The company’s dedication to retro authenticity goes far beyond creating desirable gaming hardware.
Sure, Analogue also caters to scalpers, to a point.
Somewhat /s, I guess?
I love my Analogue Pocket, which I’ve had for a little over a year, and Dock, which I’ve gotten maybe a week ago but has already surpassed my (fairly mild) expectations. I’ve also had a Super Nt for over a year and have a pre-order in for the Duo, so I tend to appreciate what Analogue comes out with, but their recent strategy with limited edition Pockets feels a bit ill-intentioned.
They had seemingly finally caught up to production issues and were able to deliver everyone’s orders towards the end of August and suddenly made both regular editions of the Pocket unavailable to then “drop” limited editions a few weeks later.
Those are once again hard to get, unsurprisingly slightly more expensive than the “regular” variant and generate a significant amount of demand for very limited quantities.
I might be reading too much into it, but it feels like they’re still trying to cultivate a constant feeling of FOMO and/or limited supply around the Pocket, all the while being finally able to catch up with demand (I fully understand production was not at scale compared to how much demand there was for it back in 2021/2022).
For anyone unaware, you can get a Slate kit for the GBA SP for about $100 less (provided you have an SP lying around), and it can play GBA, GBC, and original Gameboy carts. If all you’re looking for is the form factor and general retro gaming, there’s other options out there.
Yeah, I see them as the Teenage Engineering for retro hw. They both have an Apple flavor to them: create a unique, highly polished designed, and use scarcity to sell the product.
As a small batch hw company, that’s definitely the safer route to go, vs over-producing your niche product and then not being able to sell them all.
They let you get in line with a very clear delivery date when they can't meet demand, compared to basically everyone else who just has stock drops on and off.
I’m thinking apple from 15 years ago when they were first establishing this marketing strategy. The first few iphones were hard to get your hands on at launch, which is why people started lining up.
These days Apple has their manufacturing pipeline down and can accurately estimate, and mass produce to meet demand. Analogue and TE will probably never have enough demand to justify mass production of any of their products. So it behooves them to err on the side of scarcity.
The geoblocking is in place to prevent people from buying keys in one (cheap) region and activating them in another (more expensive) one. It’s about both, you dolt.
The EU has very clear law on digital ownership. It’s the same reason if you buy a PC with Windows installed in the EU, you have the right to take that Windows install and put it on another PC, regardless of if it’s OEM or not. This hasn’t prevented Microsoft from doing regional pricing for Windows and if this affects Steam’s pricing that’s on Valve.
The original charges centered around activation keys. The commission said Valve and five publishers (Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax) agreed to use geo-blocking so that activation keys sold in some countries — like Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary and Latvia — would not work in other member states. That would prevent someone in, say, Germany buying a cheaper key in Latvia, where prices are lower.
Valve said that the charges didn't pertain to PC games sold on Steam, but that it was accused of locking keys to particular territories at the request of publishers
It’s not like Valve played no role in this.
Games can be sold on other places besides the Steam store. This still negatively impacts consumers.
That sounds like a separate thing entirely. I could be wrong, but I don’t think Valve has any say in how keys not sold through the Steam storefront are resold, so supposedly the lawsuit should target whoever is distributing keys in that way. AFAIK, Steam only offers two ways to buy a game–buy the game for yourself and buy as a gift–and in neither case does Steam offer the keys directly to users.
And then there’s this from the article:
In a statement back in 2021, Valve said that the charges didn’t pertain to PC games sold on Steam, but that it was accused of locking keys to particular territories at the request of publishers. It added that it turned off region locks for most cases (other than local laws) in 2015 because of the EU’s concerns.
So AFAIK Valve isn’t distributing resellable keys that are region locked, it’s region-locking at the point of purchase and allowing developers to request region-locked keys. So it would be on publishers to abide by EU laws, no?
The again, I don’t live in the EU, nor have I ever bought a physical Steam key (not sure if Valve directly offers that in any way).
And more importantly no business is going to charge everyone the low price instead of charging everyone the high price if forced to pick one or the other.
Sure, in the same way it’s the government’s “fault” for removing your option to, say, run a protection racket, or agree to a contract of indentured servitude, or sell baby formula with melamine in it. There are lots of abusive or exploitative business models that the government removes your option to engage in! And the government is right to do it.
Offering those less capable of paying, a reduced price isn’t abusive or exploitative.
There is a huge difference between the things you’ve mentioned and this. You’re being intentionally dishonest at this point and there’s no further point in this discussion.
The cost of producing something doesn’t change depending on who you sell it to. Charging anything beyond cost + some reasonable profit margin is unethical profiteering.
Alternative title: Unity about to get sued into settlement or bankruptcy due to legal fees by Nintendo, Sony, and a bunch of others over unilaterally announced installation fee.
I’m surprised it’s not per-seat or per-user. Not like the dev is getting more money if the user re-installs the game. Also not a fan of it being monthly. I get why you would charge twice if the user installs it twice since you may not be able to track concurrent installs without DRM, but that should only apply if you choose a per-install licence. Per-install also opens you up to malicious users installing/uninstalling to make you pay.
There should be a per-seat/per-user perpetual price if the dev never updates the Unity engine itself. I get charging per-seat/per-user monthly if they devs are pulling in new versions, but that should stop if you cease updating.
WTF. Luckily it isn’t an issue for me right now, but I guess I won’t be using Unity in future like I once thought I might.
I couldn’t find it in the article, but I assume this is only going forward and not somehow retroactive? Lots of amazing indie titles I’ve played run on Unity.
engadget.com
Najnowsze