This is what I think as well. I understand there are people out there with that opinion, but I think their message is getting signal boosted by people trying to sway the election.

Huh, TIL. Thank you :)

Does that not hurt you on your taxes/government forms? For instance, for a period of time, my wife was making far less than me and that helped us with our taxes by giving us deductions since our combined income was under a certain threshold. I believe it helps with other things as well.

Just trying to call you out, just curious because I saw this as a net benefit overall.

Purely Mail, yes; so long as you’re comfortable with one guy running the service.

Thunderbird for desktop and K-9 for Andriod. Only because they were the most recommended and completely fit my needs.

Based take imo. I think many posters fail realize the insane amount of money steam makes Valve. Rough estimates are that Steam sold 400 million games last year. Average cost for a game is ~$15.5. Steam has a platform fee of 30%. That means that, roughly, Steam made Valve ~1.86 billion dollars just through the sell of games. Not considering microtransactions or hardware sells. Reportedly, Valve made 1 billion dollars just off cases from CS2 crate openings. Let’s just give Valve the benefit of the doubt and assume they made $5 billion dollars last year.

Impressive, but honestly not that impressive when you consider that Xbox brought in 18 billion and PlayStation brought in 30 billion last year. However, if you factor in that Xbox has a head count of ~$20,100 and Sony has one of ~12,700. While Valve has a head count of about ~400. We see that Xbox and Sony are bringing in about $900K and $2.4M per head respectively. Valve is bring in 12.5M per head. Plus Xbox and PlayStation have multiple studios and campuses. While I believe Valve only has the 1 or 2 campuses and they are their only studio.

My point being that, Valve has a ton of liquid cash for investment and growth opportunities. I’d wager Valve brought in more than 5 Billion last year, but with them being a private company, it’s hard to pin down what exactly they could’ve made.

Steam doesn’t control the quality of remasters. That’s up to publishers. I’m not the most active gamer and might have missed something, but didn’t valve release a major revamp to the way the Library and Store were layed out in the past year or two? They also recently expanded family sharing and remote co-op. The only L I can remember in recent memory is the whole “You can’t leave your games to another person when you die”

Ehh, I’m sure it’s something like if they let you manage your subscription through the play store, Google is entitled to their 30% cut. If you subscribe through desktop, they’d like to keep 100% of the money opposed to 70%. Might be off base, but I’d wager that’s the reason

Didn’t Facebook build infrastructure and give out free phones in India and other developing nations to get them online? I’m sure it was more to harvest their data, but I’m sure that counts pretty solidly for them