Yes, like refunds it’ll probably get sorted the first time someone’s estate with a bit of money tries to will it to someone and then they take Valve to court/make a complaint to the EU.

https://publicknowledge.org/eu-court-when-you-buy-software-you-own-it/

The EU has already taken care of it.

The Court of Justice of the European Union found that a
copyright owner exhausts the right of distribution to a copy of a computer
program once he sells, or authorizes the sale of, the copy. This means that whoever purchased the
computer program can resell it and the copyright holder cannot control the
resale of the copy. The Court found that
this exhaustion principle applies whether the copy is on a tangible medium like
a CD-ROM or DVD or an intangible download from the Internet, and it also
applies to corrected and updated programs that the copyright owner sells. Furthermore, the Court made clear that contract
clauses that deny the customer the right to transfer his copy of the computer
program are void.

https://www.ngo-monitor.org/ngos/euro-med-human-rights-monitor/

The best method I’ve found for using it is to help you with languages you may have lost familiarity in and to walk it through what you need step by step. This lets you evaluate it’s reasoning. When it gets stuck in a loop:

Try A!
Actually A doesn’t work because that method doesn’t exist.
Oh sorry Try B!
Yeah B doesn’t work either.
You’re right, so sorry about that, Try A!
Yeah… we just did this.

at that point it’s time to just close it down and try another AI.

Nothing stops a private company from becoming shitty. They still enjoy profit. Valve isn’t your friend, despite whatever image they try to project.

Approaching this from a developer point of view, let’s talk about how Valve has changed and what they do.

Many people will point to how Steam removed Greenlight and made it easy for indie developer to just put out whatever they wanted. The problem is Valve tends to treat indie developers like the dirt on their shoe and let well known devs skate on their requirements and policies. A lot of people don’t know that one of Valve’s requirements for screenshots is that they be of actual gameplay. I can’t count the number of store pages I’ve seen for unreleased games from well known studios that contain screenshots, or are entirely made up of screenshots, that clearly aren’t gameplay. Things that are either cinematic shots, or simply from angles that wouldn’t allow any gameplay at all, etc.

Meanwhile indie devs get their pages and games rejected for absolutely trivial reasons. A couple of great things I can highlight is them rejecting some library assets because ‘the UI can be seen’. The library assets were generated from screenshots using Unreal’s Hires screenshot tool. It’s incapable of capturing the UI. That’s kind of its thing. Another rejection came from them saying ‘You claimed the game has full gamepad support, but when we tried it in local multiplayer the first player had to use the keyboard and mouse while the second player used a gamepad’. I sent them back a screenshot of the start button which had a checkbox beside it which said: “First player uses keyboard and mouse”, because I wanted people to be able to play local multiplayer even if they only had a single gamepad. I could give a dozen more examples of absolute nonsense from Steam support in getting that game released, but it was was all of that type. Their support is inconsistent and abysmal.

Most recently trying to get taxes figured out with them because I moved from one country to another. I went back and forth with them went through a bunch of steps only to be finally told ‘oh we can’t actually update your account fully to the new country, you’ll have to make a new account for the new country with the new business information’. So I did that, but oh… the only way to do that was to buy an app credit. And I’d already bought the app credit on the original account because it was supposed to work. Took 2 more days of back and forth before they’d let me transfer that to the other account.

Steams in-game purchase support is laughable. Yes they technically have it. But as a developer, it makes no sense to use it. They take 30% to do nothing more than maintain a transaction record. You still need to keep a server on your own that matches that transaction to unlocked content the user has. Looking at that, we questioned why even use Steam for that? We now have a system set up on our own website where players can purchase things, we use a payment processor that only costs like 3%, and now players have a completely portable DLC account. When we release on other platforms later, players can just use the same content they’ve already bought.

From a consumer point of view. There are things they do, that I don’t particularly like. The trashy meme ‘curators’ they tried to shove down our throat for the longest time. Trying to label any concentrated negative reviews a ‘review bomb’ regardless of whether or not it was related to legitimate criticism of the game, the march towards mediocrity with the sales.

But they gave us refunds! Only because it started as a legal issue in one place and it was just easier for them to just roll that out worldwide with the absolute bare minimum of effort.

There is no way you could look at the state of Valve sales in the early 2010s, compare them to now and think that they haven’t gotten shittier. They used to be an event. The flash sales kept people coming back all the time, they had things going on on the website, the scavenger hunts, the mini games, etc. But they can’t have refunds and flash sales at the same time! Sure they can. You’re entitled to a refund. There is no law requiring they sell you a game over and over again. Absolutely nothing prevents them from saying ‘If you refund a game during this sale, you can’t buy it again until the sale is over’.

People were engaged. now the Steam sale is just ‘meh’. This hurts developers as well. Especially smaller developers. People flood the website the first hour of the sale, check what’s on sale, and then put the sale out of their mind for the next 2 weeks until its over. Because it never changes. Smaller devs greatly benefited from the high engagement and the ‘event’ of the sale. Users kept coming back. The more they come back the greater the chance there was that some of them might come across your game.

Reposting things from reddit that have been posted there over 1000 times.

Big surprise that Crema has stepped in it again. They’ve been pretty awful since this game started. I can still remember when they first rolled out the bans and insisted their would be no appeal because their ban process was never wrong. The CEO aggressively defended it, and it wasn’t very long before community managers were walking that back admitting some people had to be unbanned.

Their discord was run by dictators as a meme that cropped up around a botched patch resulted in the mods going nuts and banning anyone who mentioned it, and the steam forums were the same. They had a gaggle of fanboys who’d attack anyone who said a bad word about the game, and if anyone talked back to them one of the developers would come along and ban them.

It was such a great idea ran by absolutely awful people.

France is pretty strict on that. Apparently men can’t wear trunk style swimming bottoms. I’m not sure how they handle the burkini vs rashguard issue. I know rashguards are very popular with a lot of east asians because they worry about skin cancer.

No it doesn’t. Social media sites that have moderators really need to take a stand about clickbait garbage headlines like this. It’s like getting a free t-shirt with a car purchase and claiming that T-shirt costs $40,000. You’re buying coins which already cost that much, the coins with or without the mount cost that much. Currently you can buy those coins and get a free mount. Lots to be upset with Diablo and Blizzard, but this is just garbage.

it wasn’t. It was just a place where people shared pictures. The algorithm actually worked, recommended you accounts that you followed and liked and that was it.

Reels came out and that went sideways. The algorithm started pushing nothing but shitty meme accounts and the ads are nothing but ‘coaches’ talking about ‘scaling’ (yeah dude, some account with 30 followers totally convinces me that you can do that)

reels were the absolute downfall of instagram. Compared to pre-reels it’s such a shithole now.

People who have Korean first can’t get it if they go abroad and get a new citizenship, going the other way there are ways for you to keep both. They changed the laws back in 2011.

Air pollution from China along with thinking about other people besides yourself helped with that. When the pandemic broke everyone already had a box or two of N95 masks in their house. The government also took immediate control over the mask industry and started rationing them.

They had strict mask regulations, people stayed home, they closed most businesses that would help spread it, things like home delivery for groceries was already a pretty big thing in Korea at the time, and the delivery food business is massive there. Initially, outside of an outbreak caused by a church cult, numbers were very low in Korea.

They only started going up when they allowed the kids to go back to school, but were still generally very low because people were pretty careful. They also had public free government testing and home test kits were pretty easily available. If you tested positive on a home kit, you just walked over to the local outdoor testing center, stepped up and got tested, they texted you the results the next day along with instructions on how long to quarantine and then they sent you a care package of some food, masks, blood oxygen monitors, etc.

Sure, lived there 15 years and obtained dual citizenship.

I’ve now lived long term in my third country, so I am certainly in a position to compare living in multiple countries. If we want to focus just on depression, it’s a mixed bag.

Do Koreans work longer than other countries. Yes certainly. Statistics support that. Are they necessarily working ‘harder’? Not always. It depends a lot job to job, company to company.

To me the biggest thing contributing to overwork is the lack of holidays. For the longest time most statutory/bank holidays were not given additional days off if they fell on the weekend. Combine that with most companies not just giving you 2-4 weeks that you can use whenever you want, and most people worked a lot with little down time. Most companies would have a bit of time off in the summer, but they’d all take it at the same time and the prices would sky rocket meaning it was hard to enjoy what little time off you had.

This is not universal though. I know some larger companies had programs where people got specific days of the month off in addition and some had other half days on top of that.

focus on collective and ignoring individual needs and problems

This is a tough one. While they certainly do that in Korea, and things are changing in that regard as they’re acknowledging individualism more, it has certainly lead to a lot of efficiencies. As an example, to exchange a driver’s license in Korea it takes about 30 minutes and costs $10-15. In the UK you need to send it away, it costs £45, and takes 3+ weeks for them to process. If there are any issues, like say someone at the DVLA told you that your license officially printed in both English and Korean didn’t need a translation and then some jobsworth at the DVLA decided it did upon receipt, it has to be first sent back to you before you can go correct it.

For the most part bureaucratic stuff in Korea, while often talked about on the internet, is far easier to deal with, and much faster than it is in any of the other countries I’ve lived in. They also have a solid, central clearing house for making complaints about any organization in the country, government or private, and it can be done in just about any language.

The biggest issue I see contributing to poor quality of life is the density. Even when you have free time, you can’t enjoy anything outside of your house there. Want to go to the part? so did 1500 other people. Want to check out the cherry blossoms? Sure thing. Tag along wit your 5000 neighbours. Hit up ikea? Sure hope you like walking through it shoulder to shoulder without the ability to actually look at anything.

The density also means that no really has the ability to spread out and relax. Everyone lives in apartments/condos. Very few have yards. Those are the real day to day negatives that drag people down. I worked in companies as a proper employee and managed people as well, and while it was tough at times, it would have been so much better if it was possible to really enjoy your life outside of that. People want to, but it’s just very difficult in a small space with so many people.

This is wizards of the cost all over again. Unity learned nothing from them.

I’m old enough to remember these terms developing. I can remember when the first Diablo came out and called itself an ‘ARPG’. There was some controversy over this term and simply the use of the term RPG. As video games developed, there was some prestige around the ‘RPG’ label. By the late 90s, you were looking at a lot of well loved and top games using the term. Gold Box Games, Bard’s Tale, Ultima, JRPGs like Phantasy Star and Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, etc.

Diablo is the first game that I can recall that really prominently advertised itself as an ARPG. They did this of course because it wasn’t really as deep as the rest of them. There weren’t a lot of ‘choices’ to be made in this game. You set up your character and ran through the dungeon. They wanted to use the ‘RPG’ label because it was well regarded at the time and helped move units. It was a lot like calling an RV a sports car because sports cars have wheels, doors, can drive on the road. ARPGs had RPG mechanics, in that there were things like stats and you could choose abilities/spells on level up. But they really weren’t RPGs.

Around that time in PC Gamer there was a great column about what made an RPG an RPG and it was clear that games like Diablo weren’t it, the key from that was an RPG had players making meaningful choices that had a lasting impact on the game world. Whether you threw fireballs or lightning bolts wasn’t exactly a meaningful choice that had impact on the game world.

When it came to JPRGs vs RPGs, the difference was always fairly clear. RPGs were of the D&D variety. While they featured magic, the system itself was somewhat grounded in reality. JRPGs had a distinct style. Big numbers, wild combos, certain aesthetics, etc. To me the JRPG label makes sense, because it is a different style of game. I would note that JRPGs though really didn’t fit the definition of RPG for the most part, a lot of ‘RPGs’ didn’t because there was very little decision making. They were quest style games where you had a party that levelled up, but you weren’t making many decisions in the game that had much an impact.

I think the labels are absolutely important for distinguishing the type of game it is. People want to know what they’re getting into when they play it. If I’m expecting Baldur’s gate and get Diablo, I’m probably going to be a bit disappointed.

It looks like the cause of death should be mental illness

This reminds me of when Apple announced the iPhone and it turned out Linksys owned the iPhone name, and went through and slapped an ‘iphone’ sticker on all their IP telephones at the time.

jerky, granola, lots of vegetables are fairly stable and can be eaten raw. Carrots, garden peas, green beans, lettuce (you can eat that in the first day or two before it wilts), apples,

It depends on the fruit. Look at a banana funny and it’ll go rotten. Apples are pretty stable.