I didn’t mean that Ubisoft’s was better than Steam - just better than Epic’s store when comparing both against Steam. I hated the uPlay store as much as everyone else.

As for your question, once you have feature parity, it becomes about finding a niche. GoG has its list of old games and lack DRM going for it, for example. Nobody is going to pull large groups of people from Steam immediately without some major draw, obviously, but if you offer a similar service that doesn’t exclude people on other platforms like Steam from playing games with people on your own platform, then people will be drawn to whichever they like better.

The big reason I think we don’t see any real competition for Steam is that the companies with the funding to do so all wanted to force a piece of the pie rather than actually compete with Steam on quality of service. If EA, Ubisoft, and Epic had tried that, we would probably have a much more diverse ecosystem of storefronts - especially with crossplay becoming common. As it stands, Steam’s biggest competitors are the consoles, and that’s largely down to hardware preference rather than storefront/launcher preference.

Steam has so much impetus now that competing with them is very difficult, but as I saw somebody else in here say, if Epic had done something like offer their lower take from devs on sales at the agreement of a 5% lower price on their platform instead of spending all that money on forced exclusivity, people would have a real reason to go there instead of Steam (if the quality of service were comparable).

A. The technological landscape is very different today than it was 21 years ago. Many other companies have launched a better copy of Steam - including Ubisoft themselves. People didn’t like when Ubisoft and EA did it because they tried forced exclusivity, like Epic, and couldn’t offer anything beyond their own games. And you couldn’t even sync friends between the 3, needlessly splitting your friends between different platforms. GoG has been doing fine for years now.

B. Maybe if Epic had provided basic stuff like a shopping cart - you know, a basic feature that you can find on any webhost service’s website maker - instead of paying companies for forced exclusivity, maybe people would’ve been more willing to give it a chance.

Forced exclusivity put them on a bad start. The lack of basic features that were standardized for online storefronts 25 years ago killed any chance they had to gain any kind of traction. And the series of bad decisions following guaranteed that they never would have a good reputation. Remember when they had a sale on unreleased games without asking the devs of those games?

Don’t feel bad. The part that sucks is that we have to even check nowadays whether or not our memes were ethically sourced.

I totally get that, I tried to make art a job and stopped drawing for a decade because of it. But we fall back into the issue of supporting corporate abuse for convenience when there’s plenty of other images of anime girls out there. AI art has the same issues as sweatshop labor but is much easier to avoid.

Plenty of images of anime girls online to make memes out of without supporting corporate abuse.

Also, talent is simply applied skill. The only thing keeping you from drawing like that is time and effort.

The green thing could be part of a stylized plant, but the most damning thing to me is that left eye where the reflective part of the iris is in the border around her eye.

The only way these “play to earn” games can work is as a pyramid scheme. Everybody wants more money out of the pot than they’re putting in, and the company sure as hell isn’t going to run at a loss. Many of them seem to only deal with currency through their own exchange (for fiat currency directly) or through markets backed by coins that are also backed by fiat currency, like bitcoin, for exactly the reasons that you laid out. Can’t make money if everybody is buying your funny money with other funny money that lost 99% of its value 3 months after it appeared.

The only other way somebody could make this work is if the players are the product, but at that point, why wouldn’t you just sell ad space on a website.

You’re right, that’s the more accurate definition. A state of change, moving from one state of being to a new one.

I think trans still works fine in this context because gender is a cultural label designated to you entirely based on what the doctor thought at the time of your birth and what society assumes from things like secondary sex characteristics and behavior, and the cis label was retroactively applied to describe “anybody who isn’t trans” after the trans label had been in use for decades. So there’s nothing really scientific behind the label beyond the concept of that state of change. Gender itself is a cultural concept instead of a state of being too (as well as a performance that we do every moment of our lives) and so falls more into an active event than a passive state.

I agree, but I think this usually comes from a place of Bugs Bunny being many trans women’s first introduction to something outside the gender norm, and so they project that back onto the character.

That, or they’re t4t and Bugs dressing up made them feel funny as kids in the same way that Robinhood from that one Disney movie did with furries.

Cis and trans are Latin prefixes and opposites of each other - cis basically translating out to “same” and trans being “different.” To be cis means to be the same gender that the doctor assigned you when you were born, while trans people transition to a gender different from their assigned gender. So you can’t be on a spectrum of more trans or less trans because you’re transitioning to x, y, or z.

There are spectrums that people choose from, though, if you want to get into some of the finer details. Some people use the prefix demi, meaning “partially” (like in demigod), to signify a gender that they most closely relate to but don’t feel properly identifies them. Like somebody who is a demigirl most closely relates to being a woman, but doesn’t feel like womanhood fits them. This is why the umbrella term non-binary exists, for people who feel like they fall somewhere outside the traditional designated roles of “man” or “woman” and more closely relate to a secret, third thing.