Okay, to reverse the question then - have you ever seen anything that supports there being something contractual to say thar non–Steam copies can’t be sold at lower prices? Like, the terms you mention above? I’ve read the public docs, and can find nothing.
I can think of multiple times when, e.g. Ubisoft games, Rockstar games, have been sold on EGS or their own launcher for far cheaper than the version on Steam - so we’re both supported by anecdata, here.
Found Steamdeck, but I can’t see a non parody Valve account - got a link/handle?
Edit: Valve Software, thank you.
Sorry, I’m confusing a conversation I saw the other day that said we’d have had two GTAs in the same time star citizen had been in development for. Weird comparison.
Do you think they don’t intend to deliver? If so, we fundamentally disagree.
Mismanagement or bad planning is not a scam.
Why is this a scam?
Are you asking this about any other games? GTA6 doesn’t have a release date yet, do you have the same worry?
… Genuinely, I do see the difference between the two, but it’s weird to me that people are calling it out for things that aren’t said. They say enough; if you can’t make complaints based on reality, that’s a bit lazy.
Edit: for what it’s worth, I’ll “move the goalposts” on this one if you come back with some nonsense around how they haven’t delivered anything yet. I’ve played a fair few hours on my ship (probably a few hundred over the last decade), despite not having invested millions of pounds.
As has been pointed out by many other people in this thread, this is untrue.
If you are providing a Steam key, it has to be the same price as Steam. Otherwise, you can set whatever price you want (e.g. if you were selling on both Steam and Epic - like Borderlands 3, which frequently had sales on Epic where the price dropped below the Steam price)
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
It’s even fine to sell your Steam keys at a lower price in another place - as long as you’re planning to have a similar sale on Steam at some similar time.
It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.
TL;DR: Games sold on Epic could be any price they want. They’re no different to Steam, in general, because that’s what publishers choose.
Well, okay - here’s my reasoning:
I have a PC and a PS5.
If the game is on PC, I would prefer to play it there. It is a competitor, in my household (I’d argue elsewhere, too, but I guess that’s an opinion). It is a very useful distinction for me.
There are few games I can only get on my PS5, but that low number does sometimes make me ask why I have a PS5. It is useful to distinguish between the games I can only play on PS5, and those I could instead play on PC, for that reason.
I hugely prefer this world in which Sony releases for my preferred platform, but that doesn’t mean it’s sensible to say that PC isn’t a competitor to consoles and bury your head in the sand because it “devalue[s] pro-consumer behaviour”.
Forgive me if this comes across bluntly but, having seen roughly no details on price or actual performance of the still unannounced PS5 Pro, are you pulling the 3-4x cost comparison out of the ether?
If the expectation is that it will increase performance by frame generation, and that’s accepted (e.g. non native resolution performance), then I’d argue you could get away with a very reasonable build and upscale to 4k for a similar imaginary price point - but without any released details (or third party reviews/benchmarks), that’s hard to say seriously.
The developer Bohemia Interactive found it crucial to promote the idea of player creation, something that was true for most of the golden era of early PC gaming.
I can’t agree more - so many high profile games and trends came from the ability for players to mod and map for things, going back to CS and further.
That games with subscriptions etc are so much more locked down these days (for sort of fair reasons, if you agree with that model for monetising games - and not, if not) is pretty sad, and means that folk who may otherwise organically start mucking about with the ideas behind game development much earlier than otherwise.
That said, stuff like unity is way more accessible than it used to be, but it’s a whole other can of worms for various reasons.
Looking back at community mapping competitions as late as TF2 (which didn’t require mindbending detail, just an art style), it’s sad that we’re missing that these days - partly due to the increased detail, but also the ability to host your own server, mess with modding it, add new maps… And all in the name of (pessimistically) greater recurring revenue for shareholders.
To sum it all up, “:(”.
I just cannot figure out how downloading and installing a mod is somehow less engagement with this clearly dangerous pronoun selection compared to, I assume, not moving the menu from the default, creating your character, and getting on with the game?
Does the pronoun selector come back to haunt you during later exploration? Is it the final boss?
As an aside, I’m genuinely a bit worried about what terrible hellscape a site named “basedmods” which is only available on some kind of onion-or-web3 routing must be. (Jokingly, as I clearly can’t resist knowing about it, does anyone have a Firefox add-on that will remove it from the websites I browse?)
For what it’s worth, the posted article isn’t talking about the Portal - actually talking about a theoretical unconfirmed new handheld.