Quoting: Purple Library GuyAll very true . . . and yet, US citizens on average are not better off when US corporations offshore jobs. That's not who the corporations are doing it for; profits are made but they go to the top. Rather, the average citizen is worse off when that happens, for a variety of reasons. It's certainly not the fault of the people in those other countries where the sweatshops get set up, who are often also worse off, but it's still the case.
So people in the US, or Canada in my case, certainly have reason to be upset when "free trade" results in local industries being destroyed, the jobs associated with them disappearing, the increased unemployment leading to downward wage pressures and so on. Sure, it might still be better (so far) to be unemployed or working gig jobs in Canada than working in the sweatshop in Indonesia where the manufacturing went . . . but that's not a reason to be OK with well paid longer term jobs going away from Canada.
Meanwhile in places like Indonesia, the reason there's tons of people more or less "willing" to work in those sweatshops is typically that they'd be better off as subsistence farmers but they got thrown off their land so someone could have a profitable plantation (and so they'd have no choice but to work in those sweatshops). The "free trade" is bad for both places. They'd be better off skipping the foreign-owned factories paying a pittance and sucking the profits out of the country, and instead doing locally owned import substitution. But the local wealthy comprador class get a cut, so change ain't gonna come easy.

People on developed countries do benefit from the imperialistic global trade they countries often impose to others. There are several well-paying jobs that are concentrated on those countries as a result of this "division of labor" in which some countries get all the sweatshops and unqualified jobs but all the actual management and research and design are actually done in other countries - that also get the benefits of both cheap imported primary products and locally produced high-tech goods. They also elect governments that "defends their interests", for example by creating the very same legal protections it strips away from people in other countries. They can afford to ignore, for example, the environmental damage their corporations deal to foreign countries, while still working for those corporations in a "local" job.

Of course, the gap between the common worker and the corporate class is still huge and much larger than the differences across workers of different countries, and it would indeed be better for everyone to oppose the interests of the big corps. It is in the best interests of the average citizen to stop the global exploitation of corporations.

But it is naive to think that, in "colonial" relations between countries, only the very top class is benefiting... or supporting it. It is most clear when people support "America first" policies (or their equivalent) - aggressive foreign policies with obvious repercussions in other countries, but they get to benefit from the "economic growth", local jobs, and so on. Other people are taking the lion's share of the profits (through direct exploitation, lobbying, etc), sure, but there is a difference between "exploited to work in sweatshops" or "denied medical supplies" and "got a smaller share of the plunder from the US-sponsored coup that kept fruit prices low".

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Quoting: KimyrielleI guess that's part of the "Globalization is for big business, not customers!" textbook. Apparently it's totally fine for a US company to ship your job to Vietnam because wages there are a fraction of what they are here, but if a customer goes "Ok, I can make that work for me too, and shop where it's cheaper!", the same companies go "Oh no, YOU can't do that. Only WE can!"

Too funny.

Getting slightly off-topic, but I disagree a lot with how this is framed. This "Americans lose jobs to people that receive lower wages" is a load of bull; the person receiving poverty wages is not "taking your job", they are being exploited by your country. If an American wants that job, he can take it - I assure you immigration is a lot easier in that direction. As a bonus, you get their prices for videogames... People in the US benefit the most from the cost reductions of exploited labor; implying that US customers, of all the people in the world, can't benefit from globalization is not quite right.

This is a very literal "first world problem"...

Yes, globalization is for big businesses. They can set up a company in the US, pay taxes in Ireland, dispose of their garbage in China, exploit workers in Mexico, and get IT support from India. But for the people whose country is the one with all the big businesses, the right thing is to have more solidarity for the fellow workers of other countries, not thinking about how they get "cheaper" (not really) videogames.

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Ah, nothing screams "edgy teenager" quite as much as games trying to look "adult" by adding grimdark themes to silly premises. xD

Still, it looks pretty enough, might check it out (though this kind of game is very hit or miss with me).

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Quoting: ShmerlUsing VPN is like traveling to another country, but in virtual sense. If digital stores want to use physical market analogy and segment the market in virtual space, why are they against people using the physical analogy of travel in the same virtual space? Do they charge foreigners more when they come to a physical store in another country? If they do, that would be considered some weird discrimination. So why are they OK with it in virtual case?

I personally don't shop like that, but if something is only available through VPN, I don't see an issue.

Then you'd have to go through customs and pay import fees, and there might be strict restrictions on how long you can use the VPN and what activities you can do (such as working), it might require background checks and proof of income, and you might be denied a visa and deported... better not to dig this hole until we tackle the much bigger injustices in border control.

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Quoting: WorMzyMy opinion is that the price should be the price, and that should be converted to the real-time equivalent for the currency you're buying in.

So game = £10. At time of writing:

• UK: £10


• USA: $13.15


• Japan: ¥1386


• Europe: €11.12

etc. Then apply whatever local tax applies (which is probably where most of the pressure on Valve comes from, taxperson always wants their cut...).

This looks like you never had to deal with currency exchange. Exchange rates fluctuate wildly, and it is just not feasible to have prices jump around that much. Checking prices daily to see if something is cheaper, not being able to wait for a sale because who knows how much it will cost by then, speculating about the economy to know if it will go up or down in the next few months... nothing works like this. It would be better to just leave the prices in the original currency and let people "import" stuff.

And this is just for the "real-time" part. Exchange rates are not at all a good representation of how much things cost in different countries. Wages aren't proportional, cost of living isn't proportional, the cost of other products is not proportional. People aren't going to pay half their monthly wages for a dumb game that costs USD40, just because geopolitical concerns about the oil industry devalued their currency in the last year. They will buy other things instead, the things that have normal prices. It isn't even about "being nice to people in poor countries" - it is supply and demand; there isn't enough demand for games at this price point, so it is only rational to decrease the price. (See the post by x_wing for a better discussion)

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Ok, so are people really going to play Celeste on a remote server?

It's not a heavy game, most laptops and probably even some smartphones can run it. But from all I know, it is a very precise and fast platformer, the kind of thing that would be ruined by lag.

I can get that if it is free on the subscription you already have, might as well play instead of getting it elsewhere (regardless of price)... but are people really flexing the stability and bandwidth of their home internet like that? Using their stadia pro to play things that don't push the limits of a high-end computer?

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Quoting: BeamboomTo be honest though - the concept of this game is really, really niche. Like, exceptionally so. Almost so I'd place it in a genre of itself. I have a background in coding and am not "scared" by the concept of writing code, but even I must admit that it's not code writing I'm most in the mood for when I fire up my Steam client.

So how do then the gamers out there with no coding competence (or interest!) see this game?

If I purchased this game it would be simply to test the concept. Not with any intention to invest a lot of time in it. So selling 200 copies a month of a game of this concept, with no marketing power behind it... My honest reaction was that it didn't sound that bad at all.

I have a quite strong coding background, but my work isn't quite in software development (I write code for my research but it's more math and reading than coding). Programming puzzles for me are a way to scratch my programming itch without the boring and frustrating parts of a "real" programming project. But if I was doing actual work in the area, I wouldn't get close to such a game. :P

I think this is more of an exception than the rule, though. There is probably some mix of programmers who aren't burned out and non-programmers that are comfortable enough with some "light" scripting. Programming puzzles are a niche, but somehow a big enough niche to be a genre in itself.

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This is interesting, though the numbers are small enough that we should take care to not extrapolate too much (as the author points out in the blog post). Nice to have a rough idea of what exactly is the scale of this kind of indie (very well done but also super-niche), and it did quite alright on Linux; pity that itch didn't do better, but as we all know reaching 1% of steam numbers is not trivial. xD

I think he is reading too much into the achievements. For puzzle games in particular, I find it normal to not finish games or stop at some point; either because you got stuck, lost interest, or because just that first part was enough. Or because you took a break from the game for other reasons and just picked it back again. It still can be quite satisfactory even if you stop early. And, on top of that, for most games there are the people that just fire up the game and stop without achieving even the most trivial, automatic achievements (kill your first enemy, play for 15 minutes, finish the prologue).

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Hmm, I was a bit confused because I was just browsing the "Summer of Pride" sale on steam. Having two events at the same time and having both named after the season is not the best idea.

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Quoting: EikeDoes that mean there's no such thing as WaitMultipleObjects on Linux? How would a Linux programmer solve that?

My first thought, with no specific knowledge of the details, is that you would use a single event for all the possible sources and pass a parameter to indicate which. For system events, or a non-controlled application, probably set up multiple threads that wait each for a different event and then wakes up the thread you actually want.

But this is, of course, assuming that you are just adapting an existing code. When developing for Linux directly, people would just use a different algorithm that didn't rely on that; I don't think this is a particularly fundamental feature for multi-threaded development.

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