Fortran, the language, is also older than FLOW-MATIC.
FLOW-MATIC's claim to fame was beating Fortran at releasing a working implementation (and having syntax that looked like English, but that's not something to be proud of). Plankalkül, however, has not yet been implemented so if we're only counting releases of working software, it isn't a contender.
> AI means that those 'easy' tasks can be automated away, so there's less immediate value in hiring a new grad.
Not disagreeing that this is happening in the industry but it still feels like a missed opportunity to not hire juniors. Not only do you have the upcoming skill gap as you mention, but someone needs to instruct AI to do these menial/easy tasks. Perhaps it's only my opinion but I think it would be prudent to instead see this as just having junior engineers who can get more menial tasks done, instead of expecting to add it to the senior dev workflow at zero cost to output.
If you were a dev selling a game years ago when physical distribution was the only method, you'd likely end up with a lot less than 70% after both the publisher and retailer take their cut.
The difference is that the company had to risk manufacturing cartridges, distributing them, etc. If the game didn't sell, you ended up with lots of money lost.
Steam is much much easier for Valve.
I am not saying it has a value, but 30% seems a lot.
Of course, in the end that 30% we end up paying it ourselves.
It clearly isn’t easy, given that nobody else is doing it their way. Maintaining the company culture might be the toughest challenge of them all. The other game storefronts simply can’t resist muddying the water for the consumer, making the shopping experience hostile for some stupid ass monetization reasons. Shopping on Steam is a breeze, and it always feels like the store is on your side trying to help, instead of trying to get in the way. The developer-side publishing experience is much similar.
I look at neither for reviews. Steam Reviews are often bombed to hell for things like, "Game has woman. Woke." or "Game has racism." or other culture war nonsense. Or the very common, "Creator I follow on Youtube liked/disliked this game, so I left a similar review" or "Creator I dislike liked/disliked this game, so I left the opposite review". Or, the worst of all, "Game uses Unity/Unreal/Godot/Something Else, automatic dislike".
Ultimately, reviews of games tend to be pretty useless because people who play games have very little understanding of a) what makes games fun, and b) the complexity involved in making the games.
I have creators I follow whose tastes are closest to my own, and I watch their content for reviews, then go to the store that makes the best offer.
I genuinely strictly disagree; The Steam review section is usually an accurate description of the game’s quality.
The overall score tends to fairly represent the likelihood that I’ll like the game, and when in doubt reading a couple of reviews tends to give a clearer picture. And then, the reviews themselves can be rated, and there’s a “recent reviews” score that protects against review bombings and gives a clearer picture of the game’s current state. Not to say that there aren’t exceptions - there’s a poorly-received game that I’ve poured hundreds of hours into recently - but I literally wouldn’t know how to set up a better system myself.
In contrast, the Epic storefront is fucking laughable.
I use steam for the community as well. Just look at how bad reviews are on Xbox store, they are more like app store reviews... mostly complaining about a version update.
Steam also has a solid update/beta pipeline. Game companies post blog posts about new game updates so you keep up to date with development. They also did an amazing job with SteamOS which feels rock solid.
> I am not saying it has a value, but 30% seems a lot.
I’d suggest that it’s cheap, at least historically compared to just about any other product that’s been sold. If I had a popular marketplace platform that basically sold my product without much need for human intervention on the transaction, that has real value. Honestly 30% seems like a bargain to me.
In marketing and sales of the product, any human that touches the process ultimately is getting a piece of that transaction. We may not have physical media, but that was actually probably the least of the expense associated with software products back in the day. Consider the army of people needed just to wholesale to retail, coordinate distribution, distribute…
My recollection from those days is that if the dev got 10% royalties of a purchase price they would have been ecstatic. If you offered them 70%? They probably would have thought “what’s the catch?”
No, when you asked Nintendo to manufacture you a run of cartridges, you paid for them whether they sold or not. You took that risk. Nintendo took zero risks per game, they took the risk in the physical hardware. Legacy game distribution also never took the risk. Retailers were able to return unsold inventory. There were court cases about this when companies tried to go around Nintendo's cartridge building services to save money. Those companies largely won their court cases, so then we made the DMCA to say "No, get fucked"
The up front risk you take on Steam is $100. It still ends up being a meaningful risk because the numbers show almost nobody makes that back, because developers are so interested in selling their game on steam that the market is outright supersaturated.
>Of course, in the end that 30% we end up paying it ourselves.
I used to buy video games at walmart. Unlike games I bought at walmart, Valve has done things that retroactively add value to games I bought decades ago, like remote play together, adding internet multiplayer to games that never even thought about it, and a controller system that allows pretty much anything you can think of. Games that had zero controller support for a decade just do now, no extra download, and the required configuration is often the single button press to select whatever configuration someone else made. Valve created an entirely new software platform for games that makes it so even games that are utterly broken on modern systems can work again, and it's just built in. If I buy a game today, I'm pretty confident I can play it in 20 years. An actual system for sharing digital games with other accounts, with large caveats.
Refunds, despite Valve only offering them because it's the law in several countries and they were losing court cases, are not a thing for physical game purchases here in the US. Once you take off the shrink wrap, you are fucked.
Steam has built in support for Beta branches and old game versions that the game dev can enable. Steam has built in support for DLC, and market systems for trading and selling digital "goods", not that I really think that's a good thing but some people seem to. Steam has fully built in support for cloud saves.
Steam has a fully integrated "friends" system, and that system is convenient for the end user and includes features like screen sharing and voice chat and gifting people games.
Steam offers fully integrated mod management for at least a large subset of all possible mods for any game.
Like I cannot stress enough how even if video games were 30% more expensive in steam (they aren't, devs distributing through steam are making a larger portion of the profit than they used to), retroactively adding functionality to games I bought a decade ago and producing a system that makes it very likely I can play these same games in 20 years is so worth it. Everything else is just a bonus. Their hardware also shows great value per dollar, so the "They are overcharging" narrative just doesn't track.
Meanwhile, steam avoids problems that plague other digital storefronts. Easy returns (again, forced on them), their launcher mostly respects my resources and doesn't destroy my computer every time there's an update, the way Valve negotiates terms they have a much better setup: Even if a publisher or developer pulls their game, as long as you bought it before then you can always install it and play it. Transformers Devastation was pulled from the store years ago and cannot be purchased by anyone I think anywhere, but I can still download and play it on a new machine because that's the contract Valve got Activision to sign. The game literally doesn't have a store page anymore.
Fuck Valve's child gambling profits and invention of loot boxes, but their distribution business is unambiguously the most respectful of the consumer and developer. Only GOG with their work towards preservation and lack of DRM comes close.
I own 4000 games on steam. That's about 3900 more than I would have ever bought in a world without Steam. Their wishlist system is a direct driver of sales that wouldn't happen otherwise. When the Epic Store launched, it didn't even have a damn shopping cart.
I think it's a bit disingenuous to blame Steam for a decision Rockstar made. The final decision lies with the publisher as to what game actually ships. If they want to remove their old listings and replace them with a worse offering, that's on them.
GOG can't do this because (nearly all) of the hosted games have stand-alone installers that users can archive themselves. AFAIU that's not possible with Steam.
As someone who sold a few pieces of (non-gaming) software I (co-)wrote in a box in the 90s, I seem to recall that just the retailer kept ~70%. With the remaining 30%, you had to pay for the physical aspects (the box, the discs, the manual, etc.), the publisher and the developers.
I don't have access to the actual study but I wonder if they had access to any metrics for the individuals that could quantify the intensity of the insomnia. Chronic insomnia/sleep deprivation is already correlated with heart disease. Could it be that the people with worse insomnia were more likely to take melatonin but also more likely to have heart issues due to the insomnia alone?
I feel like hosting in NYC is even more of a public service given that space is limited and not everyone has a living situation suited for it. Props to you for making it happen. Been doing what I can here as well. Cheers!
Yup, I agree HSA is superior but depending on your situation (and plans offered), the HDHP can be much more expensive out of pocket[1], even if you're paying with after tax dollars. Sweet spot I think is using a good low deductible plan when it makes sense but having a spouse with an HSA which both spouses can use for expenses.
[1]: or so it seems, I tried to figure this out earlier in the year and the data is just lacking in order to make a perfect decision.
> OpenAI paid Microsoft 20% of its revenue under an existing agreement.
Wow that's a great deal MSFT made, not sure what it cost them. Better than say a stock dividend which would pay out of net income (if any), even better than a bond payment probably, this is straight off the top of revenue.
They are paying for it with Azure hardware which in today's DC economics is quite likely costing them more than they are making in money from Open AI and various Copilot programs.
41% [1] of S&P500 companies' (~Top 500 US stocks index which for example doesn't include TSMC, as it's only for US-listed companies) revenue comes from outside of the US. So really, people are buying into global companies when they're buying the S&P500.
I think you're conflating between 2 different things: the USD and US stocks from US companies.
- The USD is definitely losing value. That also means stocks from US companies would be cheaper from a foreigner's point of view.
- That means it represents good investment opportunity as long as the fundamentals of those companies are not affected too much (e.g. AI companies not directly affected by workers' raid, or pay tarrifs). Nothing is contradictory here.
> - The USD is definitely losing value. That also means stocks from US companies would be cheaper from a foreigner's point of view.
That's actually not quite right. You can only buy securities on US markets with US dollars. You'd have to buy dollars on the money market to make that trade. So to the extent that "cheaper dollars" are driving investment in dollar-valued securities, they're increasing the value of the dollar on the global market by the same amount.
All markets seek toward efficiency. The situation you posit would be subject to a money-printing arbitrage loop if it actually existed.
Is it common to default to a signed integer for tracking a timer? I realize being unsigned it would still overflow but at least you'd get twice the time, no?
Some C programmers take the view that unsigneds have too many disadvantages: undefined behaviour for overflows, and weird type promotion rules. So, they try and avoid uints.
If you get to right before you need to be (taking as long as you want), then wait until overflow, then you still have 12h to do the last tiny part if it's unsigned.
reply