Just your normal everyday casual software dev. Nothing to see here.

People can share differing opinions without immediately being on the reverse side. Avoid looking at things as black and white. You can like both waffles and pancakes, just like you can hate both waffles and pancakes.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • Whats dumb is this issue is very easily resolved by encrypting the users security pin or password against the bitlocker keys and then only storing that.

    or better yet have the pin/password an isolated thing from the microsoft system, so when a key gets uploaded, it requests the recovery pin, and if the pin matches it uploads, otherwise it states invalid pin and offers to change it while warning that it will remove existing keys, then optionally next time a system whom contains a drive with an identifier (which wouldn’t need to be encrypted only the key) goes online, it can prompt the user “note: due to recovery pin, drive X recovery key needs to be backed up again, would you like to do so?”

    This type of system would make it so the only data MS has stored is the already encrypted recovery key, and as such would mean that the data they gave law enforcement would be worthless.



  • yea looking into it, the steamworks policy doesn’t mention price parity outside of product keys via steam being sold on other storefronts, being said it does look like steam has submitted to the courts evidence of them communicating via email threatening studios that if they actually went through with it, that steam would just choose not to sell their game at all, this was uncovered during deposition during the Wolfire & Dark Catt’s U.S. antitrust lawsuit against Valve. They went on record admitting to the email and explaining that the steam key page was meant to be for all products as a whole. It sounds like it’s a situation where on paper they have it one way, but in practice it’s meant to be the other.



  • I’ve said this in the past but I think it’s worth restating. I’m amazed that EGS is willing to even front the cost of these free games. Like I would expect some form of arbitrary restriction like requiring periodic actual money purchase to be eligible. They have posted income reports that state the free program just isn’t working. Sure it’s increasing numbers, but that isn’t very helpful when your revenue is still decreasing ontop of the cost of the program. I mean it does help that its a flat cost and not a cost per install for them, but still.

    for perspective: my last purchase was void train in super early stages of the game (2021 I think?) and prior to that was satisfactory somewhere around 2018 or 19. Meanwhile I have collected a lot of decent games from the program. And I’m one of the better cases. I have /tons/ of friends who have zero intention of ever actually buying anything on the shop, they only use it as a log in, claim the weekly freebie, log out or play the freebie game. Heck, there are programs that are dedicated exclusivley to log in as you, and claim the weekly freebies so you never even have to log onto the storefront. It isn’t a sustainable model.

    I feel like they would be better off forcing an annual payment history check on the platform, something stupid small like “if total paid is > 5$” or something cheap, or even like how steam does it where once you purchase something once everything unlocks. From a financial/business mindset, I don’t get their intent on the current program. It only encourages people to grab games and never actually spend money on the sinkhole.