Wait, so you do have a Macbook. Maybe it's not M1, but if you enjoy that part of the ecosystem, you'll probably upgrade to one at some point. At which point, that gives you a "Mac copy" of the game too.
It's not a Mac OS copy and an iOS copy any more than I have a Steam Deck copy of a game and a desktop copy of a game. From what I can tell, it's the same thing. Obviously this is beneficial for Apple keeping you in their ecosystem, but this serves the same function. Quite frankly, I'm not sure why you'd have an iPhone if you don't have a Mac, but I know plenty of people do.
I think the Switch and the Steam Deck have shown that portable games are worth every bit as much as non-portable, but in both of these cases, they output easily to the larger experience at home. I think Apple is providing that too. $60 still makes sense to me, since you're always buying the MacOS version which includes a mobile copy, which you said was acceptable.
But you get it with no compromises on MacOS, so why would they discount the price there? This is buy once, play "anywhere" (anywhere that's good for Apple). You don't pay less for a game you only play on a Steam Deck either.
It didn't even occur to me that this was a result of the patch, but I did notice it start happening recently. When the patch rolled out, I was in a spot in the game where all of my things were taken from me anyway, so I guess I didn't notice it initially when it first started.
It's been a damn good summer for fighting games too, and arguably the best year for all of video games. I've still got probably 10 hours to go in Baldur's Gate 3, haven't touched Starfield or Phantom Liberty yet, and I'm also looking forward to Broken Roads. There's not enough time to get to all this good stuff, and there's still Wargroove 2 coming in a week and a half.
As for the long term, it plans to evaluate a new partner for matchmaking and to adjust Payday 3's reliance on online services. That could mean that Starbreeze will remove the game's always online requirement, but the statement does not explicitly say that will be the case.
When it doesn't explicitly say that will be the case, I doubt that it will be. But hopefully we're reaching the turning point where games will stop with the always-online nonsense.
I don't know where your information came from, but a lot of it is very wrong. I thought maybe you might be from some other country, but that would mean it's a country that uses dollars that are stronger than US dollars, which I don't think is a thing.
$50 was the standard set by PlayStation for its biggest games, which N64 couldn't match due to cartridge costs, but this standard carried over to the next generation and continued very, very briefly into the life of the Xbox 360. By 2006, all 360 and PS3 games were $60.
I bought many PC games on disc back in the day. Call of Duty 2 (not Modern Warfare 2; Call of Duty 2) was $50. You can see here via the wayback machine that a week after its release, Modern Warfare 1 is $50. Here's the PC version of Flight Simulator 2004 and the first Knights of the Old Republic for PC at $50 in December 2003. I remember there was a push to make those $50 games into $60, and the likes of Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 could sort of get away with it back when others couldn't. After buying Call of Duty 2 on disc for $50, I got the $60 version of (original) Prey, because the $60 version came on a DVD instead of several CDs, and installing games from 5 or 6 CDs was a pain that I was willing to pay $10 to not deal with back then (it also came with other collector's edition stuff).
Steam still does, and always has, taken a percent cut from game sales and not a flat fee. They priced it at 30%, because that was better than brick and mortar retail. These days it starts at 30% and follows a sort of regressive tax system once your game is super successful so that you're not as tempted to leave Steam for other platforms.
EA pulled their games off of Steam because 30% of a lot of sales is a lot of money, and they wagered they'd stand to do better if they made their own storefront, but after the first couple of years, they stopped trying to make a platform to compete with Steam and really only cared about keeping their own releases there for that 30% cut that they no longer had to pay to someone else.
Obviously I wouldn't support death threats, but moving on...
This video was specifically defending the indie dev, Nelson, that made the post that kicked this stuff off. Sure, other AAA devs responded to him...
Which the author didn't acknowledge or seem to understand why the IGN video was calling out AAA devs.
The video is just a level-headed look at why this excellent game is so excellent, and why it’s unrealistic to expect every game from now on to be like this.
It's realistic to expect the likes of Bethesda and BioWare to meet a lot of expectations from Baldur's Gate 3. Or rather, it's fair to hold those games to certain standards that Baldur's Gate 3 manages, but none of us should expect those studios to meet those standards, because they haven't shown they're interested in meeting those standards. BioWare made Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 and Neverwinter Nights, D&D games with cooperative multiplayer, like Baldur's Gate 3, with no reliance on the publisher's server to play. When multiplayer shows up in Mass Effect though, it's some microtransaction-fueled horde mode instead of just replicating a tabletop RPG and letting your buddies play the other members in your squad on missions; Fallout 76 was Bethesda's idea of multiplayer Fallout, which is far worse. You can make decisions in games from those studios, but their character sheets have been sanded down, as have skill checks, and outside of putting a bucket on someone's head in Bethesda games, you often can't use the systems to get creative like you can in Baldur's Gate 3 or a tabletop RPG. It's fair to hold these games to those standards. Given the success of games like Disco Elysium and Kickstarter games like Torment: Tides of Numenera, I don't think anyone's really expecting scope and scale like BG3 from indie efforts, but those games do let you feel like you can play them your own way in a way that AAA's most expensive efforts often don't. That's what this argument always felt like to me from the perspective of the IGN video which, once again, was not the progenitor of the argument, even if it had the most eyes.
So don't play those games. The only way that's "almost all games" is if you're looking at the mobile market. Once again, still not included in the base price.
Check back in on Devolver, Paradox, and TinyBuild in 10 years. They're scaling up to cover the market that Ubisoft, Activision, EA, and Take Two abandoned.