Their software. I don’t want to go to a site and download a game to find an actual functional launcher (and file management, etc) somewhere else. GOG galaxy is terrible on windows and doesn’t support Linux, despite the overlap between their philosophy and Linux users.

Steam isn’t just a store. It manages my large library with no work on my part, including reasonably high quality tags to make it easier to find games for whatever mood I’m in. It completely seamlessly handles Linux support on almost all of my games, while giving me all the freedom I need to make changes in the rare cases their out of the box setup has issues. It has an exceptionally high quality input mapping tool that is done per game and has a large catalogue of user generated control schemes. It handles simple modding for a lot of games that don’t need anything too crazy. It handles cloud saves so invisibly between devices that I almost never have to think about it.

I will (and have) pay for a game on Steam when I have it on GOG for free, if I actually want to play it. I’ll eventually be self hosting almost all of my other media, and have taken steps in that direction, but I definitely will not be doing so for games. Steam is just too much better than any third party options.

I reread a lot of books a lot of times, especially ones I actually bought and enjoyed most of the ride. (We’re talking ~100-200 new books a year and more that are repeats, mostly audiobook.)

The ending to the dark tower is so bad I’ll probably never read it again. It’s not the premise. Plenty of books have done that premise perfectly well. It’s the most horrendously bad presentation of that premise that I’ve ever seen.

Steven King endings always feel like he just got bored and wrote whatever awful trash he could think of with no intention whatsoever, and it’s even more frustrating because he has interesting ideas and makes them moderately compelling at the start. I’d say it feels like a pretty solid author just handed the last chapter to a random kid to write, but I think the kid would do a better job. He just never has any idea where he’s actually going by midway through the book, and doesn’t know how to end a book with “spooky” questions still in the air either.

There is no debate.

Nominative fair use has no relevance to a separate, competing product. Nominative fair use gives you permission to use the term in the exact manner they do and no more. Their notice that your version is not “WordPress”, in and of itself, completely nullifies the argument.

Same. It’s not just like a downer ending. They’re also so bland and uninteresting they make the whole book feel bland and uninteresting.

“You can’t put it on the internet anywhere in the world because we own the rights in one country” is some deranged bullshit.

To be fair they did that because law firms were seeking out frivolous arbitration bullshit to try to extort them into settlements.

But their market dominance is definitely primarily about how much better they are than anything else.

As much as I don’t like framework spam, especially when a lot of them are bloated and insecure or need bloated and insecure plugins/extentsions/whatever to do basic things, I have less desire than that to go to C.

If people post lies about trademark rights multiple places, they should be responded to multiple places.

GPL doesn’t give you any rights to trademarks.

I’m sure they’ll get right on handing you the keys. 👍

I’m sure they use the reliability of your inputs for known images to determine whether to use your input to train unknown images.

It’s all good.

I’ll just call it a deepfake and get on with my life.

I know the first one was only ever intended to be a tech demo, and it did a really good job for that, but does this one feel like an actual full-fledged game?

Also look how much of their “development costs” are actually marketing budget. They fully recognize that increasing sales is worth paying heavily for, and steam increases sales by meaningfully more than you’re paying them (which is why every AAA publisher who experiments with leaving comes back).

The fun part is, unless you’re doing stuff that’s extremely shady, they’ll basically give you as many keys as you want to sell the game externally. Of the hundreds of games in my Steam library, it’s a very small fraction that have been purchased through Steam, or that they’ve made any money on. Their 30% is closer to a commission than a platform fee, and a 30% commission on a product that’s all margin isn’t unusual.

And people use Steam because they’re actually way better than any other option. The “freedom” platforms like GOG can’t be bothered even having a client support Linux, while Valve invested a good bit into working with community projects to make most of their (already sold about as much as they’re going to) back catalogue compatible and smooth. Steam input is also, by itself, more value added than any other store, and there are several other meaningful features.

Because a well done, complete code project benefits more from continued small additions than a well constructed, complete story.

There is no “enough”. Any modification at all takes their permission to use their trademark.

Most allow you to do so within reasonable guidelines, but that only gives you the benefit of the doubt if it’s ambiguous. As soon as they tell you that you don’t have permission to use their trademark on your altered version, you can’t use it.

No, they can’t, because no, it isn’t. That’s what trademarks are for. You can’t use a trademarked name to refer to your competing product.

Open source projects are generally permissive in terms of people repackaging their code for distribution for different platforms within reasonable guidelines, but even that is a sufficient change that they aren’t obligated to allow their trademarks to be used that way.

It is no longer Wordpress once it’s modified. That’s what trademark is for.

They explicitly call their engine Wordpress more than once in those examples. You cannot do that.

They’re very obviously using the trademark in a manner that implies endorsement.

That is absolutely trademark infringement.