Federal jobs used to be nice. Stable solid employment for the rest of your life. Nothing glamorous but you wouldn’t have to worry while the market goes up and down.

And then last year that completely changed in a bad way

Hanselman pointed to a Microsoft blog post noting that, starting in October, the company began requiring “mandatory account verification for all partners in the Windows Hardware Program,” which also covers certifying software drivers. Last month, the company updated the post to say: “Accounts that did not successfully complete account verification and received a Rejected verification status have been suspended from the Windows Hardware Program, and submissions from these accounts are no longer permitted.”

So they didn’t hand over their blood and urine samples to Microsoft so they don’t get to be developers anymore

I stream on owncast and it’s tock solid. It needs very few resources and is very easy to get set up. We have matrix rooms to help you, and a community here on Lemmy! Check us out at [email protected]

Yesterday my spouse was trying to figure out how to set up copilot. I was trying to show them how I use AI to automate some of my flows, and tried to set it up for them, but turns out Copilot is different under every area of the company. Github Copilot != Office Copilot != Windows Copilot. They are all different and require different subscriptions! Horrible horrible user interface. Even the shit they’re trying to push everywhere on everyone is convoluted to hell. Why in the hell is would there not be one subscription that gives you access to everything?

Microsoft is bloated and bureaucratic, and this whole thing proves it. They never think out of their divisional lines and it shows so hard. “Why would our subscription need to be linked with X or Y division?” _Because to a customer, there are no divisions, it’s just Excel and Visual Studio, it’s all just microsoft.

Nothing concrete, but their stated goal is to play any pc game on it, similar to what steam did with the deck. That was enough to scare off sony

They made such a wonderful bug beautiful world and filled it with fetch quests and chests. I swear ubisoft should focus on making worlds, then hand it off together studios who know how to write stories and fill those worlds

So, not defending them because it’s still a stupid choice, but their reasons were not because PC bad, but because Xbox announced their “Play PC games on the next Xbox”. Meaning Microsoft’s next console could play PS games now (if they bought the PC version). Sony doesn’t want their rival console to play their games, so they revoked it.

I still think it’s stupid, exclusives are stupid, but that’s the actual reason before many more people claim that sony hates PC players. (I mean they do, but not for the reason you think)

It was Xbox. Their “You can play anything on the next xbox” made Sony pissed, and that’s ultimately why they scaled it back.

I’ve never seen it put so well. Yes it’s a monopoly, but unlike most bad monopolies it didn’t get there from being predatory, or anti competitive. Ironically with the Deck I’d argue by allowing other launchers and stores they’re surprisingly pro-competition.

It’s that every single other store (except GOG) has done everything in their power to be as anti-consumer pro-business as they can and just have destroyed themselves. EA’s Origin from the start was a buggy mess with bad DLC. Ubisoft was just an Assassin’s Creed store and pissed everyone off by forcing it and not giving a single reason to be over there except “You can’t buy Valhalla anywhere else”, proving how little PC players needed to play Valhalla. Microsoft had a strict 5-install limit of installing games over the lifetime of the purchase, and you had to use their shitty “I solidly work 15% of the time” microsoft store. Everything other store was just hot garbage made up by MBAs who had zero interest of serving the consumer.

But now “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!”

Phenomenal. They chose the buggiest operating system for a spacecraft. Amazing.

I think we’re both right in a way. They won’t care about Windows specifically, but Windows to them isn’t the product anymore. It’s the entrypoint for users to Microsoft services, which is why they advertise so much in Windows now for OneDrive, Office, Copilot. You’re essentially already in their store just by using Windows. So the real loss isn’t that people aren’t using Windows, it’s that people are cancelling OneDrive and Office subscriptions. That is what is going to be noticed.

What’s really interesting to me is these numbers:

From this, it’s roughly that Windows 11 + Linux = (-) Windows 10. So people really are pissed about migrating to 11, and leaving in droves. 5% of the market is huge. This is not being ignored my Microsoft. Rough number I see is there are 14M Steam users in the US. 5.3% of that is 742,000 computers. 742,000 points of entry into OneDrive, Office, Xbox, and of course Copilot that will never be exposed to them. That’s millions in potential revenue lost.

It’s fine. It’s not going to get any better with age. Look people will say it’s crap, it’s shit, it’s horrible. It’s not. It’s just, fine. It’s not amazing, it’s not groundbreaking, it’s just plainly fine.

The real issue is that they obviously had a lot of really cool ideas that were all left half finished or cut it out for the sake of simplicity. We can’t have advanced mining, that’d be too complex. We can’t have too many story lines, it’d confuse people.

So, treat it as it is, it’s an okay game, it’s fun, it’s just not going to be RDR2 or Cyberpunk. I’d say it’s solidly worth 30-40 dollars. Pick it up if it’s on sale.

LOL no shit, I have two separate threads going on, one about Tim Sweeney here and another in /c/movies about Sydney Sweeney! That is amazing, I did not understand why you posted the image but damn, that was stupid of me. I don’t care it stands, and I stand by my opinion of Sydney!

God she’s just not likeable. I’ll admit that she was great in White Lotus, but it’s because she was seemingly just playing herself! She did a great job at being an unlikable brat!

We just watched “Anyone but you” as a joke, and man what a shit job she did. Ironically she did really great at the beginning of the movie, by the end it was just a trainwreck. Funny enough, I also dislike Glenn Powell, but that movie made me like him more. It was a shit script and he honestly did a pretty good job with it. While there are many better than him, it does take talent to take a shit script and try to make something of it.

But I mean, her boobs were nice in it. So I guess that’s enough for Hollywood to say that it was in fact a movie.

And then they bitch. All. The time. About it.

We keep choosing the worst possible choices for the customer but the customers are going somewhere else! Why?!?!

Gonna need captain big brain over here for why Valve has a monopoly.

I just don’t understand. Their engine powers the vast majority of AAA games, and a huge chunk of non-AAA. I know they charge for this engine. How the hell are they strapped for cash. And before you comment, I know the answer unfortunately.

They had fortnight. A competent executive team would see that as a fluke that is great, but not dependable long term, and plan for investing that money back into the business but always prepared for the popularity of Fortnight could dip, but it wouldn’t matter because the core of their business would carry it.

Instead, it sounds like they had a standard executive team, where they thought the money from fortnight would last forever, it would never die, and line would only ever go up. They stupidly made a bunch of wrong decisions, and are now all shocked pikachu that Fortnight’s popularity is waning after almost a decade. So of course it’s the workers who should be fired now, not the executives, no of course not.

Oh man I love when companies make stupid tonedeaf decisions like this.

Hey you know how we haven’t made a great first party game in over a decade?

Yeah?

Well, what if to boost sales numbers we add a tier that ONLY gives you our lame first party games!

Because they refuse to see games as a creative artform. Or, they think they ate, but then do the worst corpo bs to them. This all reeks of some boardroom joining all their MBAs together to come up with this brilliant shit covered plan.

I’m optimistic about this. She has a deep passion for games and who makes th, she doesn’t like corpos but knows how to work in their system. Could be good.

They actually did. They called it Google Play Music, and Google TV/Google Play Videos. I paid for those. Youtube Music and Youtube premium are the enshittified versions of those, and they will continue to make them worse.