531–540 of 584 posts
Quite stunned that Fortnites 5bn per year isn't enough to keep them going. They've been pull about that much in per year since 2019 AFAIK. I really hope this one have knock ons for Unreal Engine or lead to Unity like licensing. Their indie grants are also quite generous.
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Technically, you need to include the adult predators as recurring revenue too.
why is this such a talking point about roblox? couldnt this be said about literally any online platform ever?
https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox/
To quote just a section of the report:
Core to the problem is that Roblox’s social media features allow pedophiles to efficiently target hundreds of children, with no up-front screening to prevent them from joining the platform.
For example, in 2018, prior to Roblox going public, a 29-year-old was caught by police with 175 hours of video footage of him grooming and engaging in explicit behavior with 150 minors using online platforms, namely Roblox.
Media and non-profit exposés from 2020 to July 2024 revealed digital strip clubs, red light districts, sex parties and child predators lurking on Roblox. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation in 2024 labeled Roblox “a tool for sexual predators, a threat for childrens’ safety”.
Numerous criminal indictments from 2019-2024 allege that sexual predators groomed children in-game, ranging from 8-14 years old, then kidnapped, raped or traded sexual content with them.
Following years of scandals, we performed our own checks to see if the platform had cleaned up its act. As a test, we attempted to set up an account under the name ‘Jeffrey Epstein’…only to see the name was taken, along with 900+ variations.
Many were Jeffrey Epstein fan accounts, including “JeffEpsteinSupporter” which had earned multiple badges for spending time in kid’s games. Other Jeff Epstein accounts had the usernames “@igruum_minors” [I groom minors], and “@RavpeTinyK1dsJE” [rape tiny kids].
We attempted to set up a Roblox account under the name of another notorious pedophile to see if Roblox had any up-front pedophile screening: Earl Brian Bradley was indicted on 471 charges of molesting, raping and exploiting 103 children. The username was taken, along with multiple variants like earlbrianbradley69.
After we found a username, we listed our age as “under 13” to see if children are being exposed to adult content. By merely plugging ‘adult’ into the Roblox search bar, we found a group called “Adult Studios” with 3,334 members openly trading child pornography and soliciting sexual acts from minors. We tracked some of the members of “Adult Studios” and easily found 38 Roblox groups – one with 103,000 members – openly soliciting sexual favors and trading child pornography.
The chatrooms trading in child pornography had no age restrictions. Roblox reports that 21% of its users are under the age of 9, a number that is likely underestimated given that Roblox has no age verification aside from users seeking 17+ experiences.
Registered as a child, we were also able to access games like “Escape to Epstein Island” and “Diddy Party”. We found over 600 “Diddy” games, including “Survive Diddy” and “Run From Diddy Simulator”.
Since September 2nd, 2024, third-party monitor ‘Moderation For Dummies’ has reported ~12,400 erotic roleplay accounts on Roblox. These include everything from “rape/forceful sex fetishes” to underage users “willing to do anything for Robux”.
Users seeking sexual experiences on Roblox are so pervasive that there are thousands of Roblox sex videos on porn sites, inviting users of unknown ages to make explicit content on the platform.
We tested out Roblox’s experiences to see what else kids were being exposed to. We quickly encountered images of male genitalia and hate speech in Roblox’s “school simulator” game, which had registered 28.9 million visits with no age restrictions.
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Yes. Do you have any evidence they use contractors for Steam?
Can you do basic math on the number of support tickets Valve is handling to answer that question for yourself? if not: https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/jobs?job_id=113#:~:text=The...
Can you? Do you even know that number?
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This argument would be a great one in 2016. Now though, proton/wine works more or less for everything, and the storefront is a web based one anyway.
I'd hope this community of all places would understand that "just integrate X with Y" is never as simple as "just". It's still something a team needs to do, and the gain is minimal unless Epic is also going to try and make their own console-esque device. That's the incentive for Steam.
Linux support may not be a huge deal in the overall market (although it's growing due to the steam os devices) but it's just one more element to Steam's moat.
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One of the more fascinating parts of the Xbox plan of attack for its new console is its apparent marriage of Xbox, Steam, and Epic among possibly others in a unified console experience. Having a true console like experience with a variety of PC game stores plugged in I think is a rare lane available for Xbox to try and do something other than reproduce Steam but worse, and I'm curious how it's going to go.
I think if it were a good plan Phil Spencer would still have a job.
The SteamOS is capable of getting out of the way, which is something Microsoft is pathologically incapable of designing Windows to do. And these days I think Linux and the Linux desktop are just objectively better than Windows, and the days where Windows embodied what it meant to have when anything goes PC are long gone.
So you're left with limited options. I think a first class console experience for a wide range of storefronts is the best bet to out-steam Steam but it assumes a degree of execution capability that I don't trust Microsoft to have.
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One of the more fascinating parts of the Xbox plan of attack for its new console is its apparent marriage of Xbox, Steam, and Epic among possibly others in a unified console experience. Having a true console like experience with a variety of PC game stores plugged in I think is a rare lane available for Xbox to try and do something other than reproduce Steam but worse, and I'm curious how it's going to go.
I can run Epic and GoG games in Steamdeck. All Steam had to do is not block them.
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In 1 phrase, the source of most evils in modern society. A minority of people (shareholders) holding the majority of people (employees) at gunpoint.
They are working for money, not coerced with a gun pointing at them. They are free to leave as they please and often do.
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You see this trap in tech companies as well as game studios. I call it "acting like Google before you're Google". And in fact virtually nobody becomes Google. Google has been a money printing machine for 20+ years almost unparalleled in human history. That's allowed Google to write bespoke software for everything , which has been useful because almost nobody has Google's problems. It's also allowed Google to contribu…
I think you're overall point is correct, but the specifics about twitter are backwards. Twitter would have been way better off using Cassandra (but it wasn't built yet!), instead you're 100% right, they did their own bespoke stack, trying to replicate what google had internally, and they didn't have the $$$ to do it. It was Facebook/Meta that later open sourced Cassandra and a buncha other great open source stuff.
Twitter claimed they were using Cassandra (or at least planned to) for storing tweets [3] but had rolled something else entirely (called Manhattan) by 2014 [4][5].
So yes it was originally released by Facebook but it was Twitter who spent a massive effort trying to make it work in production. And failed.
[1]: https://www.informationweek.com/it-infrastructure/twitter-dr...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Cassandra
[3]: https://highscalability.com/so-why-is-twitter-really-not-usi...
[4]: https://blog.x.com/engineering/en_us/a/2014/manhattan-our-re...
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People hated steam when it launched but you needed it to play CS 1.6. It made installing mods easier. Then HL2 released, orange box, and they were able to get a critical mass as they provided platforms support for other games. Steam got better. It’s still not great but they have so much market share that basically any PC gamer already has it. Epic wants some of that money. The problem is nobody wants to install anoth…
I still don't like Steam. I resent that I have to have this "Store" middle man on my computer just to have access to games. I want to pay a company for their product on their web site, download the installer, and install it on my operating system directly. I don't want this other layer that I'm dependent on, who could switch off my access to the things I "bought" whenever they want.
With the added downside of less choice and/or delayed releases