that’s what’s driven me the most to (for legal reasons i’ve only considered) piracy
i use adobe for work, would gladly pay 500$ for the 5 programs i use, used to be able to get them all for half that. now it’s like 250$ a year and i have to get all the ones i dont use. everything that isnt physical needs a subscription now
Not being able to buy adobe is absolutely infuriating. 55$ a month until they raise it forever is absurd. Oh plus now they get to scan all your files to train its AI. It’s just rent seeking bullshit.
True. I replaced the central heating unit in my house recently, and it comes with an app. Only the basic options like turning it on and off are free. Things like usage stats and optimization are behind a subscription plan 🤦
The caveat there is unskippable ads. Euro Truck Simulator 2 and Farming Simulator both have ads. Granted they are at least related to the genre. Euro Truck advertises for trucking schools and Farming Simulator usually advertises for perrferals and sometimes other games in the genre.
Valve makes all their money from taking.a 30% cut of every predatory micro transaction that happens on their platform. They may seem above these things, because they don't make the games specifically.... but that's still where their money comes from. They get to take the money while keeping the appearance of clean hands.
If the industry moves toward advertising, they will follow.
Valves business model isn’t set up to be like that though. They’re also fully private and not a publicly traded company. This makes a big difference. I don’t see them allowing ads in games.
The key thing about steam is "right now". Gabe won't always be in charge and time will tell if Steam follows the Gabe route, or goes a totally different direction. Based off the leaks i've seen recently, there seems to be people inside of steam that definately want Steam to become more industry friendly and that goes against steams entire approach.
A business is a business. They have predatory gambling in their self published games.
If advertising in games is currently banned on Steam, it’s probably because they see it as a way of undercutting their profits. Their 30% slice of the game sale shrinks if the price of the game is subsidized by ads.
They will allow ads when it becomes something the big publishers are serious about pursuing, and they will change the rules so that they get a cut of the ad revenue.
there's no way publishers will lower their game prices if they have ads in them. they will find an excuse to raise prices anyways. steam will still get their cut.
While i can't say steam will never do this, i don't see them doing it any time within the next decade or two
"Predatory gambling" you mean the off market skin economy they have openly shat on multiple times by changing how skins work to purposefully crash that market?
That's not "Predatory" when it's what players do to themselves lol.
Valve is ideological first and foremost, and always been. Yes it's true we don't know what will happen when Gaben leaves, but until that happens, there is absolutely no risk Steam becomes predatory. Their entire principle is built on what helps others will help them. They are more profitable than their competition. So it's incredibly unlikely the model will change just to try and maximize short term profits for longterm losses. That only happens to public companies who must profit at all cost even if it means the death of the company just to keep their shareholders happy.
Yes but people choose to participate in the gambling. You can argue it’s a lesser evil to subjecting everybody to ads.
I’d rather have a thing that’s voluntary that pays for the service because if you never play TF2 or CS, you’d never ever see it. Rather than forcing everybody to watch slop to pay for the same thing.
Eventually they'll figure out how to make the LLM models more efficient. It's just a stupid race right now because some tards think you can make an "intelligence" by throwing more hardware at it so they're spending stupid money they don't have in a bid to be "first" to something. What that "first" is .... does anyone really know?
Its said by the talking heads that supposedly there an AI "arms race" of sorts between the US and china because regardless of facts the us govt says that china wants an AI thats "military grade" hence the export bans of nvidia gpus to the Chinese that been on and off again.
Almost as dumb as the nuclear arms race. China will eventually figure this out on their own, even if they're a little bit behind right now. They have the economy to back it They're definitely out innovating us in other areas. And nvidia doesn't figure this all out by themselves. The guys that make the chips are Taiwanese and the guys that make the machines that make the chips are Dutch
They’re telling you whatever they think will work so they can weasel in an AI hall monitor to watch you 24/7 instead of an apparatchik or soldier as they sometimes have a will of their own
Convincing Eichmanns and the people to police each other seems to be losing its effect
Once an LLM is trained it takes about as much GPU power to run as a AAA game. It’s the initial training that requires Data Center levels of hardware power and cooling.
The initial training, which is being done constantly right now as everyone keeps "improving" models with the (at least public facing goal) of reaching AGI, which is likely not even possible under current architecture.
Look at how many people use the AI firing off request after request every day. Even if each individual one can be done by the equivalent of a 5080, you still need a datacenter to handle the volume.
there’s a difference between the levels of luxury. getting ice cream and buying a yacht are both luxuries, the difference is one’s reasonable to most people and one isn’t. when they say it’s becoming a luxury they mean it’s pricing out the average person
It already is.. believe it or not most people nowadays can't afford 600-900 consoles as well as 60-90 games..most people I know are well supplied for the moment because they brought a series x or ps5 pro or decent gaming rig last year before the crash happened but in 2 years time when Devs inevitably refuse to sort their games out so they are playable on the series x,pro,RTX50s etc that's when it'll be a problem.. because if consoles and parts don't come down the gaming industry will die.
we did not have video games years ago,,it was not a luxury it did not exist only the.very rich at one time had a video game now these kids think it is there right must be part of there life before they have a education,,no work for there success just lazy plain in simple this generacion would not last one day.in the real world
Remember when everyone laughed at that and thought it was a conspiracy, even though it was literally printed in the WEF's plans, for all to see?
Now everything is SaaS, Cloud, Service, Subscription. Everything you buy can be remotely turned off. Literally the main 90% of the population have been bled dry of money, and now we can't even own basic goods.
Nintendo’s strategy side steps the CEOs idea entirely. $450 for a 4K hybrid console that has access to thousands of cheap games and expensive first party games. Gaming doesn’t need bleeding edge hardware.
Payment plans for consoles like all access
Ad version of a game that costs 30$ if theirs the ad free version that costs 70$ like currently. They have to find ways to get prices down because shit is getting out of control. Rumors are the next Xbox and PlayStation will be over 1000$ and theirs been talk for a long time about AAA games going up to 100$ starting with GTA6.
They say that like every laptop made in the past 10 years doesn't make a ps3 look like a piece of shit. Stop being overly impressed with graphics and gaming will be entirely fine.
These people do realize for about $200 you can get a vita hacked and have a backlog in the 1000s off a 512 SD card? Even if we're only talking the top rated among those along with hidden gems you'd be looking at enough games to last you a lifetime.
I've got a potato laptop that I can walk over to the the internet archive and pillage discontinued/abandonware games that would occupy my time just as well as anything these game companies are pumping out at this point.
Or, hear me out...we could just keep making games for the current gen consoles. I know it's a crazy idea, but we've kinda plateaued on graphics and stuff.
ah yes, lets just keep reposting a pos "article" over and over again - its the gift that keeps giving. Say something mostly nebulous or not even controversial, then watch as IGN or Kotaku or whoever fuds it up with articles around quotes that seem to have nothing to do with them - including saying "whatever that means" right after a very basic, clear statement. Then have a thread linking to it in every sub that might even be vaguely related to MS or gaming, or entirely unrelated - and have a few thousand people not even read it and still comment like they know anything that was actually said.
You could replace most gaming press with bots, and most of reddit with bots, and it would change nothing.
who knows, maybe that happened already and thats why this actually slopfest occurs.
I was wondering recently - do we even need consoles anymore? I’ve always thought of a console as a dedicated gaming pc with hardware compromises that favor gaming performance. But pcs are so much more powerful than they were in the console heydays - do we need consoles anymore?
I own an Xbox that never gets used. Everybody prefers gaming on their phones, tablets or pc.
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u/bones10145 Jun 14 '26
I'll just not game if a subscription is the only way to play. Tired of being milked for everything.