It’s now a season bundle. But it was $10 per fatality x 3. One for Halloween, one for Thanksgiving, and one for Christmas. That was a total of $30 for a whole minute of cut-scenes. They successfully Overton it, apologized and now it’s $10 for the three scenes. But yeah, now buying Fatalities is a thing, look forward for your Easter Fatality edition and an extra Bunny skin version for only $4.99.
Listen, I would pay good money for an off the shelf console first computer that runs SteamOS, has as primary input a controller and an ARM architecture or any other small form factor x86, that fits under the TV. Freaking SteamMachines were a top notch idea, and Gabe should go for it again.
Now you’re all riled up and acting stupid. You are the oh so claimed expert who works at patents offices. No, you tell me what does your majestic and awesome field of expertise do to prevent corporate abuse and patent trolling? Tell me, evangelize to me, convince me that the patent system has safeguards to prevent theft of intellectual work, how does patent enforcing works? what do you do, that you work there, to make it a more ethical field? what are the practices and procedures in place to avoid a corporation from using patents to monopolize, bully industries and stifle creativity and innovation?
Patents genuinely are wonderful. The rockstar devs are going to be rewarded for their innovation. They will hire out licenses so that other games can use the tech they developed.
You can try, but WB will troll you in court for years and drown you out on legal fees to prove it isn’t a violation of a patent. So, most consider it not worth it.
You think that patent abuse is right, and that’s why everyone in this thread hates your comments. You think the system is fine. The fact that you are inside but can’t understand how corporations abuse the system and think others are wrong or misinformed when they oppose this abuse, is troubling. You think we are ignorant or misinformed, but no, we do know how intellectual property works. We disagree and find it disgusting for moral reasons that it works that way. That’s very different.
I used Egypt just as an example, the countries actually involved are Latvia and other EU countries. This is a really old case, it used to be the case that the steam store wouldn’t even open if your were not from the US. There’s a complex web of financial trade agreements and red tape behind making a global digital store with regional pricing available. There’s also a lot of shenanigans that go on to avoid abuse of regional pricing. Steam limits changing your store region to once every 6 months, for example. Which makes it impossible to exploit the regional pricing model. This case is precisely because Steam and the 5 stooges (Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax) didn’t want to let EU citizens from one country buy a cheaper version of the same game in another EU country. I think the most egregious thing is that Valve claimed not guilty, not by saying they didn’t do it, but that they did it and they were in their right to do so. The EU said, it’s not abusing the store, EU citizens are in their right to use whatever store from any other EU country under the single digital market law.
Unlike the EU, the rest of the world is still geoblocked, and discriminated by Steam. For instance, I can’t buy Elden Ring, I can’t even see their store webpage at all. Regional pricing is a good thing to make games affordable for different markets with different purchase and income levels (fuck Epic store), but it should be based on currency and payment method, not geographical location. This along with Nintendo’s regional blocking and the bullshit that Hollywood does wolrdwide are just anti-consumer manipulation.
Suppose you are an European citizen and you live in Egypt. Valve used to block you from purchasing a game available in Europe. Despite the fact that you are European and your store settings were set to Europe. That’s geogblocking. Now valve is not allowed to do that according to EU law. They still deny access and discriminate based on geography with plenty of excuses. But they can’t use the IP geolocation anymore. Mind you, they still claimed not guilty despite the fact they were caught red handed and dragged the whole thing up to appeals. Despite the fact they still pretty much still do it for certain games from time to time.