crossmr

Canada either did, or still does, have a law like this. Years ago back when getting chipped cards for satellites was a pretty big thing, a lot of people near the US border could get ones from the US that weren’t available in Canada and get the chipped card or whatever it was. At one point the company made a request to the Canadian authorities to crack down on it, and the response was something to the effect of ‘your product isn’t available here, you don’t have standing to ask us to do that’.

It’s easier to define it as this:

If you commercially release something and region restrict it, people in any region where you don’t also provide a legal way to purchase/use it should be free to get it however they want.

@Chozo@fedia.io if your post is ‘TIL A star system exists’ and you can’t really tell us an interesting fact or piece of information about it, I’d say… don’t write something to be honest or if you really want to write about that thing, try to find something interesting about it to actually submit. TIL on Reddit also has a rule about titles standing on their own. Yes you can expand on topics inside the submission, but people should get something simply from reading your title. A lot of those titles don’t really give you anything at all.

@pruwybn@discuss.tchncs.de These all amount to nothing more than, TIL X exists. The problem with posts like these, is that if you can sit there and write endless posts just like it, it’s not really a good post. TIL about fir trees, TIL about car tires, TIL about weed trimmers, TIL about Disney land, etc. etc. etc. etc.

TIL about the TRAPPIST-1 Star System TIL that there is a global, time traveling radio (sort of) TIL norway has a homocide map with exact locations of murders.

This doesn’t start with TIL and doesn’t really sound like a TIL at all:

https://kbin.run/m/til@lemmy.world/t/492996/What-Do-Neural-Networks-Really-Learn-Exploring-the-Brain-of#comments

We then have topics which are vague and don’t really tell us anything.

TIL: How Henry Ford’s Strange Social Program Aimed to Control The Personal Lives Of Workers TIL: How The IMF and World Bank Debt Trap Countries and Force them into Austerity

This is just presented in non-neutral way, and has been posted dozens or even hundreds of times over at reddit, so much so that it’s on their repost list:

TIL this Fun Fact: Unfortunately, Chainsaws Were Invented for Childbirth

Clickbait style submissions like this:

TIL that in 2014, a photographer tried to copyright a monkey’s selfie and sue Wikipedia for it.

In this kind of submission the user is telling us about an event, without actually telling us the outcome of that event. It’s unclear exactly what ‘fact’ it is they’ve learned, beyond ‘an event happened’, it’s delayed news at best. A much better TIL would be about the outcome of the trial and what legal implications that has.

Topics like this are just written to say LOL These people are stupid:

TIL the US government once banned sliced bread

and are missing crucial context in the title like the fact that it happened during WW2 when there were shortages.

TIL Most Explosives used by Hamas Are Unexploded Israeli Bombs Dropped on Palestine

This is literally related to a current on-going international conflict and politics and seems to be written to support an agenda. There are reasons they have a rule about no news, and no political posts.

At least this place isn’t as bad as a TIL I saw on another instance that seems to do little more run a bot to repost submissions from Reddit

@MikeOToxin@lemmy.world no? Magazines should have standards for their posts so that a community can be formed and grow around those principles. The principle of ‘just post whatever you want’ doesn’t encourage much beyond post anything. The only real restrictions on posting in the rules are: no baiting, promoting agendas or self-promotion.

There is nothing there on how you present what it is you’ve learned beyond ‘start it with TIL’. There isn’t even a hard requirement that you link to the source, which makes no sense.

Requiring users to actually link to a reliable source to back up what it is they’ve learned, and to present the knowledge in an objective and readable manner should be a bare minimum.

@Chozo@fedia.io Not just yours. The most recent is just little more beyond ‘TIL X exists’ a couple before yours is ‘TIL X exists, well sort of’ so it’s not even that vague. There are in fact several like that in recent posts. Some are opinions are just vagueness, or nonsense.

As downhill as TIL on reddit has gone, the rules there are a good foundation but do require active moderators to remove the stuff that doesn’t belong.

@IsThisAnAI@lemmy.world content dumping isn’t an improvement.

@PlasticExistence@lemmy.world This is on the microblog, not the main thread posting area.

I don’t think the age of the game is really relevant. If the game is active and you’re making money on it, you support it.

For the base game, which I think 30% is still more, I think it certainly makes sense. Because they’re providing a complete solution.

For in-app purchases or unlock purchases, whether or not the purchase is in-app, the solution isn’t complete, and not worth the 30% they charge on those transactions. It would be trivial for every transaction to have a custom field where you could store an array of what was purchased in in that purchase and have it returned when the transaction was checked. Boom, complete solution. Specifically for in-app purchases if they wanted to take 5% since all they’re doing is the job of Stripe and nothing more, then I’d consider that fair.

They lowered the cut for people who didn’t need it. Massive publishers selling tons of games. Arguably indie games that only sell a few copies need a larger cut than EA on their latest blockbuster.

There isn’t much in the way of scale here. Their bandwidth isn’t monitored on a per game basis, and if that was a factor in the cost they’d be basing the cut on the size of your game. Some 1 gb indie game pays the same cut or larger than a 100gb mammoth from EA. Valve is also way more strict with that indie game in getting itself published than they are with the EA game as well.

But there is always an excuse. Epic tried that. Companies complained.

Their sales used to give you a reusable $10 off coupon. That didn’t change the amount the companies got when someone bought their game. It only changed how much they paid. When one of the Witcher games had that coupon applied to it, the developer got pissed off and changed the price of the game so that it was a cent or two below the threshold to activate the coupon, and then fans of the dev were excusing it claiming that they couldn’t let the price be lower because it would ‘devalue’ the game.

if a game was $30 on Steam and $25 on Epic (as a regular price), or some other service, you’d undoubtedly hear the same rhetoric.

Epic’s cut is 12% not 30%. They also waive the 5% royalty fee over $1 million for sales on the Epic Store if you use Unreal. Epic doesn’t control the prices. Devs set the prices. They leave the price the same on Epic so that they can actually get a little more for each sale.

What the should do on a $60 game though is to set the price at like $56 on Epic, it would encourage people to save a couple bucks there, while still getting them more than steam after the cuts.

They do prevent you from linking to your own store within your Steam game though. Even though they don’t provide a complete solution for things like microtransactions and DLC.

How it works on Steam:

1. User makes an in-app purchase using the steam wallet integration
2. Steam processes the payment taking 30% and gives you a reference number for that transaction
3. You query that transaction every time the player logs in to see if they’ve refunded it or not. That transaction doesn’t actually contain any information about what they bought though.
4. You then maintain a separate purchasing server whose whole job it is is to keep a record of what the player purchased in reference to that transaction number.

For that Valve wants 30% of in-app/DLC purchases. At that point it’s stripe and nothing more. Unlike standalone DLC Or expansions, these unlock purchases don’t come with serving any additional content in the form of downloads.

If you make your own service to handle these transactions (with only a 3-4% transaction rate) Valve will prevent you from linking to it, or mentioning it anywhere on your page, forums or within the game itself. You need to direct players elsewhere and then mention it. Even for cross-platform games where having Steam maintain a transaction list for a portion of the users is just a needless additional layer.

Console prices aren’t really relevant to Steam. Consoles always tend to run higher.