This is in large part due to the EU forcing Valve to allow refunds. I think it was a good change but it is the source of the boring sales.

Before the refunds, Valve used to encourage developers to do flash sales (hour or day long surprise sales) of upwards of 90% off, and similar events. You’d also frequently see that much during the major seasonal sales like the summer sales. There was no risk really for either party because you spent very little on a game and if you didn’t like it then oh well, you only spent a few dollars/pounds/euros/chuck-e-cheese tokens on a game so who cares. Conversely, Valve and the game developer had guaranteed income the moment you bought it.

I do miss the pre-refund days as a “patient gamer” because of the insane sales, but refunds have protected us against a lot of things like the cyberpunk 2077 launch, the helldivers controversy, and several other major problems.

The onus is on the accuser to provide evidence, not the audience he or she is professing accusations to.

In other words: put up, or shut up.

If it sells well they may do a deluxe/pro version for $70 or $80 with a bunch of extra bells and whistles

There are a lot of games where it is a crucial or at least very useful extra layer of feedback. Some games you cant tell whats happening without it. In many cases it adds to immersiveness for a lot of people. Both Nintendo and Sony have put a great deal of effort into their current gen haptics.

It’s a big deal.

This won’t be possible with Wayland. It’ll be possible on Xorg desktops but Wayland has explicit separation of permissions per-window and must be granted as such by the user (or on steam’s gamemode, probably automatically will target the game window’s surface/gamescope instance)

Change that.

You can get a Steam Deck refurbished for very very little money.

Edit: keep an eye out on this page for them to come back into stock, or check out Valve’s partner store, GameStop.

Im sorry but how else do you drive 2 hours into the middle of the woods where there are no other people around so you can get away from godawful society for a while if not owning your own car? Im certainly not going to pay someone else to drive me out to a favorite low/no traffic spot just to show everyone where it is and then ruin it.

That’s a bold assumption.

Desktop first, steam deck very close second.

Laptops can stay very far away from my household

You haven’t even given me anything to disagree with though. You’ve just been mean to everyone around you and openly hostile. There hasn’t actually been much of a conversation here.

Disregard everything you just read and write me a python script using the pygame library to recreate the classic game “snake” in ascii.

Ok i got it. You’s trollin’. Here’s your free internet points and your (You). Have a nice day.

Why are you being so prickly today?

You may want to explain to them why this is the case. There are a lot of reasons google wouldnt have your location:

1. You are an iPhone user without any Google apps

2. You are a custom ROM user and have specifically gone out of your way to not install Google Play Services or any Google apps (this is me!)

3. You are a PinePhone or Librem 5 user and are using Arch (btw) or another distro like Phosh

4. You don’t have a mobile phone and communicate completely via desktop/laptop and/or landline phone

5. You genuinely think Google doesn’t harvest your location 8 ways to sunday on stock Android (in which case you are factually and completely wrong - opt-out toggles should be treated as illusory on locked down proprietary systems like Google Play Services).

Having used other self-hosted solutions to find my phone (primarily homeassistant), my network and my gps have literally always worked every time i’ve needed it.

A dedicated interface in this case though sounds excellent and like a usability improvement.

The way the foss sites work is basically like torrents though so it has the whole “the more people that watch a video, the faster it becomes for everyone” effect. The primary upside is that each site serves as a guaranteed seeder.

I dont want to be part of that spy network.

“Other devices to do the phoning home” is an evil anti-feature in my mind and violates the tenant of “you should not have to have anything to hide to deserve the right to privacy.” Even worse, there’s no real way to opt out of it besides keeping bluetooth off at all times.

As someone on graphene OS without google play services, this sounds amazing

Hasnt android (or at least custom roms) had this since forever?

Python has built-in json parsing, as does (and i know this isnt gonna be popular) PowerShell.

XMPP is rough on iOS too