a1studmuffin

This has been the weirdest console generation. I'm still surprised they railroaded ahead with the PS5 and Xbox Series X launches right at the beginning of the pandemic.

I noticed this as well and agree with everything you've said. Hopefully it's something that can be easily addressed for the next version, I doubt there's many people that would prefer to keep it as is when the comments action bar is disabled by default.

If you turn on text labels for the navigation buttons, they reappear. So seems to be when the icons only are showing.

It's the same for people who don't understand basic electronics or mechanics. Any problem just becomes "it's broken" and the only solution is to take it to an expert and pay for their time, or toss it and buy a new one. It's expensive to be ignorant.

To kill any competition and ensure they retain control over future standards. Money. It's pretty straightforward.

The basic idea is that a huge company with infinite money creates software that supports an open standard, such as Threads. Next they spend significant amounts of money driving users to their software, rather than an open software equivalent. Once they've captured a huge percent of all users of the open standard, they abandon the open standard, going with a proprietary one instead. They'll make up some new feature to justify this and sell it as a positive. Because they control almost all of the users at this point, many of the users they don't control will decide to switch over to their software, otherwise the value of the open standard drops significantly overnight for them. What's left is a "dead" open standard that still technically exists but is no longer used. You can find plenty of past examples of this pattern, such as Google and XMPP.

No, see you've fallen into the exact trap I just described. The "exact same binaries" is not true. The Steam build will have the Steam overlay SDK integrated into it. The GOG build won't. Each store may require its own SDK and API integrated into the build. But even they were the exact same binaries, you've still got to think about QA, build pipelines, storefront configuration (including achievements and online subsystems like leaderboards, parties/lobbies and voice chat, plus collectables and any other bespoke stuff a particular store has) and community management, plus any age ratings and certification/testing each store requires (though PC is usually pretty sparse on this front).

For small indie teams, all of this can seriously eat away at your time, so it makes sense to limit how many stores you target based on risk vs reward.

Edit: btw I'm not trying to be a troll, I just know from first-hand experience. I've been in the games industry for over two decades and have done everything from AAA to running my own indie studio. Indie development is brutal, you really have to be clever about your time management otherwise your risk of failure skyrockets.

This reminds me of the low-background steel problem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

The reality is those other platforms won't make much difference on sales at all, and with a limited indie dev team they've made a wise decision to focus on the largest PC storefront.

It's the same reason a lot of indies don't target Linux, the effort vs reward simply doesn't make sense for small teams. Anyone who says "But Unity and Unreal Engine support Linux! It's literally two clicks!" has no idea what they're talking about and hasn't actually been through the process of releasing a game for multiple platforms.

I see this at my local supermarket chains after they received pressure to reduce plastic usage. The exact same plastic bags are in use, except now they have printed on them "REUSABLE PLASTIC BAG". Such a predictable outcome.

It truly made no sense to me when they started the process of migrating stuff from control panel to the "new" Metro-style Settings, then just kind of... gave up and left everything as a spread-out mess. I can't believe they've left it this long to address, it's an awful user experience.

I can't speak for Craigslist, but in my area Gumtree is big, and I know from first-hand experience that they "handle it" by waiting for the crime to occur and be reported to police, then they give police the list of all IP addresses that viewed a listing. Having stared down the pointy end of a knife right outside my own home, I feel there's an opportunity to build a better system that keeps people honest and discourages thieves.