Talarivo and Crockett both seem like good candidates at first glance.

Neither should be censored.

https://youtu.be/c_ANImMrYu4?t=197

The current stance of the president of the Heritage Foundation seems to be that if the left does not take up arms, MAGA will take over everything, permanently.

There’s simple and there’s oversimplified. The element your missing is “trust”. The reason gamers go to Steam is because we trust their reviews and return policies.

The other storefronts haven’t built that trust. Most gamers have the experience of trying other storefronts, hating them, and going back to Steam.

People don’t trust Gabe because he’s a billionaire, they trust him because he consistently makes decisions that gamers benefit from. No other game store CEO can claim that with a straight face.

That would be how monopolies work. You realize that Steam doesn’t require exclusivity, right? You can get BG3 all over the place. When customers have choice between vendors it’s not a monopoly, even if they tend to make the same choice.

Do you think Larian’s management is also stupid?

Any halfway decent GTM executive would have checked their distribution channel options and chosen the mix that makes them the most money, net of fees.

Why would they pay for a service that harms them?

Are you actually confused about the information asymmetry in video game purchases? Given your weird movie references I assumed you were just trying to change the topic.

I’ll try to use small words. Before you play a game, you don’t know if it’s goo;, just as used car buyers don’t know if the used car is a lemon. Without a buyer protections that drags the price of good games down just as lemons drag down the price of used cars. Akerlof goes into the proof for the car part of this in his paper.

“Lemon laws” mostly solve that problem for cars. Steam mostly solves that problem for video games. That requires trust. You may not trust Steam but millions of people do. They’ve repeatedly made decisions that benefit gamers so gamers flock to them. Thats why they buy so many games from Steam even when they’re available elsewhere. If they broke that trust they’d probably never get it back but, until then, their net effect is to increase revenue for studios by providing a market where people are comfortable enough to spend more money.

So you don’t care that Larian isn’t harmed, you don’t care that the dev’s aren’t harmed, you don’t care that the consumer isn’t harmed.

You just feel bad for Epic?

You’re the one claiming to be the economics expert. I’m simply correcting the record.

I haven’t studied “capitalism” but my Masters degree is in Financial Engineering. Since you seem to care about formal economics, how do you propose solving Akelof’s Market for Lemons?

Valve solves the information asymmetry. That’s a net gain for both buyers and sellers. But you’ve studied economics, so you probably know that already.

So let’s skip to the meat of the question. How do you propose determining the intrinsic value of resolved information asymmetry.

You seem to be operating under some notion that particular work deserves a particular amount of pay. That’s backwards. People pay for what they get, not for what the seller’s cost of goods.

We know that Larian is doing very well financially. Their devs are happy and well paid.

That’s a completely irrelevant number.

I have no idea how many devs worked on BG3 and that number has 0 impact on my enjoyment of the game. Given the number of hours I spent playing BG3, the price made it one of the cheapest forms of entertainment available.

And, as a developer, I really don’t care how much companies pay to marketing vendors. Developer pay is generally negotiated when you’re hired. I haven’t worked in B2C but, as I understand it, they usually pay bonuses on sales volume rather than profits.

“overcharge” is entirely in the eye of the purchaser not the devs. Given the difference in user experience between Steam and any other launcher (sadly even/especially GOG), Steam charges less than I’d be willing to pay.

Valve doesn’t overcharge me.

They provide an excellent user experience. They have one of the few stores where you can actually get reliable user reviews. Their return policies are generous. I’ve never had any problems with fraud or scams. Their search and recommendation functions are pretty good.

To me, that’s a great deal and they’ve earned every penny of their markup.

I just headed over to .ml and did a local search for “mamdani”

I see a bunch of the more conservatives Democrats and their supporters complaining about him and conservatives of all stripes are really hoping he’ll fail.

I’ve been called a tankie several times and I rather like Mamdani. I see him, AOC, and Sanders as the best hope for the future of the US.

Where are these tankies that hate Mamdani so much? What do they hate him for?

It’s a better measure but not a perfect one. The big problem with the US-China GDP comparison is that the US has much more of a service economy while China has a much more manufacturing based economy.

Manufacturing pollutes much more than services do but services don’t exist without the manufacturing.

That’s why I was saying a better measure would be pollution per GNP. That would cut out services and basically just count manufacturing output. That would make sense because it’s the biggest source of pollution and it’s the source you can do the most about (ie there’s a lot of room to make many parts of the manufacturing chain cleaner).

Nobody is as green as their marketing suggests and China is no exception. China is making huge investments in green tech and there’s still a long way to go.

Because humans just existing produces far less pollution than humans producing a lot of stuff.

It’s trivial to say that a bunch of hunter-gatherers don’t pollute much but we’re not generally willing to relegate people to living in the stone age.

Our economic choices have a much larger impact on pollution than our personal choices do. Ideally we’d have a measure of pollution per consumption. Everyone would have a score that calculates the total pollution created by the entire supply chain that supports their choices. So if a mine in Africa is polluting so a Chinese guy can have a nice air condition, that should be counted for China; and if a factory in China pollutes so that a guy in the US can have a new Iphone, that should be counted for the US.

I’m not aware of any such data set. The closest proxy would be GDP or GNP. That essentially provides a measure of how much pollution the total lifestyle of that population produces.

That’s not really how it works. Some random Chinese peasant (that’s the vast majority of China’s population) doesn’t produce much CO2. You can add or remove millions of them without significantly impacting coal consumption or CO2 production.

Industry pollutes. Some types pollute more than others.

China has been increasing energy usage across the board at a much higher rate than the population has been growing. It’s a nonsense plan because there’s no reason to think that reducing the population would affect that trend.

While there’s a clear trend of China using more coal there’s just as clear a trend of coal making up a smaller and smaller share of China’s power usage over time. Just about every analysis says they’re solidly on track to completely phase out coal by 2025 and nobody predicts they’ll need to shrink their population to do it.

So you’re saying there are just too many Chinese people? How many should there be?

Trains and ships are part of the logistics chain but trucks are definitely part of it. They have a big advantage of not needing train stations or ports, as long as you have a decent road. Some of the larger strip mining operations fill a truck per minute.

China effectively seems to be playing Factorio. They have a solar/wind production rate of X/day and X keeps going up faster and faster.

They’ll sell those panels and turbines to whoever will take them. They’re cheap but the sheer volume means that you need a huge economy to take any significant share of that inventory. With the US effectively out of the picture the biggest remaining economy is China. On top of that the EU does have some tariffs on Chinese renewables and that skews the deployments even more towards China.