Posted by todsacerdoti 4/3/2025
This exactly the problem with Steam Deck, and will last while Microsoft decides tacking Proton isn't high on priority list for Microsoft Games/XBox division issues to sort out.
To push for equity is to discriminate and dehumanize people, so it's certainly good that valve does not put this value ahead of anything else let alone allow them to take precedence over taking care of their customer base. They are perfectly inclusive as well, though they are not "inclusive", the kind where they discriminate against people on the basis of race to please some misguided quotas.
There's no single way to do this but people have lumped them all together and called them "quotas" (they're not, at least not in responsible processes). It really does a disservice to the fact that it's encouraging meritocratic hiring. Because for most of the 20th century (and even still today) employment was and is stratified by race and gender, not ability.
It's not the people criticizing them that have lumped them all together. People in support of these programs have failed to self police entirely, for example IBM/Red Hat, google, apple are suffering very firmly evidenced racial discrimination lawsuits for discriminating against people with white skin using quotas, firing hiring managers for refusing to discriminate, and so on. These lawsuits were initiated long before the 2024 election, it's not a trump thing for example though he has made use of it because his dem party opponents support these practices.
If someone makes a blatant racist comment on twitter with their employer directly implicated, if the target race is white that person does not end up being fired in today's companies. These public and frequent appearances of unfairness stack up in the public eye. It's enough evidence there's a failure to self-police within the general DEI and HR landscape and i think people are very much done with the entire concept.
It appears to be a common view of many that "you can't be racist against white people" (direct quote of a kotaku journalist journalist, who was not fired for the statement, they also had a couple statements supporting racial violence against whites, big surprise), but obviously such a view is in itself race based discrimination that generalizes and dehumanizes individual experiences on the basis of race.
You can also look up the Dani Lalonders racist tirade, she's a game developer who has not been fired from EA for her comments despite openly admitting to illegal discrimination and only hiring black people to her team and just generally being insane.
But the US hates teachers (and now, education Nas a whole) and can't think long term anymore. So these are merely pipe dreams as of now.
The problem isn't just hiring, but helping hiring will help with the other two by addressing those cultural problems.
It's a complicated topic, but no we have not always been doing merit based hiring. However, merit based hiring does result in imbalanced race and gender distributions due to long term societal issues and demographic distributions at earlier stages.
Basically, there is a skewed class distribution at the source. You have to fix it at the source via equality of opportunity and making our society more equal. I'm not a conservative, i'm very far left and strongly believe in making society more equal in general. However. Trying to fix it at the destination is called racial discrimination and is dehumanizing and evil and anyone who does it should suffer prosecution.
You don't get to dehumanize and discriminate against individual people for the greater good, i will personally go out of my way to see you receive consequences if you try this and you're doing it somewhere i can see. There's a lot of us with this opinion, hopefully your stance starts getting chilled from fear of blowback.
I have a question for you. Is there anything humanizing about the hiring process? Or is it one of the most dehumanizing things most engineers experience?
I look forward to you and your army of white men marching on me saying they're tired of racial discrimination in the workplace. I'll send you guys right over to HR, and tell them that you're tired of me hiring so many black people. I'm sure it'll go well.
> I look forward to you and your army of white men
We know, the secret is out, you and all the other racist lunatics never saw anything wrong with prejudice. It's the same type of thinking that fought against civil rights in the 70s that just moved straight over to the hot new forms of racism and discrimination just because you think it's socially acceptable.
> Is there anything humanizing about the hiring process? Or is it one of the most dehumanizing things most engineers experience?
You are saying this in order to defend racist hiring practices. Whether or not the base hiring process sucks is not part of the discussion on whether or not we should allow racial discrimination in said hiring process.
In the end it's always individual innocent people that get hurt, not broad identity groups that you think deserve it.
How would you go about these "consequences" as you put them? Do you actually think anyone will take you seriously when you complain about not enough white people being hired? Surrounded by too many women? Sounds like a personal issue to me.
It's natural for you to feel attacked, as you're used to living under a white-supremacist system. I guarantee you would have been one of the MLK haters back in the 60s.
Also, on the prejudice thing. You actively make the decision every day to have shitty, racist opinions. Black people do not have the choice to become white, but you can become a better person. You simply choose not to. There is a huge difference, and your lack of ability to see that is telling.
Discriminating against people on the basis of race or gender is unacceptable, that's the bottom line, going "do you think anyone will actually take you seriously" and accusing me of being an uber driver (?) is the theme type of language i'm talking about. Segregationists in the 60s and 70s constantly used this exact style of derision and appeal to marketability, spend some time just reading the writings of segregationists at the time and you will see yourself. Sorry but there's a simple objective truth here and you're on the wrong side of it, trying to call me racist while you're defending racist practices is just pointless, it looks like a fish floundering.
And it's actually really amazing how your post boils down to 'You're white so you deserve it, nobody will take whites seriously!' despite you not even knowing my race!
Since when? You can easily run your self-built / third party apps on Android WITHOUT ROOTING and without paying / getting verified by google. Not-rooting only prevents you from circumventing the Android security model (dedicated toggles for each permission)
You don't need a Deck to try it - you can run Steam in "big picture mode" on any computer, with a controller, and get the same UI which the Deck uses.
But I think you're trying to make a point about Steam DRM.
Someone once said; there are two DRMs that everyone loves, Apple and Steam.
And I have to say it's true. I am normally not a proponent of DRM, I've been pirating since TURBO 250 tapes on c64, but I do love Steam. I love it for what Gabe has done for us gamers on Linux.
In my opinion he deserves 30%.
That's why I wanted to stick to consoles and a physical medium. But even those have devolved into what's basically a digital download, now with the disk (or cartridge now, with Switch 2) being the DRM. The Onion couldn't write a more ironic headline.
Now I'm wondering if all that "virtual sharing" stuff for switch 2 cartridges means difficulties with the used market.
>In my opinion he deserves 30%.
Even Gabe doesn't agree, given the cut he gives to AAA publishers. I'm not exactly onboard with the idea that the richest people get the best tax breaks, even in video game world.
A progressive platform cut would be much friendlier to smaller devs and put the biggest burdens on the ones likely using the most amount of bandwidth. That's how the game engines have started to leverage their tooling. And they put a lot more work in than a hosting platform
I am sure there are stories and certain situations where people have lost access to games, but I think they're fringe cases.
Yeah, it’s not a very big concern of mine either.
But people seem so Gung ho about DRM being bad. except for Steam.
Again none of this is inherently bad if your argument is "I like the convenience and don't care about the restrictions". But don't delude yourself into thinking this is "freedom".
Your entire comment is splitting some pretty fine hairs, but I just don't know how anyone can play the "muh firmware" card in 2025. I don't actually know a single Linux user or even hardware retailer that ships blobless hardware, if that means they aren't pro "software freedom" then I guess nobody is. But I think we can define "pro" to mean something other than "hardline absolutist" in this instance.
DRM is a thing we have to live with but valve does a decent job of making it invisible when it's theirs. The ones that suck the most are the aforementioned studios which roll their own on top.
I could perhaps live with subscription terms that are still variable amount / mount (currently 0) as servers do cost money. Even if their quasi-monopoly would allow them to extort us. But what needs to be more reliable, is that the ToS I applied to when I bought the game should not change afterwards in a one-sided proposal to keep access to my game licenses. Which is not allowed in our jurisdiction at least, so steam was found non-compliant in the EU.
(Back in 2021) https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/it/ip_21_...