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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • off_brand_@beehaw.orgtoPC Gaming@lemmy.ca*Permanently Deleted*
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    15 days ago

    Reminder that the 30% steam tax is absolutely greed. Gabe is a libertarian and charges it because he can get away with it. It makes games worse by affecting the equation measuring what is profitable to make. Gabe doesn’t care about that, and that should be taken into account when considering if you actually trust him.






  • Typically you pay for a battle pass with some sort of currency that costs real money to acquire. The battle pass isn’t anything on its own, but if you play the game you’ll then unlock experience or whatever with the battle pass, thus unlocking whatever it contains. Often that’s cosmetics for the game, sometimes useable items, and sometimes it’s more of that currency that costs real money.

    IMO they suck. Usually they expire at the end of the month, so if something comes up (family emergency, computer died, whatever) you wasted it and paid for nothing. It’s a cheap trick to devalue a player’s purchase, and to try and boost player count in lieu of good gameplay.

    But apparently if you completed the battle pass, it would give you enough premium currency to buy the one they out next month. So theoretically you might only have to buy it once if you were diligent in finish the pass before it went away. Now they’ve taken that away because they wanted more money.



  • Out in NYC, the bodegas all have a little plaquard saying that either 1: listed prices include a 2% credit card fee and you can save by using cash, or 2: listed prices may not match your final charge because they add a 2% fee on top for credit cards.

    Which is the same thing effectively but it can be sometimes confusing if you’re trying to watch for the fee.

    Anecdotally, I have sometimes noticed the cashier will say a price, and then say a slightly different price when I pull out the card. So it’s not like they always apply the fee regardless. At least some of the time anyway.

    Not universal of course. I don’t remember if that’s also true for grocery stores, and it’s probably not the case for big chains but honestly I don’t know.








  • I would question the efficiency claim. Uber and the like claimed incredible market dominance, driving local food delivery and taxi services out of business. They’re only now really being forced to find profitability.

    I wonder if AI is going to be similar. The powerful models right now, as I understand it, have ludicrous power requirements. I don’t know their balance sheets, but in the current race to market share, I’m skeptical that most of these services are in the green.

    What that ultimately says about the future I don’t really know. Like it could be we reach some point where the models get better, or more specialized, or something and profit arrive. Or maybe theres a point of diminishing returns where the profit just can’t be made, and once the hype falls off (and investors stop clamoring for AI) these companies will ask what they’re getting for the money spent.

    (And of course I could just be straight up wrong about profits today not being there.)