.NET is arguably one of the better things to come out of Microsoft. The CLR only runs when a .NET application is running so it’s not bloat, and it’s pretty lightweight as far as a VM goes with JIT. It’s well documented, has public standards, is cross platform, and released under MIT.

I’m a Unix/Linux greybeard so I’ve no real skin in the game. But given how C# has become the defacto cross platform game development language of choice for both Godot and Unity engines, .NET deserves a little credit.

Valve technically sell at least one movie

This take always ignores the immense value of the Steamworks SDK.

Valve’s cut enables free: multiplayer, voice, chat, game notifications, in-game purchases, stats and achievements, rich presence, cloud saves, Steam Input to support any input device you could imagine including for accessibility, error reporting, persistent inventories and tradable items, game keys, leaderboards, matchmaking and lobbies, remote play, remote play together with a remote friend, screenshots, modding / workshop, authentication and ownership validation, anti-cheat and game bans, virtual/augmented reality, special/positional audio, multiple game builds and beta channels, global CDN, community discussion / forums / game guides, sales stats, playtesting, automated builds, developer streams direct to the store page, demos, DRM, automated compatibility tests, Linux support for Windows binaries via Proton, GoldSrc, Source, and Source 2 game engines, game cafe / licensing support, marketing and promotion tools, common runtime environments to target for Linux (and alleviate external dependencies), glmgr to translate DirectX to OpenGL for macOS, and much much much more.

That’s what the Valve cut covers. It’s an insane amount of functionality to put into your game and take a huge weight off your shoulders. It’s what enables one-man indie studios to be able to make a hugely popular multiplayer game that blows up overnight without needing to bare the burden of building all the required services yourself nor the cost of running them.

Epic etc take a smaller cut, but can’t offer anywhere near the amount support in return requiring end-users to have a subscription to cover the cost of the services.

I’m very much in that camp myself. I ducked out from consoles, having owned pretty much all of them since the Atari 2600, after the PS4. So many more amazing games on PC e.g. Song of Syx which would never work on a traditional console but is amazing on PC and even Steam Deck / Steam Controller.

Now we know why they stopped shipping games to PC. They need to prep their user base for a hardware price that will have users consider just buying a PC instead, taking away the “I can play the PlayStation exclusives on PC anyway” argument.

Totally - it got us discussing! And if we didn’t, that daemon wouldn’t have been flagged.

Cheers for the thought provocation.

I’m not a Mac lover, it’s just the term; Spyware is data gathering in secret without the user’s knowledge. Apple seems to have it all documented and controllable vs say Windows where you can’t turn off telemetry gathering, just set it to “Basic/required”.

More a semantics thing. I assumed you meant there was something you can’t turn off in Apple shit and it’s done secretly (another commenter has highlighted a daemon that’s doing exactly that!).

I wasn’t part of the downvote brigade either. I don’t get why people downvote stuff that’s more a point of discussion. You didn’t say anything shocking nor blatantly incorrect.

Honest question; in what way is it spyware and do you have references?

From everything I’ve ever seen, macOS is more transparent and controllable than Windows or Android.

I’d still recommend Linux but if I were forced to use a mainstream commercial OS (e.g. for work), I’d pick macOS over anything else except FOSS.