Oh wow. That’s even worse than Falcom’s policy regarding composers. Are they really that afraid their staff will get poached? Or are they being so cheap that they just don’t want them to get the raises that accompany the rise in fame?

Well, I have some good news for you!

The transitions between these eras will offer the chance to select a fresh civilization, with a range of options determined by your previous choices.

Wait a minute. I feel like I’ve seen that one before…

Oh well, fair enough. Humankind drew heavily on Civ in its design anyway.

Thank you for the link! It helped putting things into proper nuance and context (indcluding throwing away that ridiculous notion that the ‘Steam Store’ and the ‘Steam Gaming Platform’ are two completly different things in different markets).

However, reading the whole thing, it sounds to me like while the court dismissed some of the claims (1 to 4 and 7 apparently), they agreed that Wolfire and the other plaitiffs had the right to ‘plausibly allege unlawful conduct’ about the ‘Most-favored-nations restraints’ (the part where Steam forces publishers to set prices on all stores without steam keys being involved) without mentioning anything more on the subject.

I’m not americain so I’m not sure if I understand correctly, but that means the ruling isn’t over and it’ll go into an appeal court, right?

Um, I’ve read the complaint from top to bottom and it claims way more than just ‘Valve wouldn’t give them keys to resell’ if they’re not at the same price as on steam. It also claims Valve puts a ‘Price Veto’ clause which allows them to delist games from Steam if the publisher gives bigger sales on other platforms, even if they do not using steam keys, which does sound super uncompetitive to me.

Although I’ll agree the evidence listed in the complaint seem a bit on the light side. Do you know if the trial happened yet? And if so, do you know where I can find what resolution they reached?

The only downside is that it’s not really supported anywhere at all yet. But I do hope it becomes a real thing some day.

AFAIK there’s a lot of talk about making GNU Taler the basis for the ‘digital Euro’ which is curently being debated at the EU Parliement.

I feel like that’s just a very loud minority among those who play games. As you’ve so stated, the majority of people who play these games either do not care for politics in video games, and another subset prefer it that way.

If even the greediest of companies in the video game industry keep doing that, that means they’ve analyzed the market and having politics in video games might have between no to a positive impact on sales.

AI may have its uses, but the easy counterpoint to your argument is to look at FTX at its peak and where it is now (bankrupt). The stock exchange is the exact opposite of rational, and is terrible at estimating the use one can get out of tech.

*some. While as much as I heavily dislike this party and their positions, I don’t think they’re all just okay with fachism. There’s been a great number of high ranking officials from that party who denounced this proposal when it was announced out of nowhere on live TV yesterday.

Basically, Les Republicains (Trad-conservative right wing) is the descendant party of De Gaulle, chief of the French Free Forces and probably the most iconic french figure in WW2. This party has an history with fighting fachism, so this twist of position (which is not that surprising from the guy that proposed it) goes against the party’s tradition and heritage (ironicly).

It’s been making headwaves here, and he does NOT have the support of his party in this endeavour. If someone were to speculate, the more likely outcomes of this decision would be a party splinter or even the death of the party itself (considering that since 2017, they’ve really lost a lot of their electorate whose moderates went to Macron and extremists to Le Pen) than an alliance with Far Right.

Though honestly? There’s been so many twists in the past two days that anything’s possible at this point.

Ehh… a proper political analyst would probably add some nuance to that, but that’s a kind of how it feels (the austerity measures were like pills forced down our throats that only made us sicker). Keep in mind there are other factors in play like:

• billionaires buying out more and more newspapers/TV channels and giving far right way more coverage than any other party
• beyond wealth gap increase, inflation being on the rise + the disastruous state of the housing market made people poorer and poorer
• the soc-dems have messed up their presidency back in 2012 and the traditional right wing having imploded after a big scandal and Macron’s surge
• Russia apparently paying huge desinformation campaigns here

… and probably some more I forgot to add.

Honestly (that’s just my personal opinion but) with the way he’s been acting in the past few weeks after polls gave Far Right far ahead of his party, Macron’s been looking more and more and more desperate. He tried debates between his PM and the Far Right candidate, made a big speech 2 days before the election to plea against far right (a speech in which were pointed out his many contradictions), his PM intervined out of the blue in a debate between each party’s lead EU MEP (most awkward moment in a political debate I’ve ever seen, denounced by every journalist union).

His popularity has been dwindling (with reason) since 2017 and only won the 2022 elections by virtue of not being far right (and the people refused to give him majority in the parliement in exchange). In the past two years, he’s been enacting austerity measure after austerity measure several of which with zero approval, bypassed parliement to get them into law, and barely avoided having his governement destituted (by parliement) by the skin of his teeth. And you know what’s worst? His austerity measures didn’t even ‘save public finances’ because following each of them, he gave additional tax breaks to companies, which means our budget deficit is in a worse shape than it was in 2017.

Long story short, he’s been playing stupid games for the last few years, and the stupid price is that Far Right is now the first party in France and nobody has a clue on how to get them down bar them completely failing at ruling.

(Of course it isn’t just his fault that Far Right is on the rise, but he IS a pretty big cause)

Well, it’s a risky move. Especially since just tonight, Far Right won by a landslide in the EU Parliement elections, so it’s likely the results will play against him.

Many of us (in the french subs) think it might be an attempt on his part to get far right into power through the parliment to show electors that all they spout is bull, and make them to suffer hard losses in the 2027 presidential elections.

Edit: some news drop and he apparently believes he can make big wins in this one. We’ll see if this bet will pay off, but personally, I sincerly doubt it will ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

His party lost hard in the EU Parliement elections tonight. The last legislative elections in France were a few years ago, and this is the one he’s calling for right now.

Not PM, president. It’s part of the constitution to be able to dissolve the National Assembly.

Remeber when Microsoft banned some Xbox players for screenshots they took in singleplayer, local games? Because it turns out all screenshots were uploaded to the cloud without properly informing users?

Naaah… no way they’re going to do that again.

idk most politicians are a threat to the environement like AI (if not even more so with their moronic laws)

More or less, yes.

I think the issue is the same as Apple being anti-competitive about the AppStore. Sure, techically, both Steam and the PSN are platforms for selling games, but they’re each restricted to specific non-overlapping platforms (respictively PC and PlayStation) where there they have a (near for Steam, absolute for PSN) monopoly. Hence, anticompetitive behavior.

To my knowledge, this hasn’t been the case for nearly a decade, after the backlash they received specifically for it.