Soccer is a British word though, but predominantly southerner / Oxfordian.

Association Football used to get contracted to Assoc or Soc to differentiate it from Rugby Football.

And in Oxford, they historically liked to add -er to the end of things; still in parlance today is calling Rugby “rugger”, £5 note “fiver”, the Bodleian Library “Bodder”.

Assoc became “soccer”.

It’s not an American thing. It’s a posh southern England thing that got exported to the states by American students at Oxford returning stateside and bringing the game back with them, and forgotten by the English because the southern teams pale in comparison to the north’s.

That’s what you’re going to get.

.NET is arguably one of the better things to come out of Microsoft. The CLR only runs when a .NET application is running so it’s not bloat, and it’s pretty lightweight as far as a VM goes with JIT. It’s well documented, has public standards, is cross platform, and released under MIT.

I’m a Unix/Linux greybeard so I’ve no real skin in the game. But given how C# has become the defacto cross platform game development language of choice for both Godot and Unity engines, .NET deserves a little credit.

Everyone is a they. It’s been a singular third person pronoun since the 1300s.

P.T. was the announcement teaser that Kojima was to be directing Silent Hills with del Toro but then Konami cancelled it as the company exited the video game industry and Kojima left to found their own studio.

Why blame Kojima for something Konami did without their involvement at all and long after they’d left the company?

Valve technically sell at least one movie

Final Fantasy VII has the classic mistranslation right at the start when Cloud says “Barret, be careful! Attack while its tail is up! It’s gonna counterattack with its laser!” when the complete opposite is true and it should have been translated more as “Watch the tail! You don’t want to be hit by that laser!” (i.e. DON’T attack while the tail is up).

Or a joke?

This take always ignores the immense value of the Steamworks SDK.

Valve’s cut enables free: multiplayer, voice, chat, game notifications, in-game purchases, stats and achievements, rich presence, cloud saves, Steam Input to support any input device you could imagine including for accessibility, error reporting, persistent inventories and tradable items, game keys, leaderboards, matchmaking and lobbies, remote play, remote play together with a remote friend, screenshots, modding / workshop, authentication and ownership validation, anti-cheat and game bans, virtual/augmented reality, special/positional audio, multiple game builds and beta channels, global CDN, community discussion / forums / game guides, sales stats, playtesting, automated builds, developer streams direct to the store page, demos, DRM, automated compatibility tests, Linux support for Windows binaries via Proton, GoldSrc, Source, and Source 2 game engines, game cafe / licensing support, marketing and promotion tools, common runtime environments to target for Linux (and alleviate external dependencies), glmgr to translate DirectX to OpenGL for macOS, and much much much more.

That’s what the Valve cut covers. It’s an insane amount of functionality to put into your game and take a huge weight off your shoulders. It’s what enables one-man indie studios to be able to make a hugely popular multiplayer game that blows up overnight without needing to bare the burden of building all the required services yourself nor the cost of running them.

Epic etc take a smaller cut, but can’t offer anywhere near the amount support in return requiring end-users to have a subscription to cover the cost of the services.

I’m very much in that camp myself. I ducked out from consoles, having owned pretty much all of them since the Atari 2600, after the PS4. So many more amazing games on PC e.g. Song of Syx which would never work on a traditional console but is amazing on PC and even Steam Deck / Steam Controller.

Now we know why they stopped shipping games to PC. They need to prep their user base for a hardware price that will have users consider just buying a PC instead, taking away the “I can play the PlayStation exclusives on PC anyway” argument.

This is the real reason - same thing happened with GTA5 and RDR2. They crunched hard to hit the target platform consoles and then had to crunch again to get it working well across the various GPUs, aspect ratios, and resolutions on PC.

It was invented and developed by a Russian but the company that sells it is registered in Germany.

Also “bleem” is way easier to say out loud.

10 Things I Hate About You (1999), if anyone is wondering.

And the last driver shipped by AMD for Linux for those cards was in 2015…

So if I buy Valve, I’ll gain the benefit of support and the hardware. Nice!

Given Valve have been the ones keeping older AMD GPUs working and up to date on Linux, pushing upstream etc, I’d argue we kind of do rely on a company to provide support.

I’d rather spend my money on something I have stronger confidence will have developers maintaining and committing patches etc for all the components in the box than a box of components I can’t be sure will all have the same level of support across all its components into the years to come.

Take x86-64-v1/v2 (and even v3 in some cases) CPUs for example. They’re “supported” on Linux but many distros’ packages don’t support it, meaning you’re often compiling from source to get a package functioning. Sure the kernel isn’t the issue but the rest of userspace is.

With Valve seemingly having no intention of ending maintenance support for their hardware even after end of sale, and their huge contributions to Arch and other parts of the Linux ecosystem, it’s nice to have an option to buy a complete system that will be maintained, and remain a target/reference platform for their distro (which means binaries will be around should I want to distro hop).

For instance my 11 year old Steam Link box, discontinued in 2018, got a firmware update 17 hours ago by Valve.

That kind of support.

Wasn’t it legit as early HDDs needed spinning down before the power could be cut?