I feel like luxury goods are harder to into in terms of career change and it’s a bit off to characterize them as always needed.

If we enter a depression, people will have less money to spend on luxuries. I just think the percentage of people buying hand made furniture is kind of low. I think most people “buy” them from friends and family doing it as a semi-hobby, or are rich, at least in my experience.

Not trying to be overly critical, just saying it’s not easy.

As a side note, I’ve noticed no one makes nice wooden informational kiosks with integrated touch screen even though orgs like museums would likely buy them over plastic and metal ones. Just an idea if you were looking for a niche product.

Anything that’s done on site or with your hand. Forget about working from home or having your own hours though, most of the benefits you are used to won’t exist and it will be arguably harder work physically depending.

I’d pick something that can’t be automated since that’s also a risk even if it’s not directly AI. That means something to complicated for robots (not much), too big or messy, where it can’t be trusted entirely to robots (high safety like making plane parts) or most likely where robots can’t easily go (house plumbing and electricity for example).

A lot of trades and manual work pay very well but you have to look before hand, it’s definitely not all of them. Cooking jobs for example are pretty safe but don’t ever become a cook lol.

If you have dev experience, I’d go towards micro electronics. It’s too niche for AI to be good at it yet and has the physical part of prototyping and soldering that isn’t easily accessible by AI.

What? Ikea wrecked that a long time ago. Not that you can’t make a living but the demand isn’t high in any way whatsoever. Hand crafted furniture has become a luxury.

These are two different things. You don’t need to let valve sell loot boxes to stop new York from implementing mass surveillance.

Looks like injection is the best option.

I agree to some extent. I might be more reserved, I just can’t imagine telling anyone I work with I have a crush on a fellow coworker.

I still like joking around with them and I do have more of a manager than a boss as well. I get what you mean.

I would definitely wait to see how their date goes I guess. Tough situation, good luck!

Well I try to stay away from any work relations personally. It sounds like he’s innocent about it more than anything. People usually don’t share that info specifically because of situations like this. I think it’s fine to go for it if you properly like her. I’d ask her to keep it out of work and keep it as a kind of secret relationship at least for the beginning, but he’ll hate you even more for it when he does find out.

It kind of sounds like he’s got puppy dog love going on. I only know a bit about the situation but I feel like she isn’t going to jump in his arms the moment you back off or something. I definitely wouldn’t feel bad about it.

There’s other things to think about. Are you technically her boss too? That might affect the office gossip.

I’d seriously ask myself if he actually asked her out and she said yes, or if he’s basically trying to preemptively stop anything between you two when he noticed she likes you and guilt tripping you.

Dating coworkers is a mess even without the whole situation though. Confiding your love affairs to your boss is such a red flag though. No one does that.

Go on their support forums and bitch about it. It’s the least we can do. Obviously, I plan on deleting the app and retiring my account the moment it asks me for a picture. Not interested in playing the game and trying to trick it or something silly.

HBO has a good track record period. I’m guessing you mean GoT but that series is a gem until the last season. Even in the last season, the zombie fight lasted a whole episode and a half and was peak tv. House of the dragon was pretty good as well.

Nothing new tbh. How we subconsciously round off numbers is a big part of super market pricing. Everything with a zero at the end seems bigger. Not only does 19.99 seem much smaller then 20, but even 21.99 seems smaller then 20 at a glance.

We don’t get many high budget fantasy shows. I’m all for it. Larian is already moving away from bg anyways, I think wizards of the coast upped their licensing price by quite a bit.

We don’t know how much it costs for their servers but I doubt it’s anywhere near what they charge devs. Gaben having an 11bn dollar net worth kind of points to that.

The biggest problem is that it isn’t up to devs since steam has market dominance. Not putting your game on steam is basically suicide, they have close to 90% of the PC market…

Retail needs a location to store and sell their product. They need employees as well. One small Walmart has as many employees as steam does. Retails also buys the product in bulk, there is a bigger risk involved if it doesn’t sell or even sells slowly.

Huge difference imo.

Ya, I misread it and I’m way off. It’s 4bn. Epic also made a lot less, my stats are not for gross revenue but generated revenue before they split it with the devs. Amateur hour over here (me, not you).

I went off in my other comment and was a bit of a dick throughout the convo. It just feels like someone is being robbed here. 4bn is a lot of money and, from the wolffire lawsuit leak, they have less than 100 people working on steam full time.

I’m not reading the Google summary.

Okay, but your stats are still wrong? (Edit: so are some of mine though, disregard me being a dick here). Using AI wasn’t my point.

If so then Epic should have caught up by now, no?

Is making 1 000 million in a year with something like 5% not catching up? Do you think any of these billion dollar stores are running at cost?

Please back that up.

Having a vampire sucking up 30% of your revenue does affect a company but quantifying it would mean some pretty in depth studies and getting information from bankrupt companies. I do know most devs don’t like it. https://gdconf.com/article/gdc-state-of-the-industry-most-devs-feel-steam-s-30-cut-isn-t-justified-many-prefer-10-15/

And yes, all those points you mention are happening, but having a huge chunk of your profits taken like that obviously aggravates it.

What does that 30% pay for? Do you know?

I know it pays for Gabens yacht fleet worth 1.5 billion lol. We do have rough numbers. We know their employees count and revenue, and that they are making an estimated 11 million per employee from an article by the financial Times. That doesn’t include data atorage but I doubt the cost of offering downloads is anywhere near there revenue.

I own more computer games on disc from physical stores than I do from steam.

Stores don’t even stock physical discs for PC Games. How many of those are from the past 5 years? Last year had 95% of games sold digitally (PC and consoles). https://twicethebits.com/2025/06/19/the-shift-to-digital-gaming-why-physical-sales-are-declining/

But I do not trust the developer who originally brought the lawsuit

What dev? This is about a UK lawsuit on behalf of UK gamers. I can’t find anything about a devs involvement.

Nobody is suing Nintendo, PlayStation, or Microsoft over this.

PlayStation is getting sued for it, the trial is for March. This is specifically about the 30% (https://www.catribunal.org.uk/cases/15277722-alex-neill-class-representative-limited). (https://woodsford.com/woodsford-funded-5bn-class-action-against-sony-playstation-gets-go-ahead-in-uk-competition-appeal-tribunal/) .

I want to point out that this is pure whataboutism, just like the OP. But what about epic, but what about nintendo. All of them deserve to get sued.

I also never said

Then the proper response would be “yes, steam does deserve to get sued, epics behavior doesn’t even have anything to do with the subject, but they also deserve to get sued”. Like what’s your point then? Why make a bullet point of things steam does well if you aren’t trying to imply that they are “good enough to be allowed to abuse”.

I feel like you scanned right over half of what I did say.

We are both writing walls of text.

Steams revenue was 16b (edit: it’s 4b) in 2025, epics was 1b in 2024. At least click the links instead of pasting what the Google summary tells you. You are mixing up epics store revenue with their unreal engine revenue.

The fact is any game store front is a money printing machine mostly because of the rampant price fixing, hard to enter markets and abuse from those that hold the lion share of that market (Steam, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo).

That money is being sucked out of the companies that are actually making games, and is leading to a reduction in quality, layoffs and bankruptcies.

For regulation, we could easily have limits on the percentage store fronts are allowed to demand for digital media, but each time there’s a lawsuit, a bunch of idiots loudly fight it. Lawmakers aren’t going to enact laws that go against what the lobbyist want, especially if the majority of the population have been instructed that the boot is for their benefit.

Your list of pros and cons doesn’t matter, every player being compared is bad. It’s just a defense in favor of Gabens yacht fleet at this point. Exclaiming that steam shouldn’t change because you like their product, even though it’s clearly having an impact, is the same as defending Amazon because drop shipping is easier than going to the store.

Fyi, I use both, I literally own a steam deck and the sd card came from Amazon. Defending their practices is just fucking weak though.

Everyone does the moment steam gets sued by consumers. It’s like the bar is set by epic or something and we can’t expect better things from any of them because of it.