“it’s easier than you think” is one thing that’s very helpful to show to people that don’t already know about using free software without tracking and such, but when it’s “it’s easier than you think, just spend hundreds of dollars and replace your device” I’d say the barrier to entry is the cost more than the skill.

Aren’t there phones like the Nothing that already have fully FOSS android implementations pre-installed? That’s the peak “easy” - just buy a new product! So saying installing Lineage is “easy” to someone who very likely can only do so after buying a new product is burying the lede.

If you’re buying a new one, whatever fits your budget and is compatible with Lineage/Graphene.

The only times I’ve personally been forced off of a Samsung phone (though I’ve mostly had flagships) wasn’t due to any day-to-day degradation in user experience. It was stuff like switching USA carriers or my carrier blacklisting devices with 3g. My current S22 Ultra is three years old, going on four, and aside from needing to use adb and shizuku to have a semblance of control I once had with root there’s nothing wrong with it. My previous phone was only replaced because it became incompatible with my ATT phone service in the US. The Note 9, which was four years-ish old when ATT decided 3g+4g wasn’t good enough and deactivated any SIM i put in the thing. If not for that arbitrary carrier-made decision, I can’t think of many things that 9 couldn’t do that the S22U can.

My next phone won’t be a purchase I make until I absolutely need to make it, and at that point it’ll exclusively be a pick from degooglable unlockable models. I’ll probably choose based on hardware like an SD slot, removable battery, and stylus if any of those are available. Or maybe linux phones will be a thing at that point and I’ll be looking at those.

$300 plus shipping and taxes. In your region. And a whole lot more than $0, which is the cost of staying on someone’s old phone. when someone’s buying a new phone already, considering its compatibility with Lineage or Graphene is something that should be on more people’s radar, I agree. But switching from googled vendor’d Android to fully open Android isn’t a pure skill issue like switching from Chrome to Firefox (/Waterfox/librewolf) or Windows to Linux is. “I’d switch but it’s too hard” is a much smaller reason than “I’d switch but it’s too expensive” is.

Someone’s five year old phone is just as likely to be a five year old Samsung/etc with a locked bootloader.

Of course it is. But that doesn’t change that for very many users, the difficulty of the install process isn’t anywhere close to a limiting factor.

Doesn’t matter how easy it is when step zero is “spend $500+ on a new phone because you’re currently using a Samsung or other device with a locked bootloader”

Remember, even cheaper phones (that actually work with your carrier) get marked up. Taxes, shipping, accessories like a case. Being able to afford a new device is nice and Lineage/Graphene make a good case for which new device you should buy, but someone’s five year old phone still works.

From what I can see, this doesn’t need privilege escalation. Just for the user to grant it screen reader privileges, which many users aren’t conditioned to see as the giant flashing red alarm bell it is.

Malware is like fishing. Bait a million hooks and throw them out there, something’s gonna bite and get hooked even if 999,999 lines never even get tugged.

Any chance for a self-hostable containerized version? I’d love to be able to spin up my own local instance on my homeserver.

I have yet to see a well made Unreal Engine 5 game

Do you not consider Expedition 33 a well-made game?

I have less issue with smaller devs doing it

The comment I replied to says “we should push smaller devs to try engines like Godot now for that as Unity and UE got too big for their boots.”

Indie games on shoestring budgets are also the games that can least afford to pay employees to learn the “better” tool set on the job. Hiring devs that are experienced in Unreal or Unity means your onboarding is just about teaching them your studio’s stuff, and the demands of your game. Budget is a zero sum game - if something like Expedition 33 (UE5) did it “right” instead of doing it “easy”, they might not have been able to afford or produce the phenomenal mocap/VA/soundtrack/environments in the game.

Godot continues to mature, and some relatively big names in the indie space are publicly dumping Unity for it (like Mega Crit with Slay the Spire 2). But “pushing” smaller devs to ignore the onboarding problem isn’t the way. It’s the smaller devs that benefit most from engines with “good enough” defaults - bigger studios can afford to pay someone to “do the lighting”.

Picking an engine (including the option of rolling your own shit) has to be a decision made very early in the game development cycle, like “before you hire anybody” early, and it’s a really hard one to change your mind on later. For a lot of studios, the right decision isn’t the “best, most capable, free-est” one. Hell, for Balatro the dev chose LOVE, which is usually used for VNs, because he didn’t need all the other features he’d get out of something like Unity or Godot.

TBH if you didn’t want hostile people that know the planet better than you manipulating sandworm aggro to kill you, why did you install a Dune survival MMO

That’s like, the main form of factional interaction in Dune

I mean, this article was spawned by The Alters, which had a bad machine translation segment (a thing since long before we called it AI) and… Some lorem ipsum in a background texture.

It’s already in every game in the background. Do you think paid graphic designers are instructed not to use the AI features built into Photoshop/Illustrator?

The guy who used ai to make some technobabble lipsum for an asset was an artist hired by the company. You can see a huge list of the artists that worked on The Alters in the credits. They all got paid. This artist would take home the same wage for typing “gshsjajfkfksiwn” in that asset, or copy and pasting some numbers that were in a readout from a space telescope, or literally using lorem ipsum. If we’re really micromanaging every art shortcut as “potential pay to hire more artists” now, why not start counting how many rock/plant/sky/water textures and models in The Alters (or FF7 Rebirth, or literally any UE5 game) are pre-baked assets included with the UE5 license? Game devs actually use those instead of billable hours / salaried hires.

The translation flub is the only part that mattered here. The Alters was getting a ton of praise and good press for its story, characters, mocap, VA, mechanics, visuals, you name it. Finding out that someone used GPT for some glorified lorem ipsum to paste on a random background object doesn’t change the quality one iota. The art team for this game was paid and hired and they did a phenomenal job with the game, but one of those paid artists took a shortcut for some assets. It’s not a “the ayy eye is letting corpo CEOs skip out on paying real human artists!!!” situation here.

Do you know what else paid artists / game studios do other than pay a human to create an asset from scratch? They buy models and textures on the Unreal/etc asset store. The same exact boulder model is present in everything from ffviiR to Clair Obscur to Death Stranding, because it comes free with the engine and is “good enough” just like an AI generated rock texture would be.

Ever hire a professional photo editor? They’re using generative AI. Every last one of them. They’ve been doing it for like 15 years ever since Adobe introduced “content-aware fill” algorithms that generate backgrounds to replace random bystanders or objects in a shot. Is the scary robot stealing someone’s job and burning the planet there too?

However, using machine translation without even a proofreading pass is hilarious. Using a conversational model for translation is double hilarious. Surely purpose-built translation tools exist and are more efficient than “asking” chatGPT to “translate this line into Brazilian Portuguese”.

Yeah, there’s less reason than ever before to play something like Stardew or Isaac or Hades on the Nintendo box where your save file is hostage to their system and you’ll never be able to use mods and the developers have to outsource the patches to a third party so the game’s always a couple months behind on the new features…

When the Switch 1 came out it was also the only console that had the “half-handheld” form factor. A lot of indie games like Isaac, Hades, and Slay the Spire got PC gamers like me to double dip (or in Hades’ case, actually choose Switch over Steam) for the gameboy factor. The Switch (2) is no longer unique in that regard. I haven’t touched my Switch 1 for anything but exclusives since the Steam Deck came out.

In 2025, a company that is just looking to make a shitload of money is enough to automatically “win”.

Valve: “What are you selling?” Video games, video game hardware without vendor lock-in, and in-app purchases. “Who are you selling it to?” PC gamers.

Literally everyone else in the space except for Itch, which is decidedly focused on too-indie-for-indie games and is small enough to be acquired if it ever gets popular: “What are you selling?” The promise that we’ll make more profit next year than this year. “Who are you selling it to?” Shareholders or a corp that’ll buy the whole company.

It’s an absolute no-brainer. Until anyone else can answer these questions in the same way Valve does, Valve is automatically the best player in the space. Even if another store sells games for cheaper, or has exclusives, or bans DRM, or manages to make a better storefront program, or pays developers a bigger cut. I’m not on some “good guy Gabe” circlejerk shit. There’s no morals to ascribe here. Valve makes enough money and is okay with making enough money, forever. MS, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, Nintendo, Sony, CDPR, Apple, Amazon, ActiBlizz, and every other storefront operator will be considered a failure if they don’t make “more more money than last year” every year forever. I know which platform I want to maintain a library on. I’ll happily use GOG and Itch to buy DRM-free installers though, those will outlast any enshittification the platform does in the future.

If there weren’t enough people put off by Origin and uPlay to not install them or use them to buy games, Origin and uPlay would still exist. Steam didn’t kill them, all it did was exist and be a better platform that people actually wanted to use. There’s a whole graveyard of companies that tried to make “our own Steam”. Fucking Discord tried to do it. What’s that going to do for a marketplace where you’re selling “licenses” to users? What good’s your licensed copy of Fallout New Vegas on Amazon Prime Games Launcher when that launcher no longer exists? Say what you will about Steam, most people are pretty confident it’ll still be around in eight years.

If there weren’t enough people put off by the Epic Games Store, the EGS wouldn’t still be paying developers to put their shit on the store. Steam hasn’t killed it, and isn’t even attempting to kill it. It’s just existing and being a better platform that people actually want to use. If EGS can’t compete with Steam while giving shit away for free, that’s not a “Steam monopoly” it’s an indicator of how dogshit the opinion of Epic as a corporation and storefront is.

Origin failed because nobody wanted it. uPlay failed because nobody wanted it. The perks (being able to buy exclusives) weren’t worth the downsides (literally just making another account and installing another program on your computer). I think that’s beautiful. I hope it happens to Epic next.

Steam’s existence as an IPO/enshittification-proof platform has prevented the PC gaming storefront market from going the way of Netflix. Remember that? We had cable channels, pay-per-views, piracy, and VHS/DVDs/blu-rays as the only way to watch movies at home. Then a Blockbuster-over-mail company started getting licenses to let you pay to watch movies at home with one subscription, which was a massive success. Then every other IP holder went “hey wait, why are we paying Netflix when we could just eat the whole pie ourselves” and now we have Netflix Disney+ Max Peacock AppleTV+ Amazon Prime Video Fandango Paramount+ AMC+ Philo Hulu Tubi Fubo Dippy Weeno Poob all trying to be the new Netflix. And because Netflix itself is a shareholder-value-driven company, it’s putting ads in its paid product and jacking up prices and paying for exclusivity.

Y’know what people do seem to like? Microsoft Gamepass. I’ll never install it myself, same reason I’ll never install the Epic Games Store. But Microsoft is using an even less consumer friendly strategy (timed access to games with a subscription) to propose the same “upsides” as EGS (you don’t have to pay full price for games).

For me, it failed because I wasn’t willing to install some shareholder-driven company’s storefront app on my computer just to play Mass Effect 3, so I pirated Mass Effect 3. Then I got to watch it fail because it turns out I wasn’t the only one willing to skip/pirate games because they came with Origin attached to them.

Epic’s exclusives are the exact same.

I get my PC games from five sources. Steam, GOG’s website, Itch’s website, standalone launchers (I’d probably be okay with a “store” of games as small as the Riot launcher, but I don’t use that because I don’t install rootkit anticheat), and piracy. Launcherless Itch and GOG have convenience parity with piracy with the added benefit of the devs getting paid (and the ease of acquiring updates), and I’ll usually use them over Steam if available. Itch could easily get bought by a corp like Humble did and CDPR is already a shareholder value company, but they sell DRM-free products that I can use even after the stores die / sell out.

A recent launch I paid for and didn’t use Steam for is “The Bazaar” - it has a standalone launcher. The game went pay to win so I uninstalled it, but its lack of presence on Steam didn’t keep me from playing it.

I’ll use stuff other than Steam no problem. But I’ll always cheer when a platform owned and operated by a shareholder backed company dies in favor of one that isn’t. My experience in the hobby space of PC gaming is better when there aren’t exclusives locked on EA Origin or UPlay or Microsoft UWP store or Epic, because I might want to play those games without installing a stock-ticker company’s adware on my computer. Having the space “capitalism free” is unrealistic, unless we’re talking “pirate everything”. I’ll settle for “profit driven” over “YOY growth driven” leaders in the space any day of the week.

Now, if Steam’s position as the best distributor/launcher platform is a de facto “monopoly”, what’s the solution to that? Anecdotally I know plenty of people that play non-Steam games while not playing any Epic games. Epic tries to fight Steam by directly paying developers to not publish on Steam, and also effectively guaranteeing studios a financial success by cutting a deal to put their game up for “free” on the Epic storefront. Plenty of games have been “Free” on Epic while full price on Steam. Valve tries to fight Epic by… Acting like Epic doesn’t exist. They don’t chase exclusives or get into a price war with Epic.

Steam is the most popular platform for PC game releases. A subset of users will not consider ever using other platforms. If we accept this as the definition of “monopoly” the way we’d say Windows has a monopoly on x64 PCs, how would changing the revenue split for devs (which appears to be the issue this company’s suing Valve over) alleviate this “monopoly”? Sounds to me like forcing Steam to explicitly allow “the game is more expensive on Steam” tactics would just make Steam even more of a no-brainer for devs over stuff like Epic or their own platform.

You could say that paying the devs/studios a better cut is the point, and I’d see the validity in the argument. But it’s completely unrelated to whether or not Valve operates as a monopoly.

Ah yes. Massively unsuccessful games like… checks notes League of Legends. World of Warcraft. Fortnite: Battle Royale.

The magic part of the PC is that if your independently distributed game does fail, you can still, after the fact, decide to slap it on someone’s storefront in a desperate attempt for eyeballs - see Overwatch 2. Why not double dip? It only costs you hypothetical money you haven’t made yet. Am I supposed to be sad that E fucking A failed to install their shareholder value store on my computer?

Valve will never IPO, yes! I don’t care why. That automatically makes it better than any other launcher/storefront platform that’ll exist in my lifetime, barring one that commits to staying private, succeeds as a private company, and is content with “staying profitable” for x years. Platforms that IPO universally get worse and worse as they wring every drop of shareholder value from their users to feed the infinite growth machine. We’re having this conversation on Lemmy instead of on Reddit for presumably this reason. Platforms that have shareholders (which includes Epic and CDPR’s GOG) have a primary motive of “being more profitable than last year”. If, let’s say, Epic made ten billion dollars in profit last year but also made ten billion dollars in profit in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, it’d be a failed company.

I’ll happily take the only company in the PC gaming space that’s content with one money printer over every other option that’s always thinking about how to make a second one, or reduce the ink costs, or blah blah blah. It’s just a happy coincidence that in the PC gaming space (unlike pretty much every other space), the shareholder-free thing is also the most popular, and best thing. I’d use the worse less-popular thing if that thing were the only thing free from growth capitalism.

If a game dev doesn’t value their presence on the Steam store higher than the cost of Steam’s service, they don’t list on Steam. Simple as. It’s just that a lot of dev studios consider “visible on the Steam store” to be very valuable indeed. That’s what they’re paying for, not the stuff about Steam that benefits the user (client features like Input, Workshop, Cloud, Community, etc).