I have explained plenty well. You are just refusing to listen because you have already set your opinion in stone and have either ignored or twisted everything I have said to fit that opinion.
If you have any desire to engage in good faith I suggest you go back and re read my comments.
Again you’re only listen to a part of what I’m saying to make it more convenient to argue against.
Pc part picker is not a distributer with a functional monopoly on the pc hardware market, nor are AMD Nvidia and Intel small indie teams. That’s the key here.
Steam use their position as THE retailer of PC games as leverage to make small indie Devs put their games on ridiculous sales even when they don’t want to, just to get featured, in order to benefit themselves by being the place that has the crazy sales.
If you want a more apt example think of companies that use unpaid or underpaid inters for work in return for “the exposure” it’s very similar and widely considered exploitative.
And why would consumers who are trying to get the most value for their money care about that financial aspect? They aren’t a business. They are consumers looking for deals.
Sure if you don’t give a shit about other people, and then you can use the same logic to justify sweatshop clothes and any other shitty businesses practice you like.
That works when we’re talking about big businesses and AAA games, but the problem is when we consider indie developers, who struggle to get attention so are pressured into putting their game on sale when they don’t want to just get some attention.
Because the big sale only happens because steam presses Devs into it in order to get promoted. So Devs that don’t buy into the sale, get sent to the back of line.
And maybe if you studied beyond highschool level you would be aware this is a well studied thing in economics. If you sell a priority service and there is a limit to the resource in some way you are shutting out the people that don’t pay. Like its the same problem as dating apps that sell priority matching, if enough people buy I to it you either have to buy into it as well just to get a fair chance, or except you will never get seem.
Yes the Devs that buy into it get more sales. The entire point is it works for those people, if it didn’t they would have no reason to buy into it. But the people who don’t buy into it are then inherently disadvantaged.
I thought about mentioning factorio in the original comment, but yeah as you say there is some exception, factorio. Being wildly popular and the game that more or less birthed an entire genre helps and even if you don’t play the same game it’s still entirely possible to succeed through word of nouth. But for less popular indie games it’s still true.
Games “journalists” have always been awful at their job and the entire industry is so incredibly fucky with nerds power tripping on the tiniest modicum of power they’ve been given.
Unfortunately Nintendo adults will soy out and apend a bajillion dollars on anything Nintendo does at this point so long as it has pokemon or zelda on it.