notSupplied

I recently played an indie game called Gorogoa. Took 90 minutes to complete it and it was a breathtaking work of art, worth every penny.

Then I went to the Steam Communitu hub and the first thing I saw was a thread about someone debating refunding the game. He finished the game (not easy to do, the puzzles require considerable mental effort) and enjoyed it, but felt that Steams "2 hours of playtime" refund policy laid a moral framework by which any game that provides less than 120 minutes of entertainment is a rip-off and should be refunded.

This game was a solo-effort that took 5 years.

Just as big businessed are cut-throat about screwing over consumers in the name of "shareholder rights", people are often equally cut-throat about screwing over who they buy from in the name of "consumer rights". Remember how many people abused Costcos return policy back when it was ridiculously generous?

If my indie favorites like Celeste became refundable or resellable, I wouldn't do it even though I've finished the game and won't play it anymore....this is out of a desire to be a patron to great art. But I think this view is in the minority. Most gamers will maximize their wallets and would return/resell their indie games when finished.

Exactly. This will create an incentive to turn even more games into "games as a service", so that you don't return it, or free to play, so that there is nothing to return.

Modern games are already optimizing for "long term engagement" at every turn, with a $60 box product like Modern Warfare packed with Battle Pass and seasonal grinds. Gamers want less of this and more God of War, a game where most it's value is consumed in 1 or 2 play-throughs. That'd be incredibly unfair to developers of story driven games if people can burn through the campaign in Uncharted and then resell it for 80+% of the price (since digital used goods have no wear and tear and no risk of defect due to age, I'd presume the resale prices will be near-retail)

Imagine if you had a very deal-term savvy crew of engineer hires. They then proceed claim that "the compensation cut we have taken by working here directly offsets cash you would otherwise have to spend/raise. This should count as a capital investment and should therefore entitle us to 1x preference just like for the other investors have."

Would you think this is a legitimate claim?

Microsoft eventually caved, and put a "Browser Choice" popup in Windows. This was because the US was too big for MS to ignore. Here, we have a similar choice: Turkey wants Google to give users "Search Engine Choice", and because Turkey is relatively small of a market compared to Google's TAM, they decided they'd rather ignore than market than compromise, even though a compromise is probably the best outcome for users, for fair competition.

I think the author is not talking about what Google has a right to do or not do, nor do any moral obligation to play in which field. The problem being highlighted here is that size simply matters too much.

No it is merely a act of divestiture of capital / wealth that shareholders already own.

What is peculiar is that this act has nothing to do with running a company well in the long term, yet is the most immediate way executives can improve their "performance based compensation". Execs seem to have found a hack around stock based compensation that biases companies towards divestiture over investment, and the short-term minded shareholders are onboard with this scheme at the expense of long-term minded shareholders.

This looks largely like a bug in the executive compensation system...I'm curious what kinds of fixes are going to come out of the world of MBA academia.

I know what you mean. I think of the "rolling coal" type of person too. Maybe they hate Teslas because they felt excluded by the trend...

I like MS's positioning here not just for cloud, but overall. I'd love a world where I can cross-play, cross-own, and cross-save across a console, desktop, and streaming. They are in the best position to profit regardless of how players prefer to play their games, unlike Stadia, which has an interest in muscling out other forms of AAA gaming because they don't have fingers in those other pies.

The only thing MS doesn't have a strong position in is Mobile/Tablets. Sure streaming can reach it, but mobile devices are now effectively pushing last-gen console level graphics. With wide spread support for PS4/Xbox controllers (iOS 13 supports them natively now), this is a pretty legit platform. If you're Apple, you're probably chuckling at the idea of streaming as the solution to mobile gaming when you're putting world-class silicon into users hands, most of which is underutilized.

I would love this. I have the touch bar set to show my dock at all times which just clicks for me. I'd love to still have function keys for IDE shortcuts in this configuration.

If it was so obvious, why did you omit the clause?

A lot of people don't see/won't look at the cost of healthcare that their employees are already paying. Even fewer would recognize this as effectively the same thing as a tax.

The argument is not "too hard to draw a line, so we should not do it", it is "too hard to draw a line, which means it is arbitrary, lacking in legitimacy, and prone to corruption."

Engineers are a powerful class of people with the opportunity to swing their weight around on political issues like this. Some believe this opportunity should be seized for good, others believe it is just a soft form of tyranny, an undemocratic exercise of power. This is particularly true when in your own country, where you ought to use the power of the vote to make a difference.

There is no legal doctrine for corporations to maximize profits. This is largely think-tank idealogy that has successfully won over the public mind. "Legal or moral duty to maximize profits" was a rarely uttered phrase in the 60s and one would hardly call the United States "not as capitalist" back then.

This is a myth. There is no fiduciary duty to maximize profits. There is the duty of loyalty, which mostly means you can't embezzle from the company, and there is duty of care, which means you can't do anything grossly incompetent that ends up harming the company. Duty of care is a VERY high bar (e.g. neglect safety standards and end up shopping e coli tainted food) and is nowhere close to being able to justify the "shareholder primacy" idealogy parroted by conservative think-tanks.

Look, I'm on your side on this issue, but to say that LGBTQ lack the right "to exist" is liberal hyperbole that ends up being excellent ammunition for smart pundits like Ben Shapiro to rip apart. We gotta be more precise in our language than that.

Yeah the truth is hard to access if you can't read in both languages. Though if I had to bet, I'd pick the side that didn't firewall most of the internet.

Network effects are the reason. If they charged for it, a chunk of users will leave, causing network to be less useful for the remaining users who were willing to pay, which then causes more users to leave, etc etc.

One can have 1000x more money than a middle class person, but there are no "time billionaires"

Looking at how fast the Republican Senate became supplicant to Trump, the separation did not turn out so "separate" after all due to the concentration of parties.

There may be some truth to what you're saying, but your first message is what most people would call unhinged. "Fuck people who believe in X" without then substantiating it (or substantiating with "it's so obvious I don't even need to") will only find an audience who already agrees with you and does nothing constructive.

I found this point very interesting. Let's accept this claim that the main impetus to unionize is to gain leverage in future "Always Punch Nazis" situations.

That is a radically different use of Unionization compared to the typical "Fair pay and safe working conditions" demands. I'm struggling to see why unionization is an appropriate way to secure this kind of power, and why workers deserve to have any more say besides voting with their feet individually.

Unlike compensation, which is on a continuous scale and has multiple axis (comp, profit share, benefits, PTO), these kinds of decisions are fairly binary and therefor have very little room for negotiation.

Is this something where workers deserve the power to collectively bargain? To me, whether or not to support "Always Punch Nazis" is a truly nuanced and difficult choice and I'm not sure going one way or the other qualifies for "exploitation" of the workforce.

Bingo. Games that let you trade actually are in legally shakier territory because of the cash-out potential.

I think this thread is missing the main reason why gambling dangerous: it can turn money into more money. The blinking lights and the Skinner box pyschology only play a supporting role to the main attraction: which is the belief that you can walk out richer than you walked in. This particularly plagues the poor, either because they are desperate or lack the financial accumen, and is the main reason why it is regulated. In the UK where sports gambling is legal, it is widely considered a blight on the lower class.

The fact the next roll could win back everything I've lost tonight AND make a profit on top, is far more dangerous than the next pull being merely able to finally get me that coveted Overwatch skin.

Hence why colloquially everyone calls loot boxes gambling, but no one has been able to make a strong legal case for why Overwatch loot boxes constitute gambling. If anything, Counterstrike is in the worse legal position and has had ACTUAL gambling scandals due to the high resale value of certain weapon skins.

But it results in a higher overall level of societal leverage despite consuming the same quantity of housing.

The bigger the budget the smaller the risk taken. This is pretty natural. AAA studios don't take risk because budgets have ballooned so much. The team that made Warcraft 3 would be considered a "medium sized AA team" roughly akin to Dauntless today.

You can be a minority because you live in a small state,

or because you are LGBT,

or because you are black,

or because you have a disability.

But the small-state kind of minority seems to be the only one who deserves electoral protection from tyranny of the majority. Oh what a coincidence then, that these minorities also happen to be mostly white, christian, and straight.

Here is a fun thought exercise: why group by state?

A person's political views is not just shaped by where they live, but their race, gender, sexual orientation, education etc etc. If "location" is just another column in the table properties that describe a person, what if we had a "college" or "senate" based on some other property of an individual?

How about we give all citizens who identify as straight 2 seats and all those who identify as gay 2 seats in this imaginary senate?

Or a college roughly based on race, but for some reason the smaller races are grossly over represented?

How about by religion? As an atheist myself, I'd love to get in on some of that sweet over-representation-of-minorities mojo that Ohioans get.

My point is, cut this along any other descriptive property of an individual other than what state they live in and you get all sorts of colorful results that I'm sure would appall all the conservative proponents of the Electoral college or the Senate.

Is state or location really the most important a property when it comes to deciding whether or not you are a "minority?" When it comes to national issues, do you think a gay black man in Nebraska has more in common with a striaght white man in Nebraska? Or another gay black man in New York? Why does the one in Nebraska get to be an overrepresented minority, yet the one in New York get to be an underrepresented majority?

It has not produced that result. Instead it shifts the power from "most populated" (which at lease resembles SOME democratic values) to "most swing", which is totally arbitrary.

At the very least, this needs to control for consolidation. Are companies much bigger today that three decades ago due to M&A? Due to winner take all nature of new industries? If a person is at the helm of a company with 10x the market cap, wouldn't the difference between the right and wrong decision be 10x greater? Wouldn't you want to pay much more to find the right person in this case?

One thing that surprises me is that HN is in fact, full of humanities. The non-technical topics are just as rich and interesting as the purely technical ones. To paint the opposite as this article did makes me think that the world really just wants nerds to be exactly as their prejudices imagined.

> why is it exactly that I should owe a massive amount of my economic output to those who aren't outputting anything? At what point do I simply say "fuck it" and stop working too, because some ridiculous percentage of my income has to be applied towards feeding those who won't/can't/don't do anything productive?

There's no easy way of attributing value to invention. Does the inventor / automator really deserve all of the profit that would come from such automation for all of eternity?

What if another person was only 2 months behind in making the same invention? And 2 months after that, a 3rd person was destined to, and within 2 years, the idea would be so obvious that the top 5 percentile of that profession would have been able to come up with the same thing? Why should the first person / company to automate something deserve an eternal monopoly on the output of said automation?

Considering that every other American suburb has these same qualities of being boring, yet did not become Silicon Valley, I'd say this has very little impact on why Silicon Valley is what it is.