PS5 game on sale did cost 2 EUR less than the regular price on Steam. I don’t think Steam overcharges me. It’s not like the game is cheaper somewhere else on PC either: …epicgames.com/…/banishers-ghosts-of-new-eden-f9e… (50 EUR)
Yes, but they sue Steam that has competitors selling games for the same price instead of literal monopolies. Even Apple was forced to open up to other app stores.
This lawsuit build on a false premise. Steam doesnt have a price parity clause for other stores. What this lawsuit alleges applies to Steam keys that the developer generates through Steam. If the developer lists those keys for sale at a price lower than what the game is listed for on Steam, then the price of the Steam Store purchase price must match it, so that people visiting the store page on Steam get the same discount. It doesn’t matter if you list your game on GOG and discount it there.
Steam is a service that costs money to keep running - lot’s of money actually in their scale. When you sell a Steam key outside of Steam, they don’t get their cut which goes toward running costs and whatnot. It doesn’t of course matter if it’s just some random few keys but if almost all devs started to do that, it could cause some serious funding problems to Valve. That could then lead to reduced service levels of Steam and that would hurt their customers - the players - the most.
So while it’s not a big problem currently, it could be if it wasn’t prevented properly in contractual level. People who think that is an unfair clause don’t probably understand what it actually takes to run a service like Steam or they are straight competitors trying to run them out of business in any way imaginable.
E: And actually if Steam still allows selling the Steam keys in external services but only requires the price to match the price in Steam, it’s already a quite charitable policy. I guess they count on not too many people buying the key externally for the same price than in Steam store.
Steam currently allows you to generate keys and sell them for free, only stipulating that they must be sold for the same price as on steam.
Let’s say they are told that stipulation can’t be enforced.
Valve, will probably go with 1 of 2 options.
1 - you can no longer generate keys. So all the great key sites(GMG, Fanatical and so on) no longer exist, because no steam keys.
2 - Valve charge an upfront fee for keys generated. Now smaller pmdevs and publishers can no longer supply keys to sites, because they can’t afford the upfront costs.
What incentive does valve have to continue offering this free service? If it can be exploited for the detriment of steam, they will stop providing it.
Let me try and understand this by altering the product.
Valve now produces cars and the devs are people who make these cars inside factories. Same as is currently the case, these employees get cars cheaper and are asked to not undercut the seller by holding onto the cars for a certain amount of time before selling them used.
It does make sense for me to view it that way. One could argue that the couple cars that get sold by employees doesnt do anything to hurt the brand and that pressuring them to keep the price high manipulates the market.
Also, doesnt the work of steam accumulate to hosting mirrors of a game and hosting a large website they get billions in revenue for?
This analogy is so bad, it is not even close to what is happening.
I will try and adapt to cars for you(I dont know why), but this is just really really bad.
Say you have designed a car, you can produce them on a very small scale, but you have come to valve(they make cars now) to mass produce. They do so, for a 30% cut(that reduces the more they sell) for everything they sell from their direct sales at the price you have set. There is no material costs or labour costs, just that cut of the price you have set.
Now valve have a sales page and are selling, and you decide that actually I would like more people to see the car, and so you consider selling it at other dealers. Valve says, sure, you can even have the cars for free from us(no 30% cut) and you can have basically an unlimited supply of free fully built cars to sell else where. We only ask that you sell the car at the same price you have set with us if you are selling a car we made.
You want to go sell it new cheaper? You are more than welcome too, but you cant sell the car we produced.
Such a bad analogy, but that is closer to what is actually happening.
First of all, people sometimes use analogies that dont make sense to you. No need to be a dick about it. You could just make a better example.
Staying with cars, I see my mistake. Valve is not producing the cars in this example, valve is doing the car sales for the (small) manufacturer. They dont provide any part of the car, only the exposure and surrounding community. Its not nothing but has zero to do with the product.
What they are asking is „you can sell cars from our showroom, just dont sell them for cheaper than we do“. Which does make sense.
Seems like that’d be hard to track with so many stores selling steam keys just looking at isthereanydeals.
Weird thing is it is the publishers themselves that are able to set the price so they are choosing not to put the game on sale same as it is elsewhere. Probably to not devalue the price of their game like the Nintendo strategy when it comes to certain storefronts.
They don’t really though. They’re talking about selling steam keys in a different platform, not selling the game on a different platform (like Epic Games for instance). You can sell the game for cheaper on Epic or GOG if you want to.
When new video game stores were opening that charged much lower commissions than Valve, I decided that I would provide my game “Overgrowth” at a lower price to take advantage of the lower commission rates. I intended to write a blog post about the results. But when I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM.
They don’t. The thing most people who have never published a game on steam don’t know is that valve gives you infinite steam keys (for free) that you can give or sell as you wish. This is to allow studios/publishers to give keys to whoever they want, and also allows them to sell those keys on their own or third-party websites. This is a HUGE deal, Valve is letting studios/publishers sell games on a separate site without charging anything while hosting the game themselves. The only condition to those keys is that they can’t be sold cheaper than on Steam.
That’s a completely different thing from what you’re claiming. This means that games can be cheaper on GoG, Epic, etc as long as they don’t give you a steam key together (which they could, for free).
I dunno, I’m someone who was fine with the changes to combat introduced in Doom Eternal, but was honestly really turned off by how much id was kinda huffing their own farts with the story. The first game had Doomguy punch any attempts at exposition. The second turned Hayden into an Angel, the AI friend into God, the demons are extraplanar aliens that are being used for energy by the angels, and now the Doom Slayer is some destined force of cosmic balance. The little bits were of larger lore were kinda funny in the first game, it became flanderized in the second, and now for a prequel I’m worried id’s managed to fit their entire head up their own ass trying to convince everyone how cool their space marine is.
Yeah, the exposition was part of what made DE weaker to me. Too much plot lead to losing the plot. The gameplay was fun enough overall, and I enjoyed a lot of the changes. But it was also too fuckin much keyboard ballet and pattern recognition for my tastes. If I want to kill something in a way that’s not the prescribed way, I want to be able to do that. But it became a formula and that’s not a playstyle I like because it bores me. It becomes math homework. Couple that formulaic approach with the fuckin massive swarms of unrelenting enemies and you end up having to fight like a robot. I preferred the 2016 mantra of fight like hell.
God, yes, I tried to get into the game twice and both times I bounced off right around the part where you go from Hell on Earth to a fucking high fantasy castle on some random planet. I’ll just replay Doom 2016 if I want to shoot some demons.
What I didn’t like about Eternal was being forced to use specific weapons to kill certain enemies. For me this kind of shooters are all about use “the right tool for the job”. If I fancy using the two barrels shotgun from start to finish, just let me do so.
For me Doom 2016 was a hugely more enjoyable experience than Eternal. 2016 is arguably one of the greatest linear single player shooters ever made. Eternal felt like a chore once you had all the tools unlocked and I lost interest shortly after. I could have lowered the difficulty so weapon selection didn’t matter, but that was clearly not the design intent.
Ultrakill does the “swap between weapons quickly for interesting combos” much better IMO – it’s not necessary but it’s a value add and it’s super fun to pull off.
I lowered the difficulty, and I were able to kill bigger enemies with the weapon of my choice. But they became bullet sponges. There’s no fun in that. I too prefer 2016, I like my shotgun.
Sounds more like an “easy mode” thing. Have certain enemies immune to certain guns on the harder difficulties. Want to just use the shotgun? Play easy mode. Want to be more strategic? Play a harder difficulty.
Okay, so while you can’t literally use nothing but the SSG for the entirety of Doom II (especially since you don’t get it until MAP02), you can comfortably use it at least 90% of the time on UV. Shells are plentiful throughout the game.
That isn’t the point. The point is you shouldn’t feel shoehorned into playing a specific intended route. Doom is about turning off your brain and slaying.
I gotta keep it real with you: Nothing about the trailer looks interesting to me. My viewpoints on Doom are pretty colored due to Mick Gordon’s claims and the poor combat and traversal loops in Eternal.
Looking at the trailer and reading the article, it’s clear they’re going back to the doom 1 roots with the way the projectiles feel like it’s a 2D top down shooter.
That’s the way it’s supposed to feel imo, and I dig the direction they’re heading and the combat definitely felt like oldschool 2D top down shooters were supposed to feel: Dodge everything, never stop firing.
Yeah that feeling of spacial awareness as you’re kiting around groups of enemies. Helps to have simple, easily identifiable level geometry for that matter.
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Aktywne