The line must always go up.

And by line, I mean ladder. Pulled up by the people who got in early or had nepotistic connections. While they tower above us and demand we run inside a hamster wheel for the privilege of being alive.

Oh boy do I love our currently-fucked society.

Because a subset of people are and always will be idiots. Remember: some people think unions exist to steal your money, socialism is communist dictatorship propaganda, and privatization of government services is good for everybody.

Obligatory fuck Nintendo, but I also blame the selfish dumbfucks who keep posting videos of themselves playing unreleased games on YouTube and Reddit. If you want nice things contingent on having software which exists in a legal gray area, don’t openly poke the litigious hornets’ nest.

From a theoretical point of view, emulators of modern consoles may actually be illegal. Under the DMCA, emulation for preservation is protected as a periodically-renewed exemption list defined by the library of congress. But, (paraphrasing) “creating or distributing any hardware or software device—or component of such—designed to circumvent DRM technology” is still illegal irrespective of any exemptions. A reasonable (and bullshit) interpretation of that means that any emulator which is capable of bypassing any DRM features (such as decrypting ROM using user-provided keys) is a violation under the act.

I say theoretical because it hasn’t ever actually been tested in a court. Nintendo v. Tropic Haze LLC nearly gave us the answer, but the latter chose to settle instead.

That is excellent news to hear. The more usable alternatives for browser engines than Blink, the more the opportunity for people to jump ship to something better every time Google shows how little they care about the consumer (like they did with Manifest V3).

No, yeah. We both agree here. Zero obligation for a company to help it’s competition, and the likely reason they would ever do it is either to profit or avoid regulatory scrutiny.

In fact, GNOME’s default browser uses WebKit

WebKit, or WebKit2? Last I checked, which was a year or so after WebKit was transitioned to a multi-process architecture, smaller FOSS browsers were stuck with the older single-process WebKit.

That must have changed since then, but if not, I can’t imagine a forked single-process WebKit has successfully kept up with new web features introduced since.

Ever heard of royalties? You know, that type of agreement where the creator earns X% of gross sales.

Or considered that publishing agreements can be made to include publishing costs (aka platform fees) as part of the publisher’s fixed cut? I’ll let you in on an obvious secret: if Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all take 30%, the publisher is going to use 30% as the deduction for platform fees regardless of where the sale comes from.

I stand by my opinion that the most likely outcome of lowering platform fees on Steam is the publisher finding a way to vacuum an extra 15% into their own bank account.

That being said: Please tell me what drugs you’re on, because I would love to also live in kumbaya la-la land where unchecked late-stage capitalism isn’t a problem and corporations don’t exist to enrich the 1% by infinitely increasing growth through screwing everyone below them.

like Microsoft with Apple in 1997

https://wccftech.com/microsoft-invested-150-million-in-apple-27-years-ago-today-on-august-6/

Google with Mozilla today

That’s funny because this is the opposite of what you seem to be suggesting. This is not helping their competition, this is paying another company hundreds of million dollars to be anticompetitive against their competition. They paid Mozilla (and dozens of others) to be the default search engine. Its the exact anticompetitive behavior that caused them to be legally classified as a monopoly.

Google has multiple ventures: advertising, search engine, email, web browser, cloud storage, cloud infrastructure, etc.

I’m not saying they don’t get any other benefit from paying Mozilla. I’m saying that one of the reasons Google shovels money in their direction is to stop regulators from having a reason to take a closer look at Chrome’s dominance.

In terms of browser engines, we have: Blink (Chromium), WebKit2 (Safari), and Gecko (Firefox). WebKit2 is exclusive to Apple devices, which leaves Blink and Gecko as the only two browser engines available on Windows and Linux. If Mozilla went bankrupt and stopped developing Gecko, Google’s Blink engine would have no competition on non-Apple platforms, which would invite some regulatory scrutiny.

While I disagree with the other commenter’s approach and attitude, he/she/they are partially correct with the comment they left next to this one.

There is no legal obligation for a company to fund or assist its competition, even if it holds a significant marketshare. The companies that do help their competition, like Microsoft with Apple in 1997 or Google with Mozilla today, begrugingly choose to do it so their lawyers can make the argument that they are not a monopoly because they still have competition.