DO NOT SUPPORT THIS AS A CONSUMER
This is something travel agent websites do too.
If you’re logged out, they’ll show you a price that’s really attractive. But if you log in with an account that’s got some history, they’ll suddenly say that price is no longer available now you need to pay the higher price.
Agoda.com I’m looking at you
I’m the sort of person that likes proof before I decide to be angry about corporate gouging. So the first thing I did was to look for other sources that discuss this. Vice is reporting on this screenshot and the OG reddit post, there have been no comments from Sony. Insider Gaming is also reporting on this screenshot and OG reddit thread, in addition to discussing an earlier instance where someone reported going onto their browser to look up Astro Bot on the PlayStation Store while being signed out. It was $59.99. when signed in, it appeared as $44.99. Sony likes to call this bullshit dynamic pricing. This means that as you play, Sony is harvesting data about what games you play, how long you play the games in question, along with data in your library which gets fed into an algorithm to determine what price you should pay. This garbage is fucking reprehensible. This is the type of stuff that made me drop consoles and turn to the loving embrace of PC gaming. If I saw shit like this via my digital distributor, I would absolutely stop using them and look for other ways to legally purchase the game, or turn to piracy.
The future we are headed towards if we don’t start caring about privacy and where we hand out our data.
Obviously Playstation has their own data, but stuff like this is gonna start being way more obvious in other places because they can so easily buy data on you through data brokers.
Websites you visit saying they share your data? Yes they sell it and it’s directly going to have an effect on other parts of your life just like this.
So you won’t just “pay with your data”, you’ll pay with your money too in a less direct way (prices on other sites shooting up because x website sold your data to y and they know you need this product so they price gouge you).
Not only will this occur for gaming stores or web shops, it can become a thing in banking (maybe they give you a worse interest rate on a loan, etc) and worse.
Get more active, get other people active too, and teach them the importance of it
Credit scores are already how banks discriminate. That system is already in place.
True, but that won’t stop them from acquiring more data so they can squeeze more out of you.
Anything to make them more.
Maybe my examples would’ve been better for other industries, but yeah, I think this will happen everywhere if we don’t stop it.
Been sailing recently?
Have your wife buy it and gift it to you.
But yes, this sort of price discrimination is weird and deadly for any sort of free market.
arr 🏴☠️🦜
Determination to install Linux on ps increases.
Instructions too complicated. Ended up with OtherOS on PS3
Wow, this is pretty dystopian, but I guess it’s just the natural extension of supply and demand applied to the individual. Free market at its finest… The next step is to use your demographic data in calculating the price, like insurance companies already do.
So instead of taxing the rich we just let corporations scam extra money off them? Thanks I hate it.
I think Elmo’s gonna notice if his Hentai Games suddenly cost 10 Million Dollars.
It’s not just the rich that get targeted by this. The goal is to see what price each individual will tolerate. The rich may tolerate higher prices, but the end goal is closing sales that otherwise would have been missed. Because in the digital world where things like shipping expenses aren’t a thing, any sale (even heavily discounted) is better than no sale. Which means even the poor spend more money, because it’s something they wouldn’t have purchased otherwise.
And it unfairly impacts the poor, who have less disposable income to throw around, and who are more adversely impacted by surprise expenses. Because $40 isn’t a big difference for a rich person, but $20 could be the difference in whether or not a poor person is able to eat in two or three weeks (after the refund period has closed).
And then I see people complaining about Steam having so much of the market cornered. They 👏 don’t 👏 pull 👏 shit 👏 like 👏 this
I’ll still complain about them having the market cornered. Sure, right now they mostly only do things I agree with. If things change though we’re fucked, and there’s nothing we can do about it. If there’s competition in the market then we can choose to support whoever is doing things right (like Valve currently) and the others will be forced to follow.
What do you call the business strategy where you just aren’t a huge assholes to your customers to milk maximum profit and your competition keeps shooting itself in the foot?
Pre 1980s capitalism beating its braindead son with a belt? Like that’s the best terminology I can think of. Maybe general wait and see versus the landmine runners IDK.
👏 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?
Newell has supposedly said that if ever there were to be a sea change where steam would have to shut down people’s access to games they’ve purchased, he would release code to turn off the ‘check’ for whether you’ve bought the game on steam, thus allowing you to play games without the ‘DRM’ of being online with steam. I wonder if he would do the same if he thought that would be the direction things were going in the event of his death.
I hope he and Linus torvalds both announce successors. Like a sort of "if my product fails you, this person follows my steps
Both. Steam is already the market leader in its industry. You just keep doing what you’re doing and you win.
Microsoft were already the dominant operating system in computing. Now they’re losing market share due to frequent bad decision making.
All they had to do was keep windows ticking over. But instead they looked to milk more revenue from their customer base in the form of advertising and telemetry data. That’s because shareholders demand ever increasing profits. Enshittification is always the result of a company going public… Never a question of if, only when; as soon as the passion has died in ownership (usually due to sale or change of management), the only drive becomes profit; and the user experience is stripped to accommodate. The same will be true one day for steam, unfortunately.
but they have shareholders, that demand, with the backing of the law, that the company produces as much profit as possible, otherwise they can sue them
I keep seeing this notion that companies “must” maximize profit above all else “by law” repeated over and over again here and in other online spaces, and here’s where I’m finally getting off of my arse to draw the line in the sand.
You can file a derivative suit against a company of which you are shareholder for a multitude of reasons, but just “they didn’t make us enough money” is unlikely to be a successful one.
i don’t remember where i got it from, but what i remembered was that they can be sued if the shareholders feel that they avoid money-making opportunities
When
MiamotoIwata 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.Nintendo is gonna keep making the same 5 games with ever-improving graphics until they die. Doesn’t hurt that people are fine paying $80 every few years for the same game.
The Switch 2 is selling faster than the Switch 1 during it’s launch period. So Nintendo’s new leadership is not negatively affecting the company. Also even under Yamauchi and Iwata Nintendo never fixed drifting analogue sticks, so that is new leadership continuing the course.
Myamoto isn’t dead
When Miamoto died,
Myamoto isn’t dead
Dammit I was thinking of Iwata and didn’t check my tired thoughts and just dropped the most famous Nintendo name my brain came up with. Apologies.
Except you need to make even more money. You can’t do that by simply letting things continue as they are.
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.
I’m glad people use Playstation/Xbox/Epic, so Steam still has competition, but I’m also really glad I’m not using any other store
Long live Steam & GOG in their current moral states.
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.
it’s really undercutting the value that Valve provides developers who utilize steam for distribution
I think I’d actually disagree here. In a classical sense Valve offers no value to the product (game). They just own the digital marketplace. It’s like saying, “well, the Lord does maintain the roads and walls and the square, and he does a good job. He adds a lot of value for the craftsmen and peasants who use the roads and are protected by the walls.” But in the end, the Lord is still extracting a rent from the workers actually producing the goods.
That’s how taxes work, yes, and I consider them valuable. There’s a lot of work in actually deciding what work needs to be done, finding the people to do it, negotiating prices, things like that. So yes, I do think “the Lord” is adding a lot of value and making the whole operation possible in a way that probably wouldn’t work if you had everybody just trying to agree on how to spend the money and split the costs.
I will also point out Valve provides not just the platforms, but also some libraries for game development, including a networking library with NAT punchthrough (which is why on steam you can right-click a friend and join them, even on small indie games, without the game devs hosting their own servers for that) and a library for input handling (though less mandatory, but if used it makes input remapping in steam better integrated).
Another thing to note is that the value provided can be experienced more directly - if you want to try a great website/store that, to my understanding, doesn’t take any cut while providing hosting, try playing some games from itch. Depending on your gaming habits you might not notice much of a difference, and more of your money would go to the devs, but you might sorely miss some features like cloud saves, steam networking, steam input, proton, automatic delta/incremental updates.
I think you misunderstand me. I’m not saying valves infrastructure isn’t valuable, or what they offer to gamers isn’t good. Again, Steam is not a product to gamers. It’s a marketplace that charges rents to game devs. I’m saying it’s not value added to the product that is produced. The product that’s produced by the game dev is the same regardless of whether they put it on steam or not.
Most of your points are about how much value Steam offers to gamers in a colloquial sense. Of course, its a lot. But it’s not in an economic sense value added to the good produced. Valve taking a 1/3rd cut is more akin to an extractive feudal lord than a collaborator in the making of the good (the game) and sharing in the profits.
Okay.
So, host a game on your own website, with its own patching process, payment systems, and forum. See how long it takes you, and how many sales you get out of it.
Once you do that, you may start to realize where that 30% is going. Sure, once you have the game and are playing it, you can say, “gee, it’s weird that Valve took a 30% cut of this work”. But it’s like seeing a long list of credits at the end of a movie when you were only aware of the signature voice of the lead actor.
But it’s like seeing a long list of credits at the end of a movie when you were only aware of the signature voice of the lead actor.
It’s not like this, because most (not all) of those credits actually worked on the movie, itself. Their labor went into the thing that was produced in the end. I’m not arguing there’s no cost to distribution. It’s just not value-adding and so it ends up being extractive imo.
So, host a game on your own website, with its own patching process, payment systems, and forum. See how long it takes you, and how many sales you get out of it.
I’m also not trying to claim there’s no productive work involved with maintaining a distribution platform, or that they aren’t necessary. That’s one of the issues, they are necessary, and there is one big player, and anyone who wants to sell their good is beholden to them. Valve still has a feudal-lord-like position in relation to the people who actually make the games, themselves.
Edit: also, im sensing some indignation. hope i didn’t push your buttons or anything, just saying things as i see them and if you don’t see it that way, that’s fine.
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 :)
Ahh, I gotcha. Thanks for the clarification – I didn’t know you could be charged by bandwidth, but it makes sense. I always just think of paying for the cpu and ram and disk.
I’m inclined to agree with you. I’m sure many just chalk it up to the cost of doing business. But, like I mentioned, it seems there are at least some game devs unhappy about the position Valve maintains in the chain.
You’re drinking all the tech bro Kool-Aid that the lawyers and paid bots/shills have thrown out there on the internet. Valve has threatened the market dominance of large tech companies and there’s been a ton of negative press pushed for them lately.
There’s lots of platforms to release your game online Minecraft famously didn’t go on steam and it’s one of the largest games of all time.
You can self-publish as a solo Dev and make one of the largest games of all time without steam. Tell me how that’s a monopoly.
You got fortnite out here on the epic game store. Also one of the largest games of all time no steam, no valve. Tell me that’s a monopoly.
You’ve got itch.io, Gog, Microsoft game store, epic game store, and there’s always the option to skip the PC market and go straight to consoles if you wanted. You have choices as a developer. Steam is just simply the best fucking one.
Listen, I’d be happy to talk about my perspective more, but why would I when you begin your response with
You’re drinking all the tech bro Kool-Aid that the lawyers and paid bots/shills have thrown out there on the internet.
Just totally rude.
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 resent Nintendo so much because I know for a fact that if they just made a red clone of steam with Nintendo branding and put every possible Nintendo game ported to PC on it they would make so much God damn money it would cause some kind of gravitational money Singularity and destroy the world.
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
Fanboys like you are what drive me to bitch about steam. Steam is ok but the more people circle-jerk all over themselves about how amazing it is the more I hate it and them. It’s a service that lets you download an executable wrapped up in an application which feels like they took the worst possible parts of every generation of computing in the last 20 years. Its ridiculous to fanboi a downloader.
Edit: yes, saying anyone who doesn’t like steam is a paid agitator makes you a fanboi of the highest order.
And to respond to your deleted comment, although you’ve probably blocked me: saying anything you don’t like is “coming from reddit” is a bad argument and you should be ashamed.
I don’t think you came from Reddit. I think you came from TruthSocial.
Ok crisis actor
There I think I did it right
deleted by creator
Steam is my favorite monopoly. They are not perfect, and probably not good either. but they are the best
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I would say that I won’t buy it because of this. Let them know they lost a sale.
If you give them money they’ll just keep doing it in the background.
Microsoft is societal cancer.
This is Playstation…
Did he stutter
They’re still not technically wrong.
Plot twist: they are posting this in every thread, regardless of the topic
I’ll never forgive the Japanese.
My age is showing, every plastic box used to be a Nintendo now it’s an Xbox.
Of course, everything’s an Xbox!
what was your first console?
Sega master system.
He was just stating a fact 😅
Yes.
And I’ve seen “special for you price” on xbox as well.
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.
Or don’t get it at all, never played them or felt like it!
(Bad news: I grew up with Nintendo instead)
Naval aquisition.
