Which is how fast?

And what is the memory bandwidth on these APUs?

you’d definitely be able to do it cheaper with PC hardware.

You can get a GPU with 192GB VRAM for less than a Mac? Sign me up please.

Why even bother with things like strings for a salt? I would expect it to just take a byte array. Just create some random bytes and provide that.

they wanna share a codebase between web, desktop and possibly mobile.

That way you get an app that’s crap on every platform.

If you have the entire code, not just some part, as most companies do when go Open Source (not free software), then you don’t have to worry about unknown behavior because everything is in the source.

Hahaha, good joke

That’s not a solution at all. First of all, depending country, you will need a gambling license. This is a PITA as gambling laws will differ per country. In my country gambling is heavily regulated and you would need to check ID and keep track of how much a person gambles. You have a duty of care and if you notice a person’s gambling habits are becoming problematic you have to refuse them.

You can put money and source code in escrow for this exact eventuality.

I don’t think it’s a token gesture. Microsoft is a software company; they want to sell software, not hardware. They don’t really care about xbox other than as a means to sell more software and gamepass subscriptions. Selling their games on as many platforms as possible is a logical move for them.

Really? Never heard of it. How does it compare to e.g. Visual Studio, XCode, Android Studio and the like?

So for the record I don’t know that this is relevant

My point was that you can’t really compare them because Steam provides a lot less value than Apple to developers, yet they still take a 30% cut. With Apple you get a lot more for your 30% than you do at Valve.

Followup question. Do you receive any of this stuff from Nintendo? Sony/PlayStation? They also take an 30% cut.

I don’t develop for consoles but a quick Google search shows that PlayStation provides support and even free development kits (special console hardware for development) to indie developers. They all obviously provide SDKs as they are the only ones who can.

Steam is great, but it’s just a storefront. Steam doesn’t get involved until your game is done and ready for sale. This is very different from Apple/Google/Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo who are much more involved in the entire development process than Steam.

Well, a complete development toolchain for example. Does Steam provide an IDE, compiler, debugging tools, etc? No. You got to license that shit from someone else. Does Steam provide developer support for any of the OSes their client runs on? No they don’t. If I’ve got a question about Windows internals, I have to pay Microsoft for help. Then there’s lots of services my apps can use for free, like the push notifications service.

People like to shit on Xcode, but they likely didn’t do any mobile development before the App Store was a thing. I’m talking 2005-2007 era. Development tools for S60, J2ME and BlackBerry were so bad, it was like they were built by someone who hates developers. The software was actively developer-hostile.

You want on-device debugging? Haha, why don’t you go fuck yourself instead? Oh no, I need to sign my iOS app. which takes all of 1 second and is done locally. With BlackBerry your app would be split into dozens of small chunks, and each chunk would need 3 different signatures to be able to access all APIs. Of course this signing wasn’t done locally, no it was done on one of BlackBerry’s servers which was slow as molasses, and each signature, which any non trivial app would easily need 100+, was requested separately. Of course you needed to do this every time you wanted to run your app on a device. To add insult to injury, the signing server was down all the time, to the point that someone made a website (something like ‘isthesigningserverdown.com’) to easily check its status.

Of course, that was if you were lucky and even got access to the signing server. You’re not a Fortune 500 company and want access to BB api’s that require signing? Why not go fuck yourself instead?

Of course you’re thinking, if testing on device is so painful, I’ll just test in a device simulator, right. Hahahaha, no. Because fuck you.

Also, all phones were super buggy to the point that our codebase was full of device-specific workarounds. We actually had a kind of database that kept track of which specific bugs were present in which device that was used in combination with a pre-processor to build a device-specific version of our apps. We didn’t upload 1 build to an app store, we built 200+ versions of our apps (which took hours btw). We didn’t have to buy a few ‘expensive’ iPhones to test on, no we literally bought every single phone that had any significant market share. We literally had to test our apps on hundreds of phones. We’d buy new phones every week. We had an entire team of people who did nothing all day but test our apps on different phones.

Also, since there was no app store we had to host the apps ourselves, that meant we had to buy and maintain our own servers (including writing all the server code) just to let users download the apps. There was no app store to handle payments, payment was usually done through reverse-billing SMS (a.k.a. premium SMS). You text a keyword to a shortcode and you’d get an SMS with the install link. We had to write and maintain the code to handle that. We had to pay to receive the SMS. Then the mobile operator took a 70% cut. Not for any kind of app store, there wasn’t anything like that. Not for hosting the app. Not for providing development tools. No, just for sending the premium text message with the install link.

So when Apple announced the app store. With good development tools. With them handling payments. With them handling the download. With an actual good OS that wasn’t buggy as fuck and actually got updates. And they only took a 30% cut? You bet everyone in the mobile app industry was jumping for joy.

The 30% cut is well worth it for developers, plus all the other services steam provides. Kids have no idea how buying, installing, modding, patching games used to be like.

You cant compare this to the apple app store

As a mobile app developer who has been in the business since before the iPhone was even announced, this is hilarious.

No, you can’t compare it to the App Store. With the Apple App Store you get so much more for that 30% cut than you get with Steam, it’s not even close. You kids have no idea how bad it was in the before times.

Sony/PlayStation DualSense is type C and a great controller.

It’s $99 a year. I wish my hobbies were that cheap.

Which is a complete non-issue. It’s $99 / year, basically a symbolic amount just high enough to prevent spammers from making a billion accounts.

I have no problems with this. Notarizing your app is trivial and takes just a few minutes. As a user I want to know who actually produced an app and ensure it wasn’t tampered with.

don’t let apple tell you they invented it.

Why always the knee-jerk anti-apple reaction even if they do something good?

FYI: Apple isn’t telling anyone they invented this. In fact, they didn’t even tell anyone about this feature and declined to comment after it was discovered and people started asking questions.

I wish TLoU 1 gave you the option to sacrifice Ellie. Have an alternate ending where they find a vaccine and everyone lives happily ever after (except Ellie).

Yep. The best people will leave first because they have options. It’s called the dead sea effect