We’re number one! /s

Depends on the state / county / city.

In my county, King County in WA state, servers make the same minimum wage everyone else does.

That being said most places offer more than minimum wage when I see signs out with their hiring rates.

Fuck no please don’t start these rumours. I know of no one who tips 25% unless the service was exquisite.

No.

Generally the historical rule is sit down restaurants only, where someone serves you, or tip a driver if your food gets delivered.

So even if you sit down, if you got up to collect your food and/or bussed your dishes yourself then it’s not expected.

At bars generally you tip on all drinks, though I’d say less if all they did was open something and/or pour. Definitely tip on cocktails though.

That being said two things have happened in the past 6 years:

• there was a lot of community support to tip on take out orders during Covid to help local places survive. A lot of places still expect this on take out nowadays which is a shame. That being said I still like supporting local places so tip when I can, but less than I would sitting in and dining there.
• with everyone moving to electronic point of sales systems the owners of lots of places of “fast food” or coffee shops these days are now setting them up so they ask for tips after any transaction, and in many cases where they previously didn’t ask, those tips are not going to staff, just being collected by the owners which may be illegal in some places. Not to mention they always have three suggested tip rates, and there’s no legal rule they be set to anything specific or they be in any order. So one place may be 15%, 18%, 20%, and another place may be 25%, 23%, 20%. So if you’re used to hitting the first option (generally used to be 15%) automatically now you’re way over-tipping your usual amount. This results in customers just not returning if they realized what happened, hurting the overall business. But like most owners / marketers they can’t see past the next quarter or so of transactions and don’t care about long term.

Yeah they had their chance. Audio streaming services have (mostly) managed to figure out licensing agreements so all music is on all platforms.

Video streaming services all created their own walled gardens with various levels of advertising. Paramount even offered an advertising free tier but would happily advertise their own shows before other shows (noticed specifically on Star Trek shows but I imagine other providers do it too).

In the end… Fuck them. I give up on trying to figure out streaming video with all its complications. Back to the seven seas to procure my own.

Yeah also early 40s. Hoped to retire in 3 - 4 years or so based on my finances but it’s getting harder and harder to stick it out.

A recent update renamed the Proton packages.

Check your Steam settings (like the global ones, not specific to a game) and the Compatibility settings. In my case the selected compatibility layer was blank after the package rename.

Reselect whatever compatibility package you like.

We’re just going to NIMBY the problem onto someone else?

As is tradition.

Yeah it’s particularly weird in this case because Ubisoft and Valve both have publisher, developer, and distributor departments within each company. So the agreements they signed and put into place are probably somewhat complex.

Looking at the Steam page though it says

Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Publisher: Ubisoft

So in this case it’s whatever Ubisoft as a publisher signed / agreed to with Valve when they accepted their distribution terms. These are probably not the same boiler plate terms an indie dev would sign if self publishing.

Yeah but it’s fairly simple.

You can generate Steam keys using the Steam developer tools. This allows a game key to be purchased on any storefront that supports selling them, which can then be activated on Steam.

The main requirement? You can’t price those steam keys on a 3rd party store cheaper than on Steam itself.

For that, it means if the 3rd party store takes a smaller cut than Steam itself would take, the developer makes a bit more profit through almost no additional effort. Steam is the system users use to download and update the game, and cloud save syncing, and community guides, forums, workshop, etc.

The developer is, afaik, more than welcome to also sell a UPlay key if they partner with Ubisoft at any price point they want (regardless of the Steam price) because Ubisoft is the taking on the burden of distribution, etc.

The only price requirement Valve imposes is on selling Steam keys on 3rd party storefronts. Not UPlay keys. Not Xbox keys. Not Epic Store keys.

Edit: and I read the article, while albeit short (can’t access the linked Bloomberg article sadly), they claim exactly that, that the version on UPlay was significantly cheaper than the version on Steam for essentially the same game. Valve was arguing that Rainbow Six Siege needs to change their pricing on UPlay or they would be delisted.

Not sure about Mac support but I suspect Outbound checks most / all of your boxes?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2681030/Outbound/