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- not just one country. 2) this is different because no one actually made anyone do that. That I know of, no company was going around threatening to cancel services if other companies didn’t stop using the term, and certainly no one large and critical. A social pressure to change a word is different from a financial pressure to remove a product.
No, it’s similar because it’s a business making a value judgement instead of a business judgement. It would be different if your exact argument hadn’t been used against those groups in the past.
I doubt we’ll see eye to eye as well. I’m not okay with discrimination and I don’t think the beliefs of corporations matter, even when they’re being judgey about sex stuff I don’t understand.
You should work on learning how to handle those feelings. Most people just ignore it when other people do stuff they think is gross if it’s not hurting anyone.
For example, I think egg salad is pretty gross. I manage this in my day to day life by “not buying egg salad”, and if I run into it I usually just “move along quickly”, or say “oh, no thank you”.
I doubt people are as pushy with furry porn as they are with egg salad, unless you and I live in shockingly different worlds.
🙄 On what grounds would doing so operationally impair the platform? Is it illegal? Does it prevent them from servicing other businesses in a timely fashion? Does it cost more money in a way that can’t be reflected in the service fee structure?
Explain to me what reason they would have for objecting that isn’t just a different way of phrasing “morality judgment” or “image management”.
Do you also think that a shipping company should be able to refuse to ship products from businesses they don’t approve of, even if it’s functionally identical to something else they would ship?
What about either of those companies refusing service to someone because of their sexual orientation or gender identity?
People used to say it’s bad business to service gays, blacks, Jews, Catholics, Hispanics and the Irish. At some point we decided that businesses need to shut the fuck up and just do business without judging, or else their service has no place in society.
The free market that businesses love so much exists entirely through the grace and in the service of society at large. If they fail to at least not harm society, why should society extend that courtesy to them?
why should they be forced to process payments that facilitate things against their beliefs?
You’ll excuse me for thinking this means you think corporate beliefs are more important than the social benefits of neutral financial institutions.
To answer your question again without assuming anything about your opinion: they should be forced to process payments because they don’t have beliefs, it’s better for society if financial institutions only look at the business relevant portions of a business, and a legal obligation is perfectly sufficient to protect their business interests in reputation management. All the same reasons we don’t let shipping companies refuse customers for morality reasons.
Because they’re a financial institution, not an individual. They don’t have beliefs.
Arguing that corporate “beliefs” (image management) and interests take priority over societal order is ridiculous.
We regulate banks and financial institutions all the time. We regulate businesses all the time.
They should suck it up and treat businesses with legal activities and proper tax documents as just another business. Kinda like how we have laws that say that public shipping companies need to generally treat all customers the same. It’s why they don’t typically ask what’s in the box aside from questions related to operational characteristics. Porn doesn’t spontaneously ignite and threaten an aircraft, but lithium batteries can.
It’s not even legal risk. It’s brand risk.
There’s a difference with cannabis shops because that’s actually still federally illegal. As such, the required business accounts and tax documents required to use a national payment processor are often not forthcoming. It’s a low level regulation that you can’t generally tell a federal bank you’d like an account to store the proceeds of a federal crime.
With porn, the legal standards and protections are pretty well established. As long as the company is in possession of the required tax documents and business accounts, there’s no legal risk beyond the standard due diligence they need to do for every customer. Visa isn’t generally liable if a tire shop is discovered to be breaking a non-financial law. What processors don’t want is to have their brand attached to something that they worry could make them look bad.
So?
It’s a game with a representation of something that can’t even happen. It doesn’t even get to the point where you could have a discussion about simulation creating a demand for real that some things have because it’s not even remotely realistic.
It’s not my cup of tea, but that just means I don’t look at it.
It’s because you think it’s icky and you don’t know how to handle those feelings, isn’t it?
Well, we’re discussing a lot of hypothetical things here.
I wasn’t referring to bees making games, but to bees making honey. It’s just something they do that we get value from without needing to persuade them. We exploit it and facilitate it but if we didn’t they would still make honey.
I don’t know that something has to be identical to humans to make fun games for us. I’ve regularly done fun and entertaining things for cats and dogs that I wouldn’t enjoy in the slightest.
If it’s less a question of comprehension or awareness as it is motivation. If we can make an AI feel motivated to do what we need, it doesn’t matter if it understands why it feels that motivation. There are humans who feel motivated to make games purely because they enjoy the process.
I’m not entirely sure what you’re talking about with the need for omniscient hardware and prison.
Eh, I really don’t agree that thinking about future rounds is even remotely like gambling.
It’s not the random chance that makes it gambling, it’s the wagering and possibility of a payoff.
No one would mistake vanilla solitaire for gambling even though it’s based on random factors and minimal strategy.
I think what you’re referring to as gambling tropes are more engagement tactics, which are often used by gambling apps but are fundamentally distinct.
Potentially. Since we don’t know how any of it works because it doesn’t exist, it’s entirely possible that intelligence requires sentience in order to be recognizable as what we would mean by “intelligence”.
If the AI considered the work trivial, or it could do it faster or more precisely than a human would also be reasons to desire one.
Alternatively, we could design them to just enjoy doing what we need. Knowing they were built to like a thing wouldn’t make them not like it. Food is tasty because to motivate me to get the energy I need to live, and knowing that doesn’t lessen my enjoyment.
I don’t know that I’d agree with the notion that games that are engaging need to be rated higher. Is there harm to playing one game a lot?
I’ve read books that were so engaging I kept reading long after I should have stopped for the night. The author very much intended for the book to be engaging and to hold my attention. Should we rate the book as more mature because I kept reading it?
I don’t think balatro is any more addictive than most other games, it just has a low barrier to starting and a quick turn around.
Ratings should be informative and harm based. “This game is full of violence” and “this game has gambling”. Factual.
A game being prone to being played alot isn’t factual, it’s just an observation that some people find it fun. Without an associated risk of harm you’re just putting a scary number on something because of your opinion about it.
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.
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”.