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God forbid anyone under 18 knows that gambling exists without actually engaging in it.
You do know that you can play a card game without it being gambling, don’t you? Or that you can gamble on not just any card game, but just about anything?
By your logic we should rank solitaire as 18+, since people actually gamble on it in casinos.
You mentioned a handful of games without doing any research on them, and one of them accidentally proved my point.
You asked for a list of games that fit my “steam hasn’t impacted pricing” statement, so I gave you games that had prices inline with what steam prices games at and industry standard. Like I explained in my previous comment. I know how much those games cost: between $50 and $70 dollars, which is what games have retailed at for decades.
Games on steam and off steam have had roughly the same price, and games not on steam have had perfectly reasonable times making sales. Except the one on epic.
They set the $50 price tag to maximize revenue
My point was that even with lowering the price to the low end of standard, they have had some difficulty getting enough revenue to cover the cost of the game.
If other retailers are able to compete just fine, and one isn’t despite lowering prices and paying for exclusives, and it’s the one that, as you mentioned, people complain about when they buy an exclusive, then maybe the issue is with that retailer.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1388073/average-price-of-video-games-by-platform/
If you want more discussion, you can Google “video game prices over time”.
Given that you’re starting to ignore large bits of replies and have been repeating yourself pretty consistently without expanding on the point, I’m not sure that there’s much value in continuing. You think it’s anticompetitive, I don’t think it’s so obvious. We’ll see what the courts say.
Have a nice day, and I hope you find the same passion for your next endeavor. :)
So, a court document is an argument, not a smoking gun. The court didn’t dismiss the case because it has enough merit to be argued, which just means it isn’t plainly false at first glance. The court did dismiss earlier versions of their claim. Earlier versions being rejected and this one being allowed to move forward have little to do with anything.
Repeatedly asserting that it’s “anticompetitive bullying” doesn’t actually make it anticompetitive bullying.
This isn’t going to end well for you when Valve becomes as openly evil as Google.
Lol, what do you think is going to happen to me? I think maybe you’re taking this conversation too seriously.
Yes, Alan wake 2 was lower priced on epic than on consoles by about $10, after epic financed the game. it also has yet to turn a profit, with most revenue coming from titles that aren’t exclusive to epic. You also ignored the list of other games I mentioned, each of which launched for $60 to $70 and wasn’t on steam.
Half life 1 cost $60 on launch. Same for 2. Same for the original star craft. Same for basically every full featured game for years.
It’s not “sus” that most games sell for the typical price for a game. It’s a sign that valve isn’t driving up prices, since prices are roughly the same regardless of platform, vendor or time, including when steam didn’t exist yet.
I know you think you’re arguing against a mindless steam fanboy, hence you’re starting to break out some insulting language and condescension. I can assure you you’re not, just like I assume I’m not dealing with a dense contrarian more interested in punishing valve for success than actual critical thinking.
I don’t think that suing someone necessarily makes you right, and that a financially motivated lawsuit is an inherently slanted description of events, when the trial hasn’t happened and none of the claims have even been responded to.
And of course it’s not possible that they’re despised and not doing well because people don’t like their platform.
You still haven’t convinced me that they are price fixing, to say nothing of it hurting consumers. Full feature games on steam are still around the same price console games are, and that games have been for many years. If they’re price fixing to artificially inflate prices, they’re doing it in a way that hasn’t really kept up with inflation and has been in line with retailers on platforms they don’t even sell on.
Listing your product on Steam isn’t advertising.
They literally present your product to people as recommendations and make it discoverable by the people likely to buy it. No, it’s not banner ads, but you use them because they get your game in front of consumers likely to buy it. That’s the entire reason the platform has appeal to developers.
This entire lemmy post is about someone being upset that Epic is successful enough to have an exclusive
Yes. Because it’s a worse store. People being upset that a thing they want has a hurdle they’re not willing to jump over doesn’t mean the preferable system is a problem.
Is it reasonable for Nordstrom to go after a company selling the same product at Wal-Mart cheaper?
If they signed a distribution agreement, then yes. It would almost be like a game signing an agreement to sell exclusively on the epic game store and then deciding to sell on steam anyway.
It’s a flawed analogy though, because Nordstrom’s and Walmart buy the product and then resell it, rather than facilitating a sale. Valve doesn’t buy 50k licenses from you for $20 each and then try to sell them while keeping all the revenue for themselves.
They know their price fixing department would have to become a “watch for prices on other platforms and adjust our prices / cut to be competitive” department.
🙄 That would make sense if valve set the prices or adjusted their cut in real time.
Epic is allowed to compete with steam on price. Games don’t have to be on steam to be successful. Valve has no way if stopping you from choosing to use a different store, and as you pointed out in the beginning: This entire lemmy post is about someone being upset that Epic is successful enough to have an exclusive. You can’t be mad epic isn’t “allowed” to compete when they’re actively competing.
How much does Diablo cost? How much did StarCraft 2 cost? Alan wake 2 ? Every Nintendo game? PlayStation or Xbox console exclusives?
It’s trivially easy to find full featured games that didn’t launch on steam and have the same price point as a full featured game on steam.
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by “the economics of an exclusive launch on a smaller platform are going to be completely different”.
Isn’t your whole point that the smaller platform can compete by taking a smaller cut and allowing developers to offer lower prices for the same revenue?
How does developers not doing that become irrelevant?
And it’s two small publishers who had their remaining claims joined by the court after variously having them dismissed and reframing them. Class action doesn’t mean that a large number of publishers have actually made the complaint.
Valve not letting you use their advertisement and distribution network at the same time you undercut them on sales elsewhere doesn’t feel anticompetitive to me.
Some games choose to skip steam and use epic. Epic pays them to do so, and the publisher doesn’t lower prices.
If you’re a publisher, why would you want to offer a lower price elsewhere? The appeal to a lower cut to you is higher revenue, not equivalent revenue.
Or blizzard, riot or epic. All of which are perfectly successful without using steam.
Communication between valve and publishers about TOS violations is only an issue if it’s an anticompetitive clause.
If publishers want to offer lower prices, they can use a different storefront like the others. If they can’t make sufficient revenue without valves advertisement and distribution network, then maybe the service is worth the price valve charges for it.
Valve has done nothing to stop consumers from using other stores, so I’m not particularly sympathetic when the stores are upset about consumer choice.
Price fixing is, as your highlighted bit says, a conspiracy to not compete on prices. Valve isn’t conspiring with their competition to fix prices, nor does valve even set the price.
The lawsuit alleges that it’s anticompetitive, not price fixing.
I personally don’t think it’s anticompetitive , given the number of popular games that don’t use steam. I just think that epic has a worse product, which isn’t valves fault.
That’s not why epic has to pay for exclusives. They have to pay to cover the income gap developers would face from eschewing the better store.
Publishers are free to skip using steam and pass along their savings, but they invariably don’t. They just pocket the difference.
That epic game store exists, takes a lower cut and gives away free stuff, and still struggles to be viable is an indicator that valve isn’t be anticompetitive.
It’s not illegal to have a better product, only to use your market position to keep other products from trying to compete.
It’s one thing to be generally against big companies, and another to be against one in favor of another, when the stakes are “which company keeps money”.
“In general, your GOG account and GOG content is not transferable. However, if you can obtain a copy of a court order that specifically entitles someone to your GOG personal account, the digital content attached to it taking into account the EULAs of specific games within it, and that specifically refers to your GOG username or at least email address used to create such an account, we’d do our best to make it happen. We’re willing to handle such a situation and preserve your GOG library—but currently we can only do it with the help of the justice system.”
That’s a very fancy way of saying “we’ll comply with a court order”, which is what any business would do.
This is marketing fluff. DRM free is good enough reason to like them without framing them as fixing literally every problem with steam.
These articles are basically just advertising for GoG.
They have the same issues as steam does regarding only selling licenses, or not having inheritable or transferable accounts.
DRM free is great, but as a service they aren’t fundamentally different from steam. They just like to market themselves like they are.
That is a good point.
On the flip side, they’re not largely selling something that has any physical finiteness to it anymore, and the sales volumes have increased drastically, resulting in significantly higher profits despite a smaller inflation adjusted unit cost.
The cost of a good decreasing as an industry matures feels right. Jello cost 23¢ a box in 1940. Adjusted for inflation it should cost $5.17 a box now, but it’s only $1.59.
When there’s 2 games to buy, they can be justifiably more expensive than when there’s a massive surplus.
The games are different, but it’s not like consumers can’t find a different one they’ll also enjoy if the first one they look at is too expensive.
Inflation has made $60 less valuable, but they’re not selling to the same market that they were 30 years ago either.
It’s hard to use inflation to justify raising prices or adding exploitative features when you’re already seeing higher inflation adjusted profits due to a larger more accessible market, lower risk due to reduced publishing overhead, and more options for consumers, which would be expected to bring prices down.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution
Hardly qualifies as “sending your data to advertisers”.
CEOs of companies that are adjacent to technology desperately want to ensure that their company isn’t seen as “outdated”, almost more than they want to actually not be outdated.
So when a technology comes that everyone in tech leadership is saying is the bestest, they want to make sure everyone knows they’re totally with it, whatever the cool kids are talking about.
Hype train goes chugga chugga.
As the hype train slows, they still need to be onboard, but they set expectations based on what their people are actually telling them.
So this is the CEO yelling to do something, and then the news slowly percolating back from the tech people that they can, but only a handful of projects can do so in a way that makes sense, has impact, and doesn’t disrupt a timeline or budget in a way that requires shareholder disclosure.
I just learned about some of the additional context from another comment, so it definitely might not be part of this branch in the narrative. Having spent at least a little time and energy developing the weapon, they’re not gonna just waste it, and having filled out the budget paperwork for a charity donation, it’s was also going to happen one way or another.
It’s not bad or anything, it’s just how you tell a story involving unpredictable interactions, “being a business that has a budget and employee salaries”, and also the PR 101 lesson of “never withhold charity”.
My bet, given how you budget for this type of PR stuff, is that it was basically the players picking the story that got told while they got a new weapon and a charity donation happened. Like if the players hadn’t chosen to do so, there would have been some contrivance for someone certainly has to save the children. Since they saved them, now the children will get together and give you this thank you gift, or something.
Illusion of choice, but not in a bad way.
They know what they’re trying to do, which is to bait people into spending money on their platform so they can have revenue numbers to show developers to get them to release on their platform to get people to want to spend money with them without bait.
Taking the bait but not getting caught in the trap isn’t quite pulling one over on them, but it’s also not what they were hoping for, so it’s not not taking advantage.
I don’t know what to tell you beyond “in the US, not all licenses are transferable”. Different countries have different laws.
It’s a pretty well trod area of law, so it’s not really contentious that it’s a legal license term in the US.
https://www.shadesofgraylaw.com/2009/12/14/cant-transfer-this/ is an example. It’s less tested for consumers.
The lawyers are definitely there to protect the company. No lawyer is ever there to follow the intent of the law, because it’s the letter that matters in almost every circumstance.
Knowingly adding an illegal term to the terms of the agreement is a great way to not only fail to protect the company, because the entire thing might get tossed out, but to risk professional consequences.
Even the Microsoft terms of service say “non-transferable unless you’re in Germany or other EU jurisdiction where such clauses are unenforceable”.
I’m sure someone will challenge it in the EU then at some point.
In the US not all licenses are transferable, and that includes things like “accounts”.
Valve and gog have the same policy. I’m fairly confident that both of them didn’t decide to violate the law in the same way that’s also consistent with how other digital licensing arrangements work without consulting with some lawyers on their user agreements.
That was very well explained. :)
I really think it’s a case of valve being explicit (no, your uncle can’t will you his steam collection), and gog having the same policy but looking for the closest way to say “yes” to avoid falling into the same PR trouble.
“No, access is lost when you die” is a valve support person giving a direct response to an individuals question.
“Yes, if we are given no legal choice” is a gog PR person answering a reporter to sound as good as possible.
It’s one of the better known downsides of digital media, so this whole thing feels a little… Much ado about nothing new.
A probate court validating a will isn’t a court order is the thing.
For both companies, they agreed to provide you access to the titles in exchange for money. You can’t generally will a service to someone else.
It’s why things like bank accounts get crazy weird with estates (weird for anyone other than a banker or lawyer). We’ve had a very long time to work out how we handle it. The money in the account is an asset owned by the estate. It’s a “thing” that you can will. The account itself is owned by the estate, but it can’t be willed because it’s an agreement between the bank and the deceased.
When the estate is being handled, only the person managing it can access the bank account, and then they move the money to the accounts of the person who gets the money, even if it’s at the same bank.
Games in your game library aren’t assets like money is. They’re non-transferable licenses. A physical disk is an asset.
We give you and other GOG users the personal right (known legally as a ‘license’) to use GOG services and to download, access and/or stream (depending on the content) and use GOG content. This license is for your personal use. We can stop or suspend this license in some situations, which are explained later on.
https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/212632089-GOG-User-Agreement?product=gog
Their user agreement is particularly approachable, and includes nice explanations next to the sections.
This is whole thing is really a case of valve being very explicit about a significant drawback of digital assets to avoid confusion (their support has clearly had to address this situation before 😔). Gog is answering a press question being asked in response to the explicit reply from valve, so of course they’re going to avoid saying “our policy is the same”.
If it were routinely transferable via normal estate transfer, they wouldn’t need to specify the need for a court order, or that the installers are drm free so they couldn’t revoke access. If it went to an estate, the account would transfer automatically with the estate like every other tangible good.
https://respawnfirst.com/what-happens-to-your-gog-account-if-you-die-gog-confirms-policy/
Their full statement is really just that they’ll comply with a court order specifically relating to the library, less a general estate settlement.
In general, your GOG account and GOG content is not transferable. However, if you can obtain a copy of a court order that specifically entitles someone to your GOG personal account… we’ll do our best to make it happen.
This is really just a more casual phrasing of valves policy.
Steam accounts and games are non-transferable. Steam support can’t provide someone else with access to the account or merge its contents with another account. Your Steam account cannot be transferred via a will.
It’s not like valve is going to ignore a court order either.
Licences are different than physical goods.
With a physical good you’re transferring ownership of that “thing”, and the new owner can do as they like, except for the exceptions made for copyright.
With a licensed thing, it’s closer to a rental. Just because you rented the tool doesn’t mean you can sell it, and it doesn’t mean that the rental company is obligated to let your next of kin keep using it.
This goes double for things like digital media, because the rental company is also the one who has actual possession of the thing. They’re not taking anything, they’re just not giving someone they never did business with access to it.
Yup. It’s why they’re unlikely to get conversions, but they might get people to do both.
Consoles compete with PC gaming, but they’re not substitutes. The best they can hope for is people who are relatively indifferent to the advantages a PC has being persuaded by the console advantages, or people who are okay with just having both picking a PS5 over an Xbox or Nintendo.
For the latter, I think they’d be better served looking for a way to do “but it in one, play it in both” type deals, since that makes the ambivalent people more likely to default to PlayStation, since they still get PC, and the “both” people are more likely to buy sooner, since waiting doesn’t get them anything.
I feel like the better thing to compete on is “plug it in and it works”, “easier to play on your couch and TV with a controller than a PC” and various comparisons to the other consoles.
Other than setup and ease of couch gaming, PC has them beat hands down. And it’s only very slightly easier in those dimensions too.
I could see a federated recommendation engine/ranking system/the social parts of game ownership, but I just don’t see it panning out for the actual commerce part.
Those parts benefit from being able to control your own data and who it’s shared with. I don’t think there’s a reasonable way to federate giving a specific individual money and them authorizing you to download or access a resource they control.
Well, I don’t think they’re interested in selling directly. There’s a lot of overhead in handling credit card payments and dealing with the jurisdictional issues of sales tax, currency conversion, and regional age and content restrictions.
Your notion sounds perfectly lovely from the consumer side, but from the creator side it’s not much different from not using the system at all.
It would be!
The big issue would be getting game developers onboard. The service valve provides is both to developers and to consumers.
The appeal to developers is that they can toss the game on steam and valve will manage putting it in front of players and getting them to buy it, and all the associated payment processing that entails.
Developers like steam because it has all the users and does a good job of “based on your games, buy these too”.
Users like it because it has all the games, installation is inevitably trivial, and it does a good job offering them games they could plausibly like, often on sale, and there’s a feeling of platform security: valve won’t screw you over.
Any new distribution system will have a tough time breaking in. Just look at the difficulties epic has had despite giving away games constantly and offering extremely generous developer revenue shares.
Valve aimed to make steam $30-60 dollars more convenient than piracy, and that seems to extend to other forms of free as well.
First step is figuring out secure decentralized credit card payments. 😊
The only way hiring people will help you develop faster is if either:
- ramp up time is insignificant compared to project time and you don’t hire so many you hit communication overhead.
- you’re hiring people to do all the other stuff the people working on the project were also doing. I don’t think game devs typically have four systems in the maintenance lifecycle while they also develop new stuff, so that means you’re hiring a few IT folks to wrangle the weird office issues programmers wander off and deal with, a sysadmin, and like, 45 lunch delivery people.
I’ve had the first one work once, when we had a year+ project timeline. Hired one person, took them a week to get started, a month to be properly contributing and maybe another to be up to speed. We were a four person team, so not much overhead.
The second one is the dream of every manager who finds themselves with a contractor budget. I have yet to see it work the way they want. The only way I’ve seen it work is when you tell an established team that some other teams maintenance project is now their maintenance project, and eat the sharp increase in timelines for that maintenance work.
Eeeeh, at least then there would theoretically be public accountability. The FCC has limited censorship power that they’re generally unobjectionable with.
I’m honestly more concerned with the censorship from private enterprises than with government consorship currently. Less accountability and less recourse.
It also really only becomes censorship if the rating system is used to prohibit speech. If we instead made it more like the nutritional guidelines on food it could instead give more of a content breakdown than setting an arbitrary age.