If they don’t already, they will. The insatiable desire for profit means that even if you paid them $1000 a month for their dogshit rag, they’d sell your data to make $1001 dollars.

Regulations are the only answer and they have to be both enforced and punished heavily enough to not make it worth risking.

The best way to encourage adoption is to be miserable as fuck about every topic and event.

Oh yeah that’s right. Sorry, I haven’t put a game out for a long time.

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I have mixed feelings on it.

When I was putting out games, publishing on Steam would mean a guaranteed 1 million impressions on the “New releases” list. That’s incredible exposure for an indie title, which often succeed or fail on exposure alone.

But 30% can be a lot for those same indie teams, especially combined with taxes. You can put years of work into a title and lose half the money it earns to groups that didn’t directly contribute at all. It can easily be enough money that long-term support or follow up games just aren’t viable. It can be your entire outsourcing budget or a whole employee for a year.

And after that initial exposure, you’re not getting much for your perputual 30%. The value of Steamworks can vary greatly game by game so you could end up paying $30k for $100 of bandwidth and minor marketing through things like sales and rich presence.

I would much prefer to see something like “30% after the first $X in sales”. Their cut would kick in only after they’ve demonstrated their value as a platform and small teams wouldn’t have to watch a company with billions of dollars take a very large bite out of their very small pie.

Nobody in this thread has forbidden anyone from doing anything. If you want a soapbox for your irrelevant opinions, start a blog.

I don’t know much about the gambling industry

You can stop there. You don’t know much about the gambling industry, defending them was just an opportunity to tell us your opinions on “some people”, none of whom are actually here.

Sounds more like you just don’t know anything about the gambling industry. They run rigged games in predatory ways. They happily let organised crime launder money for a cut. They fight regulations designed to reduce problem gambling.

Nevertheless, nobody here is “forcing their way of life on others and taking away their agency over their own lives”. They’re just acknowledging that casinos have a long history of being absolute cunts.

It also makes it nearly impossible for independent researchers to uncover bot networks and AstroTurfing, just in time for fully automated AI propaganda.

Whatever happened to “you do you, I do me”?

Literally the sentence before that one was you being critical of pride parades, so I guess you mean “You do you (but only with my rubber stamp of approval)”

Shocking nobody.

You’re really bad at staying mask on.

Sure. “It happened to a friend”.

Okay Gamer.

This situation doesn’t exist outside your imagination.

“Thanks for pushing normal people to the far-right” is an overt strategy passed around 4chan and far-right chat channels, intended to both discourage the left from defending their views and create the idea that being bigoted is something “normal people” support.

Sounds like bullshit.

The far-right is not the Democrats fault and I don’t know why you’re bragging about selling out your community.

The Republican culture war being waged against the LGBT+ community should make it completely clear that your skin color or brand of religious nonsense doesn’t make you immune to bigotry.

I genuinely can’t tell if you’re autistic, have abysmal reading comprehension or are pretending to be stupid but either way, I’m not engaging further.