rand_alpha19

A cold plunge is essentially an ice water bath for a human. It’s not food.

I don’t know anything about Jellyfin as a user but I’ve heard from others Jellyfin and Emby are ready to compete with Plex on a level playing field. Not sure if it’s an exaggerated hype or not. :P

Plex is fine as a whole, it just handles my music library kind of clunkily and doesn’t have much support for organization or dynamic playlists. It’s obviously meant more for movies and shows and that’s why Plexamp exists (which I don’t use).

Whenever I posted on /r/Plex on Reddit, people would comment that I should use another player, but that place is a cesspool with dedicated Plex haters; it’s so weird. Plex does function as a music player, it’s just a bit unfocused (design-wise) and bloated.

When I don’t want to boot up Plex I use mocp, a terminal-based music player, so I’m not in need of a fancy player like Deadbeef, Strawberry, Audacious, MediaMonkey, Musicbee, etc. but they do offer more to the user than Plex does.

I use Plex to play music most of the time (I know, but it works). Do you know if there’s a webhook or script available that would scrobble from Plex to ListenBrainz? I skimmed the list of player integrations and didn’t see anything.

If you check this list and this list, many games on Steam will actually launch without Steam running. I don’t think I can say the same for a lot of other platforms, excluding GOG and itch, of course.

I don’t disagree with you about why it exists and that it’s bad, but the fact remains that it does exist and Remedy and Epic, as companies, need to face that when making these decisions and factor that into sales projections accordingly. They should have known what they were getting into, and forcing people into using Epic isn’t really the answer to the lock-in problem anyway.

Edit: Turns out a bunch of other platforms have DRM-free games too, TIL.

Respectfully, using Epic means using yet another platform. I have games spread across Steam, GOG, itch, Amazon, Ubisoft, and probably at least one more. If I buy a game on Epic, chances are I’ll forget about it, so I don’t bother.

This isn’t to mention that the one game I do have on Epic, GTA V, has 3 different launchers when used through Epic (when it wants to actually open). It doesn’t do anything Steam doesn’t and doesn’t do many of the things Steam does. I don’t even really love Steam either, because it crashes constantly on Debian for me, but I already have 500+ games there and it’s got ~20 years on Epic. I’m also a Linux user, so Proton is essentially one of the only ways I can reliably play most of my library.

Platform lock-in should be a consideration for companies, even though it sucks, because it’s an objective reflection of the reality of the games industry. Remedy knew that they would have fewer players going Epic-exclusive but seemed to underestimate to what degree that might hurt sales; this past couple of years have been sort of bad for the average person, so maybe they used previous sales data that didn’t really account for lower levels of consumer spending.

The game wouldn’t have been a massive success even with 30% more money than what they ended up earning. They didn’t want to pay the fee so they didn’t, that’s their choice and they were free to make it; the result isn’t Valve’s fault, they weren’t involved at all. When it’s on GOG or Steam, maybe I’ll buy it on sale, but at this point there’s no reason to lock myself into another janky platform. I did this with Control: the GOG version of Control is great and I don’t have to use Epic.