Valve only gets a 30% cut from sales from the Steam store. Valve makes nothing (that's 0% BTW) from Steam keys sold on 3rd party sites, like the ones sold at Humble Store, which was founded by Wolfire Games. I've seen estimates that say Valve's actual take when figuring in 3rd party key sales is about 20%.

This reminded me of one of those Valve vs. Epic discussions a couple of years ago. People were pulling imaginary numbers out of strange places and making bold claims about how much Valve could lower their cut, and still operate while making a profit. One person claimed that Valve could operate on 2 cents per transaction. Rather than make shit up, I did some guestimation on how much it costs to run a service like Steam. I had to go find my old post to get the numbers. This post from 2 years ago, so these costs have most likely increased since then:

Valve's Download Status page shows a peak rate of 5.8 Tbps in the past 48 hours. It looks like they average about 4 Tbps. I looked up prices for commercial CDNs and find prices from 4 cents to 80 cents per GB. Going with the lowest rate of 4 cents per GB means Valve would be spending an average of $20 per second to run their data centers. That's $1.728 Million per day, or $630 Million per year just to run their data centers.

That is just bandwidth costs and doesn't figure in wages for employees, electricity costs, hardware, etc.

Zero. That's exactly how much trust I have in Microsoft.

Rhialto wrote on Jul 27, 2021, 20:07:
Audacity notice: We collect very limited Personal Data about you.

No thanks.

Just block it with a firewall, and they can't collect shit. I'm still not updating until this while mess gets sorted out though.

RedEye9 wrote on Jul 27, 2021, 20:15:
BoP has mentioned there's a fork in the works and 2.4.2 is available.
It's not like 3.0 automatically made the program intuitive or anything.

I thought the fork was abandoned due to death threats.

I watched Hitler's Circle of Evil a few months ago on Netflix, and it was fucking scary seeing how Hitler's his rise to power is so similar to recent events here in the US.

Steele Johnson wrote on Jul 21, 2021, 18:28:
"NBC's Canceled Manifest TV Show Might Return On Netflix"

They have to give Netflix a chance to cancel it too

I thought it was canceled after the first season. Just let it die. I watched the first season, and wish I could get that time back. I didn't even know there was a second or third season.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhVrn4zAKrM&t=2s

RedEye9 wrote on Jul 6, 2021, 13:38:
Whew, for a second there i thought Audacity sent your data to China and not Russia.

Time to look for another audio editor. Maybe one w/out such an intuitive interface.

I use Audacity a bit and it has never set off my firewall alerting me that it's attempting to send anything anywhere.

I've been watching this, and hoping it turns out good. I'd rather have no voiced dialog than bad or partial dialog.

I hope this serves as a lesson for people to STOP BUYING GAMES THAT HAVE ONLINE DRM.

Please don't link to this site ever again. It gives me a nag popup to turn off ad blockers, and all it is is two quoted paragraphs and a link to the actual article at ZDNet.

Here is the actual article for anyone interested: https://www.zdnet.com/article/major-linux-rpm-problem-uncovered/

I didn't know Windows phone's had TPM 2.0 chips.

I haven't bought a "Humble" bundle in a whiley, and I think the last one was one where they gave 100% to charity. I'm pretty much done with Humble, and bundles anyway. I'd rather just buy a game on sale for $5, than buy a $10 bundle to get a couple of games I want out of a dozen.

I took advantage of one of those subscribe to Humble Monthly for a year and get wallet credit a few years ago. Shortly after that, the quality of games went to shit and I've been pausing almost every month since. I believe I have 5 months remaining, and it would be 6 but I didn't pause in time once. If you had subscription, you used to still get the 10% store discount up until when you paused it, so I waited until a couple of days before they would charge you before I paused my subscription just in case I wanted to buy something from them. I had almost forgot and ended up pausing just after midnight, and they charged me anyway the next day. Apparently they have a midnight cutoff, even though they don't process the charges until the next day, and wouldn't refund that month.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Jul 1, 2021, 21:54:

RedEye9 wrote on Jul 1, 2021, 21:03:
Back button works fine on mobile, how advanced of them.

Works fine on Firefox and Brave on my desktop, too. I guess Epic just loves us Linux users more.

Works with Firefox on Windows too.

Acleacius wrote on Jul 1, 2021, 14:27:
Nice a drone that can see through the walls in people's houses and it's fully autonomous!

RTFA? It doesn't see through walls. It doesn't technically see through anything. It combines multiple images and an algorithm to look for heat signatures in small gaps through the trees that aren't fully visible in a single frame but when pieced together can show what's under them.

Bill Borre wrote on Jul 1, 2021, 19:00:
One thing I do find very strange about the situation in the times we are living in is that the game had a very positive female lead. You would think some of the female executives at these corporations would be in Kate's corner and work towards her rerelease.

Are there any female execs at these companies? If so, it might be worth trying to work out a deal with them again.

coldcut wrote on Jul 1, 2021, 16:19:

Blue wrote on Jul 1, 2021, 13:01:
If I recall correctly, no one actually knows who exactly owns the IP.

Yeah, that probably explains why NOLF Revival has been up for such a long time already without anyone trying to take it down. There, you can get updated versions of NOLF 1, 2 and Contract Jack, all with the latest patches including widescreen support and ready to work on modern systems (although I had some sound issues in cutscenes, it was playing too fast for some reason).

https://www.bluesnews.com/s/140550/no-one-knows-who-owns-nolf

Rock Paper Shotgun did some digging and reported on it in 2013 and 2017.

Basically, Night Dive tried finding out who might own the IP or any part of it, and none of them weren't interested in checking, and also threatened to sue if they tried to re-release it.

Fox seemingly wanted money up front to even look through their filing cabinets (which they'd repay if they found they had no rights), so when Night Dive said no to that generous offer, Fox responded by saying (and I paraphrase) "You can bet your bum we'll look in our filing cabinets for free if you start selling it." Activision just shrugged. And Warner? Well, those treats sent Night Dive a "scary letter", threatening to throw lawyers at them if they pursued re-releasing the game, despite the concurrent negotiations they were involved in. SIGH. Night Dive eventually managed to get the two parts of Warner to actually talk to each other, and sensibly ask themselves if they wanted to work out a licensing deal, which resulted in their saying... No.

I still have the disks for the first one and the box and disks for the second one. Unfortunately the disks use SecuROM, which doesn't work with modern Windows, so even if you legally own it, you have to crack it. I've been thinking about playing them again for a while. I don't know what the NOLF Revival uses to make it work, but on the PCGaming Wiki are links to NOLF Modernizer for both games that patch it to work without the disks and add widescreen support, and fix some bugs.

Bill Borre wrote on Jul 1, 2021, 13:30:
If it's focused on free-to-play I don't mind so much since I don't play many of them.

You know what they say, if you are't paying for it, you're not the customer, you're the product.

bhcompy wrote on Jul 1, 2021, 15:39:
NBA 2k20 had unskippable ads on loading screens that would play to the end even if the game loaded sooner, and that shit is unacceptable for a paid game

What happens if you block it with a firewall?

Luggage wrote on Jun 29, 2021, 18:01:
I love the idea of UFOs.

But I can't work out why their tech is so good it can cross galaxies but their stealth factor is zero. And they keep crashing in Roswell.

Aliens are rubbish, is all I can conclude.

Their stealth tech is that they only appear in front of the worst possible cameras.

The Half Elf wrote on Jun 29, 2021, 01:21:

MeanJim wrote on Jun 28, 2021, 20:21:
Microsoft, please let me remove your xbox shit from my PCs! I have a second PC used for hosting game servers for friends. It doesn't have a monitor, I login using remote desktop. We played Arma3 last week, and Sunday one of my friends texted me and said a couple were up to play and asked if I could start up the server for them. The server should have still been up, so I logged in to see what was up and saw this. The server was still running, but this Xbox shit was all over the place. I don't know why that shit popped up all of the sudden or why it was preventing them from seeing the server either, but apparently the overlay doesn't work right over RDP and I had a hell of a time getting it to close. It seemed to recognize the mouse going over buttons and stuff, but clicking stuff wasn't doing anything. I was about to go reboot it when I somehow finally made close, and then they were able to connect. I had all of that xbox shit disabled, but I guess it re-enabled it during the 20H2 update.

It looks like ya have a 360 controller and hit the X button in the middle or Windows Key + G. Pretty easy to shut it all down.

No, the only things plugged into that machine is a power cord and ethernet cable. No keyboard, no mouse, no monitor, and certainly no controller.

Acleacius wrote on Jun 28, 2021, 19:39:
Damn, not sure how to feel about EVGA's deal. It's just hard to trust Nvidia is telling the truth after all the lies about rtx production and released cards.
Guess we don't really have a choice, but to accept the LHR cards. Otherwise we might not get a card at all.

I just got that email from EVGA right after reading this. I signed up back in November for the 3070s and 3080s, but I managed to get an EVGA 3070 from Best Buy in January. I finally got an email from them last month for the same 3070 I already bought, still nothing on the others.