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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • This isn’t about server costs or infrastructure, but rather about licensing rights and artist payments.

    Spotify pays 70% of its revenue to artists and despite that most of them are still severely underpaid compared to their listening times. They could pay artists 5-10% more I’d they give up all profit they make, but that’s about it. You already pay artists less than 1ct per song, if that’s still too much or not is for you to decide.

    Youtube Premium works cause they pay creators even less while showering every non-premium watcher with ads every 5 minutes.

    Netflix has an entirely different business model. They only pay an initial license fee for a finished series. The artists/studio already got paid, the price negotiations is purely between Netflix and a few big publishers. Due to that they can calculate if a series will bring in a profit and only then decide to buy the license for a period of time. Due to that their offer, while it may seem large, is just a tiny fraction compared to Spotify or YouTube.

    Now to Spotifys books. I’m not sure what their exact business model is, but either they buy the license for the books or they allow others to sell their books directly on their platform. Whatever it is, its a huge increase in costs for them. Either Spotify has the big upfront license cost that they try to get back by gaining new customers or premium allows you to “rent” a book which means Spotify still has to pay the creator even if you didn’t pay them anything.

    Taking the extra money from the already existing premium subscription won’t work. Artists are already underpaid, reducing that even further will lead to them leaving Spotify.





  • I’m really surprised so many people here of all places believe any corporation gives a shit about anything but their money. Corporations are never your friend.

    I never said valve is a friend, they simply are the more trustworthy party in this lawsuit. Two things about this:

    1. I’ve never seen any proof of this MFN clause. I’ve read the Steamworks distribution agreement (which is hidden behind an NDA), I’ve read the steam TOS, I’ve looked through the steamworks documentation that is declared as legally binding in the contract, I’ve looked for screenshots or citations. There is nothing that would even suggest they are interfering with non-steamkey prices apart from what Wolfire games tells the court. (Who are, of course, coincidentally using the same Lawfirm as epic does, which makes this whole thing even more suspicious.)

    2. This is the second time this lawsuit is brought up and there are pretty much no complaints from other devs, not even anonymous. Usually when lawsuits like this happen a bandwagon full of people come out to complain, twitter descends into a shitstorm and reddit digs out their aluminium foil hats. But there is absolutely nothing at the moment.

    You are free to post any links with proof you have. Maybe the lawsuit will dig up something in Valve’s basement. But as of now, everything we’ve seen is just one big accusation from Wolfire games.



  • That’s not entirely true. Valve forces devs to not sell Steam keys lower on other sites without also going on sale on Steam in a reasonable close amount of time.

    I know it sounds the same at first, but it’s a drastic difference. You can generate as many Steam keys as you like and sell then on other sites, Valve won’t see a single cent from these sales. They however still provide their online services and servers for free for all those keys sold on other sites. It is quite reasonable that they force you to match prices since they literally are losing money (albeit not much) if you sell on other platforms. And I don’t mean lost sales, but infrastructure cost.

    And additionally is this rule pretty much never enforced. AAA studios have special deals and indi devs aren’t worth the hassle.



  • There are additional lists you can activate to block annoyances like cookie banners. If you want to it’s possible to add the whole “I still don’t care about cookies” as a custom list so you combine the functionality without the added redundancy.

    All the trackers that firefox blocks should be included in ublock origin as well. I’m not quite sure about their cookie isolation, but if you already block the tracking cookies you don’t really need that.

    As for DDGEP, it’s also mostly a list of different trackers that get blocked which is redundant. The enforced https can also be achieved through browser settings. As for the link shortening to remove tracking, ublock has additional lists for that too. No idea about the supposed Google AMP protection and what it really does, but it also looks like a link shortener.

    All in all, pretty much all functionality is covered by ublock origin, but it does require you to go into settings and enable some additional lists.