Aside from hosting cloud saves and Steam workshop data, there aren't many other services that justify a high fee to offset long-term costs. Steam trading cards, for instance, are just another source of revenue for Valve given that they also take a cut of sales from marketplace transactions.
Given that Valve's costs in developing Proton are offset by the higher Steam game purchase rates of Steam Deck users (myself included), the main benefit to developers is Steam's user base. As with Apple and the iOS app store, however, having what amounts to a monopoly in a market segment is not a justification for high platform access fees.
Considering that Valve makes more money per employee than most major tech companies, it definitely seems like it would still be turning a profit if its share of sales were reduced to 15 or 20 percent. Steam's services aren't free; the 30% fee inflates the price of games by 43%. As with any company Valve needs to have a high enough profit margin to cover long-term costs and R&D budgets, but the 30% cut is an outdated industry standard from when server operating costs were substantially higher than today.
They're certainly a much worse value for the money and intentionally constrained in ways that maximize the profits of Apple services by making it inconvenient or impossible to use alternatives, but the UI is substantially better than Android. Aside from that and Apple device interoperability benefits, nearly any Android phone is a better choice for most people.
As long as they participate in Steam sales, assuming they're on Steam to begin with, PC games are more convenient to have in a library where I don't have to manually update each game. Valve's not perfect, with its 30% cut of sales being arguably too high (as is the case for all other platforms that defend its use as being an "industry standard"), but given Nintendo's monetization of online gameplay and replacing the Virtual Console system with what is essentially console library rentals, I don't mind putting up with updating Switch ROMs once in a blue moon if it means not supporting anti-consumer practices. Any games I had in my Switch library that are also on Steam I simply repurchased for the sake of convenience, however.
Message boards like that have dedicated userbases for their subject matter though, something that is missing on Lemmy for most subject matters. Since I'd like to be on Lemmy for more than just, for my interests at least, a piracy message board, more users are needed to build interest in communities that weren't promoted by a subreddit.
For me it's about all the subreddits that didn't migrate to Lemmy, and the ghost town feeling caused by only having 55,000 monthly users versus Reddit's 850 million. With Lemmy's active user count slowly dropping instead of rising, everything needs to be done to bring more redditors to Lemmy, whether they are supporters of piracy or not.
While it's great to have a thriving piracy community, it being one of the only thriving ones inevitably makes potential users associate the platform with it and convinces them to either choose another Reddit alternative or simply avoid the inconvenience of switching platforms. While we may disagree with them, the failure of the Reddit blackout demonstrated that they make up the lion's share of users from large communities that have yet to materialize here. Better to have many communities with a diversity of opinions than only a handful of echo chambers.
If we're to have any chance at convincing more Reddit users to join the Fediverse, the main Lemmy and Kbin instances need to stick together. While the piracy community being among the biggest arguably doesn't make for great optics (having a greater variety of communities above the 50k user mark would help bring more users to Lemmy), a fragmented federation only helps Reddit. Beyond that, this community has rules in place to ensure that posts stick to the discussion of piracy, and not piracy itself.
I use a similar setup myself, though also make use of a Newsdemon block plan as a secondary usenet provider for any files Eweka doesn't have. Since the two providers are on different nodes and in different copyright jurisdictions (Eweka implements NTD requests while Newsdemon implements DMCA requests), Newsdemon can often finish releases that Eweka is missing a portion of. Since Newsdemon is only useful on the off-chance that Eweka can't finish a download, getting a one-time purchase block plan for it avoids needing to have another ongoing subscription.
On the off-chance that both fail (has yet to happen to me after switching to Eweka) and you don't mind also using torrents, I'd suggest joining TorrentLeech as another source for many such releases.
Entirely agreed, though I wish there were more of a joint effort between Lemmy and Kbin communities to find novel ways of getting more redditors to switch over to the Fediverse. Wishful thinking perhaps, though it'd be nice to have more active communities around here.
As I don't want to reduce the quality of an already lossy codec, I'm instead comparing identical audio tracks of the same release that differ only in their codecs and bitrates. For instance, would a stereo 224kbps AC3 audio track be equivalent to a 128kbps AAC audio track, or is one of the two better than the other?
Got Wii Sports for $1 at a thrift store like that, whereas their glassware was usually significantly above comparable eBay listings (despite the labels sometimes claiming otherwise). Unfortunately, at least where I live, the odds of computer stuff showing up are few and far between.
If that were the case there would at least be some value in selling the division to another company. Perhaps by not selling it they can claim the division lost money, artificially reducing the tax burden on profits from divisions corporate management is more interested in.
Aside from hosting cloud saves and Steam workshop data, there aren't many other services that justify a high fee to offset long-term costs. Steam trading cards, for instance, are just another source of revenue for Valve given that they also take a cut of sales from marketplace transactions.
Given that Valve's costs in developing Proton are offset by the higher Steam game purchase rates of Steam Deck users (myself included), the main benefit to developers is Steam's user base. As with Apple and the iOS app store, however, having what amounts to a monopoly in a market segment is not a justification for high platform access fees.