• good on you to make an account, welcome!
• that’s one hell of a choice for a username, genuinely made me laugh, so cheers for that!
• have a nice morning/day/evening :D

in most countries, afaik, you actually can’t patent game mechanics, for the same reason you can’t patent rule sets for boardgames:

because they are essentially just logical connections. it would be like patenting math, which is also not allowed, for very obvious reasons. (with some very specific, very niche exceptions)

japan is just plain weird and wrong about their patent system.

that’s why all of the lawsuits about this stuff are happening in japan; not just because that’s where the companies are, but because japanese copyright law is (especially) fucked.

afaik the client does collect a bunch if data, most (all, i think? but not a 100% on that) of which is opt-in.

they do need stuff like IPs for internet related features.

telemetry wise there’s the steam hardware survey, which is opt-in, and it asks every single time it attempts to collect your systems hardware and OS information. this could technically be identifying information, but since it’s opt-in it’s not a privacy violation and it’s entirely optional. (plus it’s super useful for all involved: users, devs, and steam. it’s kind of a win-win and straight up necessary info for devs to know which hardware they should optimize for)

they might be putting it at the top because steam has native support for DRM?

but that’s also weird, because DRM isn’t a privacy violation. it’s a shitty practice, barely does anything, barely works, and keeps breaking or hobbling otherwise perfectly good games, all of which is shitty, but it’s little to do with privacy. and the dev has to specifically opt-in and integrate it as a feature…unless they’re thinking of 3rd party DRM that can be waaay more intrusive, like Vanguard… THAT’S a privacy and security nightmare just waiting to blow up in people’s faces.

otherwise…i haven’t really heard anything bad about steam privacy wise?

doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to be concerned about, but i feel like there’d been some news about it if there was…

effectively calling at least a quarter of the population some kind of mentally handicapped is certainly a novel strategy…

i wonder why politicians don’t typically run on such a platform? /s

also in the books!

the expanse is probably the most faithful reproduction of a book series ever.

especially considering it’s like, what?, 5 books they made into the series?

it’s almost a 1:1 translation into a different medium, which is hella impressive!

they cut some stuff here and there (more and more as the series goes on, for obvious reasons) but seriously, damn near everything about the main story is there!

there’s really good reasons for the fans demanding more of it after Netflix stopped production