(2025 is “The year of the Windows 11 PC refresh,” allegedly)

Wait. Since when has Microsoft’s Windows team been drinking from the same copium jars as us Linux users have for years?

That’s hilarious.

They can probably try, but much like this case, it’s very unlikely it will get anywhere.

Sure, but that’s tangential to their market position relative to their competitors. CS2 loot boxes are a problem, but they’re not responsible for Steam being the biggest PC game store.

You are completely right. What I meant, is that since PC Gaming is only considered a subset of PC & Console gaming market (as opposed to, say, Mobile gaming), if it were to grow in share within said market, it will likely attract the eyes of regulators who could improve the current situation.

Sorry if I wasn’t clear before.

Username does NOT check out. You give too many.

You can block the main mastodon instances if you find it THAT horrible. No more hashtags in your feed then.

Regulation isn’t just about breaking them up. I was more thinking along the line of applying the DMA and DSA to Steam proper, which would only lead to benefits for us. The presence of the speculation casino that is the Steam Market into the hands of kids without any regulation is nuts, and that’s not saying anything about the current hypertoxic state of the Steam Community forums. That’s not okay, and Valve seems reluctant to fix that (the former becausr it brings them a metric ton of money, and the latter probably to avoid pissing off the gamergate libertarian crowd). Regulation could force them to do so.

I’m not sure. The courts intends for Google to sell Chrome, not Chromium. Even if they gave guarentees that Chromium will become independant, the coourt’s likely to tell them to sell Chrome anyway (as they could still apply monopolistic practices like service bundling without control over Chromium, not to mention they could ‘fork’ LF’s Chromium later to make their own).

The way I see it, this is more Google being scared shitless about Chrome’s new owner being shitty, promote their own services instead of Google’s, and disrespect web standards (or depecreates the ‘standards’ Google implemented in Chromium without the approval of other browers, or standard bodies). That could cause MASSIVE issues for them, and the loss of business that could cause would be tremendous, in a way that’s far worse than giving up control on Chromium.

To me, his seems more like the nuclear option of Google saying that if they can’t own Chromiulm, then nobody can as a way to cut their losses.

Stephen Shankland’s report from 2020 notes a number of people suggesting that Chromium as a whole could be moved out of Google entirely and into an independent foundation, such as the Linux Foundation. That’s not what is happening now, but it’s another step toward larger organization outside of the web’s dominant browser and advertising provider (though Google is still one of the supporters).

One can only hope this is the first step toward a larger trend. LF stewardship of the Chromium project wouldn’t be perfect, but it’s still much better than the current situation of it being controlled by one company, be it Google or whoever they’ll forced to sell Chrome to.

That’s a good point. The number of Switches sold does nearly match Steam’s MAU.

Every Switch is handheld, but how many people are they capturing, or will they soon capture, that care very little about Nintendo games and just want to play games handheld?

Every Switch owner I know has bought at least one Nintendo game over its lifetime, and often several. According to the best selling Switch games list, it’s safe to assume at least one in every two Switch owner has bought Nintendo games for it. Is it due to the marketing and advertisement coming from the fact they own the platform, or that they’re still the kings of both casual and family friendly couch gaming? I suppose indie is strongly catching up, at least on the former but the latter might be more difficult.

I have a feeling that the “port everything to the Switch” crowd won’t really exist anymore in a world where that game already plays on a similarly-priced PC handheld without having to beg the developers first.

Wouldn’t that be nice? Given that PS and Xbox exclusives now all make their way onto PC to the point we barely have to ask anymore. Though if we were to reach that point, I’d seriously worry about the centralisation of the Steam market. Hopefully regulation will catch up soon.

Nintendo’s unbeatable advantage will always be its first-party games, but the Switch 2 — a device rumored to be a fairly light improvement over its predecessor — doesn’t quite feel like it’ll be as culturally dominant as the Switch was in 2017.

That remains to be seen. Back in 2016-2017, every gaming media was skeptical that the Switch would be anywhere near as much of a success like the DS or the GameBoy had been, or if it was going to be another failure like the Wii U.

Why buy a game on PS5 when you can get it on Steam and have access to it on any number of devices?

That has been one of the arguments for PC gaming in a long time, but it never quite reached the console players’ mindset. Not to mention that, despite its dominance in game distribution, Valve and the Steam brand are nowhere near as recognizable as any of the other ‘big 3’. The Steam Deck may have sold a few million copies (four or five from what I hear?), but it’s nowhere near the hundreds of millions of Switches, even in sale pace nowadays. I can’t see it take less than a decade for that mindset to start changing change and competitors and regulation to get interested, and even that’s an optimistic estimate.

Still, it’s good to hear the platform exlusivity walls are finally breaking down.

That’s some title gore and a half. They apologized for baning people who were flagged as cheaters for using ‘compatibility layers’ (clearly Wine/Proton) and unbanned them.

I’d argue it’s not useless, rather, it would remove any financial incentive for these companies to sink who knows how much into training AI. By putting them on the public domain, they would loose their competitve advantage over other cloud providers who could exploit it all the same, all the while not disturbing the current usage of AI.

Now, I do agree that destroying it would be even better, but I fear something like that would face too much force back by the parts of civil society who do use AI.

Wait, wasn’t he the one who mandated musicians should not be credited for their tracks in Falcom games?

Does that mean that this policy could be repelled?

Heavy recommendation for Portal: Revolutions. It’s one of those super fun storied Portal 2 mods like Stories: Mel, if you like this kind of thing!

The abortion one is nearing the necessary support. Otherwise, they have a list of initiatives they’ve already answered.

Lots of really cool stuff there, sad to see that not all of them get traction troughout the EU (tax the rich my beloved :( )

2 ans ? Tu oublies les élections législatives de l’année prochaine lors de la nouvelle dissolution. Aucun parti ne veut paraitre “faible” ou “comprométant” par rapport au soutien de leur base, car ça pourait leur éclater à la figure pendant la campagne.

Les centristes sont conscients que aujourd’hui, le groupe dont l’unité est la plus fragile, c’est eux. Aux élections législatives de cete année, sans le front republicain, il n’y aurait pas eux de bloc centriste. S’allier avec le NFP pour former un gouvernement ne ferait que les rendre plus légitime comme “la seule alternative au RN”. S’allier au RN, à l’inverse, ferait à 100% exploser leur coalition, et donnerait à tous les membres du NFP une balle gratuite du genre “Macron = RN”.

Bref, tout le monde joue un jeu de dupe pour ne pas gouverner et apparaitre légitime pour 2025. Et en vérité, si Macron était malin, il nomerais Lucie Castets et la laisserais se casser la geule toute seule avec une motion de censure imédiate pour renforcer sa position. C’est pas comme si il en avait quoi que soit à foutre de la stabilité de notre régime ou de l’inflation aux vue de tout ce qui s’est passé ces dernières années.

Yeah, I don’t see the NFP (left alliance) collapsing over this. Both them and the RN rn only has the 2027 2025 elections in their mind and want to break the current stalemate by dismantling the centrist coalition, one way or the other.

The socialists have zero interest in breaking away from the NFP with whom they’ve only been gaining legitimacy to join Macron’s sinking ship.

What options does that actually leave? Well, Macron could play coy and the clock by nominating Barnier again (or someone worse, like Manuel Vals, or a member of Cioti (right-far)'s party, which would be the biggest insult to the elections in our history) until he can dissolve the parliement again… or he could resign.

The next weeks aren’t going to be fun.

You’d be suprised. A few years back in France, there were trials on hate speech involving death threats, and the 13 people who were brought in court were aged between 18 and 31.

And I remember and article (though was unable to find it again), that spoke about the many groups of 60+ y.o. people that spewed a lot of hate speech and death threats on Facebook.

À mettre en relation avec un article du Monde qui vient de qortir aujourd’hui :

« Le dilemme » : faut-il quitter X ?

Yikes. 59% des français trouvent que la police n’a pas assez de pouvoir ? 44% qu’il devrait y avoir une ‘préférence nationale’ (???) à l’emploi ?

Le cordon sanitaire entre le camp du président de la République, Emmanuel Macron, et l’extrême droite n’a jamais semblé si friable. Près d’un sympathisant sur deux (47 %) de la coalition présidentielle adhère aux constats faits par Marine Le Pen, sans forcément adhérer aux solutions. Ce chiffre était seulement de 29 % chez les sympathisants de Renaissance, le parti présidentiel, en 2023.

Ah, là voila d’où vient l’augmentation. +18% des electeurs macronistent tolèrent le RN.

Les sondés sont désormais 39 % à considérer le Nouveau Front populaire (NFP) comme la principale force d’opposition au gouvernement de Michel Barnier, contre 34 % qui désignent le RN. Signe d’un possible trouble chez les électeurs lepénistes : un quart d’entre eux considèrent que le NFP représente la première opposition au gouvernement.

Bon au moins il y a ça. C’est quand même fou que 34% considèrent encore le RN dans l’opposition alors qu’ils auraient pu faire tomber ce gouvernement dès qu’ils le voulaient.

Quelle horreur.