I know Pokemon Go did something like this as market research. They wanted to see what price would people buy at (in the coins you can earn without money, or buy with money).
Still yucky, so yucky. I would contact them with the screenshot and tell them you will buy it for the lower price on your account.
And then I see people complaining about Steam having so much of the market cornered. They 👏 don’t 👏 pull 👏 shit 👏 like 👏 this
👏 yet
What do you think will happen when Gaben our Lord dies?
You think their successor will be as merciful and follow Gabens vision? Or be blinded by the huge amount of money Steam makes?
Both. Steam is already the market leader in its industry. You just keep doing what you’re doing and you win.
When Miamoto died, Nintendo just had to stay the course. They were never dominant, but they were ubiquitous and everyone enjoyed their products. Now the new guys don’t even play games, and the switch 2 price point is ridiculous, and they never fixed the issue with the joy con sticks, and prices never drop like they used to. You can’t count on new leadership being capable of continuing success, even when all they have to do is keep things on the exact same course.
When steam came out with the orange box and set it up so that if you already had some of the games in the box, you could gift the other copies to people, I knew they were going to win the war.
I hope gaben lives forever, because I’m terrified of how instantly it will turn to shit when he’s not in charge anymore.
This right here. So much space and energy being used to bitch about Steam that could be used for, oh, I dunno… Sony. Microsoft. Nintendo. Giant players that have held tacit monopolies for years and literally engage in anticompetitive behavior on a regular basis.
If I had room for one more conspiracy theory, I could point to a handful of companies that probably would not be above paying people to bitch about Steam…
(points up ^^^)
I bitch about steam because it has issues. I don’t bitch about the others because they have issues severe enough I just don’t use them whereas steam is running anytime my laptop is running
The fact that they don’t pull this shit is the reason they have the distribution market cornered.
We have to remember that gamers are not Valve’s primary customers. Game devs are. The market you’re referring to is the market of distributors available to game devs – NOT the market of storefronts available to gamers. In the PC space, the market of distributors is cornered by Valve and it allows them to take a big chunk of each sale from the game devs.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Steam and I think Valve has done some great things for gaming on PC and for gamers in general. That doesn’t change the fact that they are another cost a game dev must pay in order for them to create their goods, in an economic sense. Valve’s got the shelf space and devs don’t have much choice but to rent it out.
I think you are forgetting the other reason Valve cornered the market;
“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue… The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
Gabe Newell, CEO Valve - Speaking at the Washington Technology Industry Association’s (WTIA) Tech NW Conference.
Yeah, no I definitely agree they’re good to gamers. I also love how they have a flat structure, and I think Gabe seems like a smart guy. He’s given some interesting talks about economics. They’ve made a great platform for gamers, but it doesn’t quite change that their business model is based on taking a cut of the profit of work done by others. In most other scenarios, it’s easy for us to recognize when companies do this – amazon, Walmart, etc, but in Valves case they have such a great reputation among gamers and a fanbase of their own, I think the escape a good amount of warranted scrutiny (game dev side, not gamer side)
“Is based on taking a cut of the product of work done by others.”
That seems like a fair trade off for game developers in turn getting to use the platform who’s work was done by… Valve.
I understand why people make this argument but it’s really undercutting the value that Valve provides developers who utilize steam for distribution.
Valve’s fee is more than earned however. Steam as a storefront is highly trusted by users, it has a rock solid reputation that is hard to come by. As a distributor they take a one time fee for each copy sold, then they manage all of the costs from users downloading and downloading again for as long as the platform exists from that one time fee. Meanwhile if a developer were to do that themselves then they pay each time a user wants to download that game.
Sure the developers lose a bit more money than if they sold on another platform. But the higher up front cost to access the larger platform is a very worthwhile trade as can be seen by developers continually coming back.
Valve’s fee is more than earned however.
Maybe. I’m not a game dev, so Im not sure I can say for sure. But it still remains that there isn’t much of a choice for game devs and Valve holds most of the cards. That level of centralization of power isn’t good, earned or otherwise. It’s evident that at least some devs aren’t happy how much of a cut Valve is taking.
Meanwhile if a developer were to do that themselves then they pay each time a user wants to download that game.
I’m not sure this is exactly right. They’d have to buy and maintain their own servers, or rent them from a cloud provider, but it wouldnt necessarily be a charge for every download. But maybe I’m being pedantic – you’re right that it costs some amount of money to store data and keep computers up.
I think probably from a game dev perspective, the issue here is Valve takes far more of a cut than whatever value they add to the experience itself. If you’re a team that just spent years of work on a game, the one-third cut Valve takes is just not proportional considering the amount of dev work, and is therefore considered extractive. Does that make sense?
I’m trying not to cast too much moral judgement here because we live in a capitalist system and corporations are going to seek profit in whatever way possible, and we are all indoctrinated into it, but from a perspective critical to that system, Valve are not good.
From a gamer perspective theyre a fucking godsend lmaooo
As a cloud engineer - renting any distribution servers from a cloud provider will result in a dev paying for every download. You pay based on the bandwidth you consume in the cloud (I.e., you pay per Gb delivered) as opposed to your pipeline like you do when you run your own private servers. You also pay storage costs per month. You’d have to maintain that “forever” as well, because people would want to uninstall, then re-install later.
I get your argument, and I’m not discounting it, but I do suspect that for smaller devs the price they’re paying to Valve is well earned on Valve’s side (and the fact that so many devs choose to use it would seem to bear this out). We should also consider that steam is essentially built-in DRM to games.
For larger customers, they likely have this infrastructure and get annoyed at the costs. They still go to Steam though because it increases their reach as a type of marketing strategy, so they still likely find the cut worth while. If Steam was more hostile to users, then people would actively look for alternatives (I.e., the Gogs of the world), and the publishers would have to target more storefronts.
So yes, Steam’s primary customers are publishers, but I’m not sure they’re really getting the raw end of the deal here :)
Steam doesn’t really have a market cornered? They aren’t stopping you from buying from elsewhere. They even let you add non-steam games to your library.
Playstation would as there are no other way of installing software without modding
How do I install my non steam games?
However you like. Download it straight from the publisher, buy it on cdrom, buy it on gog, epic or any other platform. There’s no enforced monopoly for PC games, and the only one who could enforce one is Microsoft.
In the library list on the left scroll down until you find “+ non steam game”
He’s asking how to register your non-Steam game with Steam such that you can re-download it from Steam later, which obviously can’t happen because of copyright law. It was a disingenuous question.
I’m almost certain this is how I got the first witcher on steam, using the key that was in the box with the physical game. So at some point at least using outside keys was supported.
In principle, copyright law doesn’t stop there being a system that lets you redeem the same key from Steam, Epic and Gog as long as it’s the same person behind all three acounts. There’s already a degree of precedent for this - when a publisher generates Steam keys to sell at other retailers (whether they’re codes-in-a-box at a physical shop or an online retailer like Humble Bundle), they don’t have to pay Valve a fee, but the keys can be redeemed on Steam and work just like if you’d bought the game from the Steam store where Valve would take a 30% cut. Valve probably don’t think it’s in their interest to make libraries transferrable/sharable between Steam and not-Steam, but if they change their mind, and the competitors that they’re building the transfer/sharing system with also thought it was in their interests (which is unlikely to happen at the same time), there’s nothing stopping them building it.
since we’re asking bad faith questions, allow me a bad faith answer.
through the fucking launcher for that non-Steam game, you absolute knob.
That you know of
Isthereanydeal.com tracks prices and histories of most PC games. You can always check there to find the best current price and compare to what is being shown. If Steam was showing me something different I would know thanks to this.
Unless that site is secretly run by a shell corp owned by Gaben which tracks you and presents you the same price as you’d see on Steam. The conspiracy goes all the way to the top!
...
/s, obviously.
Plus family accounts kinda negate any use for such pricing schemes.
there are several websites that track the prices of all steam games, and it’s not steam that sets the prices, it’s the publisher. the price you see is the same price everyone in your region sees, no matter who they are. on top of that, family sharing means only one person needs the game anyway as long as it’s not one you’re playing together, so if they did do this then people would find out very quickly.
How the fuck is this even legal?
I mean, if they generally advertise a specific price or discount, then bait and switch on you, it isn’t. But they can always give different discounts to people on whatever conditions they want. Like stores giving employee discounts, senior discounts, military discounts, student discounts, repeat customer discounts, partnership discounts, new customer discounts, etc. You can even get a discount on an individual basis by haggling. None of that is illegal, or really even deceptive in itself. The slimy part here isn’t the different pricing as a promo to entice a new customer, or even that two people in the same household would be treated differently (military husband, civilian wife; senior parent, non-senior caregiving child, etc.), but in the lack of transparency/the deception as to why they are priced different or even that they are given a different price unless both go to look specifically.
Now that you put it like that, yeah, it really is completely normal to have “discriminatory” discounts (as a student I personally regularly make use of them), and for a moment I even wondered why it would bother me at all, why I even thought it is problematic - but as you say it’s the fact that it’s covert is what’s problematic.
I would say it’s not even that it’s “covert” but that it’s at least seemingly arbitrary.
All those other ones it’s clear what condition you may fulfill to get the discount or understand why you didn’t. This one is just a vague “the algorithm said so.”
There’s a law saying grocery stores can’t give discounts to SNAP benifiters, why can’t there be a law saying you have to give the deal to EVERYONE.
That’s not exactly correct. So first, in order to recieve SNAP payments as a seller, you have to be authorized. This provides limits and oversight on government money, making sure it is going to certified retailers, or farmers markets, not just anyone. That means that everyone who is authorized must meet and continue to uphold certain requirements of the law or else lose their authorization. One such requirement is the equal treatment provision which prevents that seller from treating SNAP buyers any differently, whether positively or negatively.
So, A) there is not an actual law preventing anyone from giving a SNAP recipient a special discount. 1) If I were an authorized seller, I might lose that status and no longer be allowed to take SNAP payments. But I would only have broken a requirement for that privilege, not the law. 2) If I am not a SNAP authorized seller, there are zero reasons I couldn’t give out discounts to SNAP recipients. There would be no consequences at all.
B) The reason I can’t charge SNAP recipients more should be obvious, becuase it would mean the government is getting charged more for their beneficiaries to receive less. But it might seem counter-intuitive that they can’t then charge less to them. I think there are two (threeish) major reasons for that. 1) part of the reason that the current system works, where SNAP recipients have a preloaded card that they charge, rather than stamps or other currency used to be used, is that it maintains some level of anonymity so that even that cashier doesn’t necessarily know that anything is different between their transaction and the next guy’s in line. 1.5) This anonymity and the lack of special treatment for the entire process means that people who need it are more likely to participate in the program because they can maintain dignity and not be embarrassed for their need, as plenty would be. 2) People are already attacking SNAP recipients for getting a handout. Can you imagine how much anger SNAP targetted discounts would make those people? To protect a much needed program, they want to make sure that there is as little reason as possible to attack it. So treat them as close to equal as humanly possible.
Also, there are allowances for exceptions to this rule already, such as discounts on fresh produce and whole foods to promote healthier purchases with SNAP dollars.
EDIT: Forgot to address your question about why they couldn’t pass a law to require the same price and discount be given to everyone. They probably could. I don’t think there is any good constitutional argument to say they couldn’t. But no such law currently exists, which is why it is not a legal problem at this time.
I wouldn’t buy rockstar products anyways, they are terrible and intentionally break Linux support.
Yeah. Don’t buy rockstar. Just get it through alternative means.
Naval aquisition.
What is the difference in price based on? Are they offering an extra discount due to lack of activity? Just random A/B testing? Demographics?
I remember hearing some time ago that mobile games give you progressively cheap “special deals” to make you buy anything from them, as that makes future purchases way more probable
I imagine it’s similar here - “Oh, you didn’t buy any games recently? But what if they went on sale?”
I learned, decades ago, that piracy was always the best option
I’m not a huge fan of pirating games, but shit like this gets me there real quick.
Im a big fan, the only way I play new games is by 🏴☠️, if its good I go and buy it on steam or gog. Most the time pirated versions run better anyway since all the DRM is removed.
The base game is $60 on the PlayStation store for me 😭
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
I was going to sell my xbox for a ps5… but no way am I buying into that bullshit.
I only buy nintendo, not much better over here… PC is and always has been king, haven’t even bought the switch2 due to all the bull with not owning anything anymore with it.
I get most of my gametime in on a steamdeck. And I’m sitting the SW2 out entirely. Completely underwhelming.
Yeah, I have a Playstation and wtf…
