“We had multiple publishers actively coming to us,” explains Pietro, “and be like, ‘Hey, we want to make this game.’” And many of those big publishers were initially unperturbed by Steam’s ban. “The main reaction,” he recalls, “was, ‘Leave that to me… I know everyone at Valve, let me figure it out’, and so they’d take the game, and a month later they’d come back and be like, ‘No, you’re fucked. Bye.’” And seemingly nothing will get Valve to budge. “We’ve tried everything,” Pietro continues. “I was already in touch with a real human being [at Valve] since our first onboarding on Steam… but they were like, ‘I’m sorry this happened… I don’t have insights on the reasons for the ban. I’ve brought your plea to the review team and they’ve declined to re-review and their decision is final.’”

Wtf? It sounds like someone powerful at Valve made a mistake and would rather let this studio close than admit it.

Edit : Caught this on a re-read. Definitely sounds more sussy now.

In the early build reviewed by Valve, day six featured a scene in which a man and his young daughter visit the farm. The daughter wants to ride one of the horses, resulting in an interactive dialogue sequence where the girl rides on the shoulders of a naked “horse” while it’s led by the player.

In a final bid to save the product, Google has quarantined the model in a server room with no WiFi, feeding it only proprietary Oracle Java documentation in hopes of breaking its spirit.

😂

Are they abandoning it? Where are they going instead?

The FTC argued that Meta had maintained illegal monopoly power in the narrow sector of the social media market by gobbling up nascent competitors, Instagram and WhatsApp, it feared could threaten its dominance. But throughout the trial, the FTC was dogged by questions about whether it could claim Meta still had that illegal monopoly in the face of a greatly changed social media landscape. Boasberg said the government had to prove current or imminent illegal monopolization, not just past dominance.

Technically, fair on the judge’s part.

I think this is more like Meta winning by delaying the case until it could win on a technicality.

If these arguments had come up when the suit was originally filed, Meta would have lost the case, because TikTok hadn’t grown to be the competitor it is now.

Putting on my tinfoil hat: Meta let TikTok grow in order to avoid being broken up for being a monopoly.

I get that with raspberries.

I don’t understand how - it doesn’t even look like it has seeds, but it happens every time.