I sometimes find a small seed in seedless watermelons.

Vivaldi is great. Sadly any mention of it gets downvoted by Firefox fanboys who don’t understand we are on the same team.

Yeah, my SteamVR library is why I keep a Windows virtual machine around.

What makes you think it isn’t an option? Most people probably aren’t using it though, because there is no reason to predownload terabytes of world data when you aren’t going to come near 95% of it.

Have you tried that fun fact? I know there was a meme claiming it, but I have never found any evidence of it actually being true, nor did I manage to replicate it on Amazon.

I understood it perfectly well, and wanted to clarify that it is not the concept of paying for mods that is problematic, but implementations like Steam did.

Because just saying “the paid mods shit” gives people a wrong idea that giving creators money is a bad thing, when that’s not the problematic part.

Why you took my “the store shouldn’t get a cut” comment and thought I support stores getting a cut, I have no clue.

You do know that this whole comment chain was started by Valve trying to push paid mods with the help of Bethesda right?

Yes, I started the conversion by saying that’s bad and should be called out, why?

“kid down the street” really? Are you creating the image of a fictional modder to attract pity?

No, I’m going with your story of being a kid with no money in a third world country, because it was my childhood too. I solved that problem by spending my free time modding a free to play game – I was that kid down the street. Never got paid though. I would love if others did.

So lets see, 30% goes to Steam, 45% goes to Bethesda and whats left to the “modder who actually needs the money” is… 25% yep

Yep, total bullshit. Why are you bringing it up though? We are in agreement here.

Are you okay with paying foreign corporations to exploit the work of the “kid down the street”, keeping the vast majority of the profit?

No, why? As I said in my first comment, they shouldn’t get a cut. I’m not sure why are you are bringing these arguments to me, as if I ever disagreed.

Before you start typing ‘but other companies wouldn’t charge so much from the modder!’,

Why would I ever type that, when I only support paid mods where all of the money goes to the modder without middlemen stealing a share?

If you WANT to pay for mods I really need to ask, what is stopping you? If you actually care about the modders getting money, many of them have ko-fi/patreon platforms where they actually keep most of the money you give them

Nothing, not long ago I bought a Kerbal Space Program mod for volumetric clouds from a guy called Blackrack. It’s a paid mod only available by paying him on Patreon. It looks amazing and I think it’s great he gets money for it. Which is why I support paid mods and don’t like when people are against them.

There is nothing stopping you from paying for mods, now that Im an adult with a job I do pay for them often.

Not sure why are you against them then. Based on your comments I think you are not against paid mods, you are against companies like Steam or Bethesda taking a cut. Which is exactly my position too, so I’m not sure what are you actually disagreeing with me about.

Wow, you managed to completely reverse what I said.

By your logic we should also make libraries paid, […] lets put a price on everything

That doesn’t follow at all. Books are not free, and yet libraries work just fine. By my logic we should allow book authors to charge for their books. Oh right, we already do. Why do you not like that?

I didn’t mention having to charge for anything at all, even mods. I think mod authors should be allowed to charge for them if they choose to, just like for anyone else making anything else.

and charge for all FOSS too

What a great example of my point. Charging for software is allowed, and yet there is lots of software released for free. Seems it’s not that bad after all?

What an utopia this will lead to!

Quite the opposite. Good thing I don’t share your ideas.

I come from a third world country and as a kid most people could only afford one maybe two games, all my friends bought half-life and warcraft 3

So you were fine with paying foreign corporations for these games, but you are not fine paying the kid down the street for his mod? Why do these well-off corporations deserve your money, but the modder who actually needs the money doesn’t?

So is all art, should artists all work for free? Why do I have to pay for books and movies? Aren’t the authors motivated by passion? Isn’t your argument the same one used by corporations underpaying game devs all the time, “since they should be happy fulfilling their passion”?

the capitalistic idea that only money can motivate people to do things sucks.

Agree, and I wish we lived in an utopia where nobody needs money and everyone can share their work freely. Sadly, this is not the world we live in, and so we need to reward passionate people to let them dedicate time to their passion rather than having to only focus on work for survival. That way not only rich people can afford to make mods.

Why are you against mod creators getting paid for their work? Some mods are amazing and definitely deserve some money.

The store shouldn’t get a cut though. But if that’s what you mean, let’s call that out specifically.

Since the 2014 release date.

I looked at the latest and most “recent” heroes games… they’re all rated/reviewed SO harshly.

Many of the negative reviews are (and rightly so) because of Ubisoft forcing you to use their crappy launcher, adding DRM, and otherwise making the customer experience horrible, and not because there is anything wrong with the genre.

Since it’s end to end encrypted, Ente just sees some raw bytes, it has no way to tell if what you uploaded is an image or not. So in practice it supports whatever the client can display, so your browser for the web version.

Thanks, that explains it. So there is a pop-up when you try to play a game from the common pool and you have to choose who you are borrowing from?

Nobody is giving anybody permission any more than anyone else though. Account 6 creates a family and 5 accounts with a game join the family. There are now 5 copies of the game in the family pool. Account 6 can play and get banned. In this situation nobody even invited account 6 to the family.

Being able to evade a ban once is already a problem. Now you need to ban every cheater twice to really ban them.

My question is, when there are 5 people with 5 copies of a multiplayer game in the pool, and the 6th member without a copy gets banned, which of the other 5 members gets banned?

No one said they are unpaid or have zero qualifications either.

You live in a fantasy world if you think it’s possible to catch 100% of mistakes internally. Even safety critical equipment with many layers of checks fails and kills people every now and then (medical equipment, bridges).

Great summary! Here is the other side of the debate:

• The backpack is overengineered and spares no expense in materials and durability, making it expensive. It is not overpriced. It may be unreasonably costly and not worth the purchase. The reason being it costs a lot to manufacture, not because it’s overpriced.

• Linus was stupid in his “no warranty needed” claim, as most people won’t (and shouldn’t) take his word for it. Nevertheless, it is true his store always replaced items without issue and continues to do so, warranty or not. The customer experience is generally much better than the average store, where you may have to fight for your warranty claim only for it to be refused anyway. This is what he meant. If stores are not honoring warranties, and his store is accepting returns without a warranty anyway, then what’s the piece of paper worth anyway? But people like the piece of mind it provides, they learned the lesson and are providing it now. Of course the warranty never mattered either way.

• I did buy the backpack. Months later I received a replacement set of zippers. There is nothing wrong with the original zippers, they just felt these ones are better and people who bought the backpack before the change should get them too. This has never happened to me with another purchase in my life, where the store decided to upgrade it for free and ship it to another continent for free, without me asking.

• Months later they discovered the material used for the backpack floor isn’t what they wanted. So they offered me (and all purchasers) a full refund and additional store credit. Nobody noticed the issue, nobody asked for refunds. They discovered it and offered refunds proactively, even though it’s a non-issue. Again never happen in my life with another purchase.

• Shitty for the employee to shit on GN. Commendable for Linus to stand by his employee publicly instead of blaming him.

• You are correct they had lot of quality issues. It is also worth mentioning their overhaul that happened after that, improved processed, slowed down upload cadence, and the formation of volunteer “beta tester” viewers who watch videos pre-release to find errors not found internally. Good for them to try to improve.

• Auctioning off the prototype cooler was quite egregious! As usual Linus took the heat on himself and never named the responsible employee who misallocated the cooler in their inventory.

• A third party investigation found the sexual harassment allegations unfounded. Due to the nature of this we might never know the details though.

• Linus invited Naomi to meet him in the meeting rooms of his hotel’s lobby, which exist specifically for business meetings. She later untruthfully misrepresented it as an invite to his hotel room.

• In general, the transparency at which their business operates makes it very easy to point out flaws. I think it’s better than the opaque businesses where this can’t happen.

• I agree with these of your points I didn’t address.

Hope this provides both sides for readers, and thanks again.