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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: December 4th, 2025

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  • This is stupid. Valve telling developers “you can’t sell your game cheaper on other platforms than on steam” is taking the cake away alone.

    First of all, that’s not entirely true - valve is demanding price parity, meaning long-term undercutting steam is not allowed (something absolutely normal in almost any larger e-commerce scenario btw), but they have no problem if you have sales or value-added offers on other platforms. Now, you can think about price parity what you think, I’m not the biggest fan of it either, but it’s a very common practice, not exclusive to steam and has nothing to do with anti-trust.

    You somehow keep ignoring the fact that valve makes more money than any other corporation per employee. They are clearly over-charging and you cannot argue against this

    I ignored it because it’s a retarded metric. Yeah, guess what, if you automate a lot, you’re going to need less employees. I have no clue how that has any relevance in if a product is worth it or not. I’m pretty sure the v-servers I’m renting from hetzner involve nobody, it’s all automated, from purchase to setup - should I get it for free now? Would it be fine to have a 30% cut if valve employed like 1000 more people or what is the logic here?

    Stop defending megacorporations.

    I’m not defending megacorporations, I just don’t agree with you at all. Fundamentally, you are saying “making money bad” which is just a naive and highly uneducated argument to have.


  • 30% cut was fine when infrastructure was just not there yet, but 64GB HDD no longer costs 100€ and internet is not metered in megabytes.

    Steam isn’t just storing stuff and letting people download it. They’re an entire distribution network. There’s not just the tech (which is already expensive in itself), but also the entire legal stuff. Invoicing, legal compliance, fraud prevention, chargeback processing, the customer support (which actually got fairly helpful in the last 2 years) etc.

    If you genuinely think Valve and Gabe’s fleet of Yachts is not monopolistic squeezing/pricing

    It’s not. Valve has not adjusted their pricing once, at least not upwards. They have reduced the pricing for extremely high-grossing games, but other than that, the price has stuck at 30%. How is that squeezing? Wouldn’t that make them INCREASE the percentage point instead of leaving it where it is?

    Also, it’s funny that you talk about “monopolistic”, because epic has probably engaged in more monopolistic behavior with the EGS than steam ever has. And if we compare the features of the EGS (which didn’t even have a shopping cart for the first year of it’s existence) with the feature set of steam, I can absolutely see that a 30% cut is fine.

    Now, could they lower it? Probably. But 30% is still worth it for any indie dev and significantly less than any other entity with the size and reach of steam would take for all their services.


  • They introduced a feature, the community didn’t like it, and they canceled it a few days later because of that feedback. What exactly is the problem? Making a mistake and rectifying it within days is not a bad thing at all.

    Users are just more tolerant towards Valve than any other platform because of the cheap games they can buy during a sale

    If that was the case, people would be extremely tolerant towards the epic game store which regularly throws out games for free, but they aren’t.


  • “doing nothing”

    Global distribution of exabytes of data, handling the entire e-commerce side and offering great toolings with steamworks while requiring onyl 100 dollars upfront is now considered “nothing”. Yeah, we should definitely go back to a time when steam wasn’t a thing and indie devs were required to have a publisher to even get their games into stores, and those publishers often took 80% of the entire profits. I’m sure indies had a much better time back then when they didn’t have to pay steam!





  • With indexes, so can MySQL or MariaDB. That’s why I said “unoptimized”. Postgres is certainly superior when it comes to more complex or analytical queries, but that’s because MySQL/MariaDB simply weren’t MADE for these kind of situations. And even postgres will struggle with an unoptimized, data-intensive workload. I’ve seen those in the wild.

    It’s like shipping a formula 1 car into the desert and wondering why you’re last in the desert rally.









  • There’s a lot of options. There’s countless paid services that offer exactly that.

    If you wanna build something yourself for free, you could probably set up a site accessible via HTTP on your server and create a script on your phone that pings it every 30 seconds or so. Afaik, termux has a termux-notification function that lets you send a notification.

    Codewise, it would look somewhere like this I think:

    #!/usr/bin/env bash  
    
    # Config 
    NOTIFY_TITLE="Server Alert"  
    NOTIFY_MESSAGE="Server returned a non‑200 status."  
    
    HOST="funnysite.com"  
    PORT=8080  
    PATH="/healtcheck"  
    
    URL="http://${HOST}:${PORT}${PATH}"  
    # Config  
    
    HTTP_CODE=$(curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" "$URL")  
    
    if [[ "$HTTP_CODE" != "200" ]]; then  
        termux-notification -t "$NOTIFY_TITLE" -c "$NOTIFY_MESSAGE $HOST:$PORT"  
    fi  
    
    exit 0  
    

    Afaik, termux doesn’t ship the cron daemon, but you can install cronie or use an external task scheduler. There, just set to run the script every 60 seconds or so. Whatever you need.

    I haven’t tested anything of this, but in my head, it sounds like it should work fine.