It says Valve “forces” game publishers to sign up to so-called price parity obligations, preventing titles being sold at cheaper prices on rival platforms.
Ms Shotbolt says this has enabled Steam to charge an “excessive commission of up to 30%”, making UK consumers pay too much for purchasing PC games and add-on content.
This is actually the norm on a lot of platforms unfortunately. Apple. Google Play. Not at all unique to Valve.
Just because it’s the norm doesn’t mean it’s not excessive. In contrast, Apple’s implementation of a 30% cut is even worse, since with an iPhone you can’t just install an app from another source (and even when you can in the case of the EU, there are recurring costs for doing so). Since Steam accounts for the majority of PC video game sales, with AAA titles only not releasing on it when they have a clear financial motive not to, Valve’s use of a price parity clause effectively makes it the arbiter of what the industry standard markup on PC should be.
That 30% cut is also done on the Xbox and Playstation stores. I would assume Nintendo does the same thing.
It also sounds like Valve’s price parity agreement only applies to Steam keys. So, if a developer or publisher wanted to provide the game through their own storefront or on another third-party platform then they could charge whatever they wanted.
As for the 30% cut being excessive, I don’t know if it is or not, but storing data at the scale that Valve does costs a lot of money, not to mention the costs associated with ensuring the data’s integrity and distributing the data to their users all over the world at reasonable speeds. In all likelihood they are running multiple data centers on multiple continents with 100s of petabytes of storage each with some extremely high speed networking within the individual data centers, between the data centers, and out to the wider internet. Data hosting, especially for global availability, is damn expensive.
As I mentioned in another thread, if their running costs were close to the revenues they make then their owner wouldn’t be a multiple yachts owning billionaire.
Their cut is a %, which means that as games become more expensive they make more money. But their running costs actually go down as they improve their tech and code.
An internal memo was made public and they make more revenue per employee than Microsoft.
We’re overpaying for games but people just got used to it.
Forcing you to sell at the same price as on steam when customers will be downloading from steam servers anyway is not sketchy but very fair.
As a developer you could set the game price on steam to a high number and sell keys on your own site for cheaper. Anyone who buys a key then used steam resources to download it. The dev keeps the 30% since its not a sale through steam. Yeah id like free file hosting with terabytes of bandwidth too please.
If you sell the game yourself and provide the files, you can set lower prices. This is fair and valve doesn’t restrict that.
There was a indie dev, the Spiderweb games guy, who refused to use Steam for years and he sold his games on his website. I think it was from like 2008 all the way to 2022. Refused to give Valve a cut.
Then he finally released it on Steam and he wrote a blog post how his niche games sold extremely well and regrets leaving so much money on the table for years.
Instead of ending it, just address the problem. I’m no city designer, but seems like a button triggering a flashing light or something might be enough. It also seems like bikers would be pretty tuned into people crossing at the stops already.
The only difference I see is instead of crossing a highspeed car lane, one would cross a slow speed cycling lane designed with the intent to protect individuals on bicycles.
Cyclists travel at speeds they can easily slow down or stop if some blind person walks into the lane, sighted people do it all the time anyway. The typical long sight lines give plenty of time for a cyclist to spot someone sporting a red and white cane.
“We don’t have any evidence at this time that there is an injury collision problem."
I had no idea we could image exoplanets at a resolution high enough to be able to detect something like this, huh (and no I don’t mean the artist rendering)
I assume we can’t actually resolve spatial detail on the planet, so the effect must have been temporal. Would it have been something like a spike moving through the visible spectrum as the planet transits its star?
Czytałem, że jeszcze przed otruciem powiedział w wywiadzie dla Spiegla, że ma dokładnie takie same poglądy z jakimi wszedł w politykę. To maksymalnie 4-5 lat temu. Później było otrucie i więzienie.
A jakie to poglądy? Za wielką silną Rosją, za aneksją Krymu, za inwazją na Gruzję, za dostępem do broni. Przeciw imigrantom, przeciw LGBT. Współpracował też z niektórymi oligarchami. Po prostu chciał obalić Putina bo uważał go za skorumpowaną władzę, niewiele jednak różniły się ich poglądy. Taka Konfederacja kontra PiS, w bardzo ubogim ale obrazowym przełożeniu.
Czy podczas uwięzienia mógł powiedzieć, że ma inne poglądy? Mógł. Był mocno na ustach świata, kolejny więzień polityczny w Rosji, byłoby bardzo głupio gdyby wyszło, że np. na inwazję na Ukrainę ma takie same poglądy jak Putin. Ale czy Krzysiu Bosak również nie wygładził swojego języka? Albo Romek Giertych? Ale czy ktokolwiek z nich faktycznie zmienił swoje poglądy?
Nie wierzę, że muszę jednak czuję, że powinienem tylko doprecyzować: tak, Putin jest zbrodniarzem który zabija i więzi swoich przeciwników politycznych. Po prostu nie wybielajmy Nawalnego. Był zwykłym naciolem a nie wielkim opozycjonistą, wspaniałym demokratą i ostatnią nadzieją na zmianę w Rosji. Bo takie komentarze się ostatnio pojawiają.
In case anyone wasn't aware, nearly all space photos that you've ever seen have had their colours tweaked. It's standard practice in space photography. Nebulae and galaxies and planets aren't as colourful as they appear in photos. They do it either to make the features more obvious for study, or just to make them pop more to drum up interest in space exploration. Nothing wrong with it, just be aware that what you see isn't reality but an interpretation.
Really though, I don’t know why it never crossed my mind that the picture of Neptune was so… saturated. It’ll take a little bit to reconcile this new perspective of a “light bluish-green” Neptune. It’s just so jarring to alter a belief held since my childhood.
bbc.com
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