Liar.

You could very well be right, I haven’t read the full suit or done a lot of research on it, so I’m just going off the scraps I’ve read. I did check out isthereanydeal to look at price differences between Steam and Epic on some major titles, and all of them had even pricing. I don’t have a huge sample size, so if you want to look for some that have different prices, I’d be interested to see how much difference there is, and if, say, the lowest price on Epic has had a Steam sale after it where the game was priced higher on Steam.

I think that’s part of the argument. It isn’t just for Steam keys, it’s for alternate storefronts like GOG, Ubi, EA, Epic, etc. If you want to sell on Steam, you have to keep it the same price as anywhere else. It seems a bit harsh, but I am tentatively siding with Steam on this one. I’ve never had a company be as consumer friendly as Valve has been over their lifetime, and they’ve earned some brand loyalty. It’ll quickly dissolve if they start fucking people over, but for now, as far as I’m concerned, they get the benefit of the doubt.

Yeah, on the other hand, I’m also an idiot, and I could be completely off with what I’m talking about. IANAL, so we’ll have to wait and see.

Sure, by all means. But how many people watch a show or movie they enjoy and don’t talk to friends or family about it? Secondary advertising is still advertising. If you convince someone else to buy it, you aren’t solving any problems.

Oh yeah, god forbid people miss some form of entertainment! Whatever will they do? If only there was INFINITE entertainment out there. The assumed need to consume is bullshit, and people that feel that they must have everything are sucking that fat capitalist teat harder than anyone else, regardless of if they pirate or not. When you start to pull back from the idea that you have to have it all, you realize how little of it you actually need, and then you can be selective with your content consumption.

Or you can keep watching Disney shows, bitching about how much you hate Disney shows, all while talking to friends and coworkers about Disney shows. Oh, you pirate it? You are still advertising for Disney. You’re a goddamned billboard.

It wouldn’t make them available to more people, it would make deeper sales available to certain storefronts. Right now, Valve says that if you want to do business with them, and you offer a discount on another storefront, that same discount must be reflected in the Steam price when it sold for a discount on Steam. What the lawsuit says is that Publishers should be allowed to publish whatever discount they want on whatever site they want. That sounds like a better deal to consumers, but what it does is open the door for anti-competitive loss-leaders.

It’s the same strategy that companies like Wal-Mart have employed to gain marketshare. They come in, sell everything at a loss to drive out competition, and then raise the prices to the same price the competition was charging. They haven’t given the consumers a better option, they’ve only ensured that they don’t have another choice. If you look at Valve and you look at Epic, you can easily see who has the deeper pockets: Valve is worth a little over $3 Billion from what I can tell, while Epic is worth over $40 Billion. If Epic wants to sell at a loss to drive Steam out of business, they can, easily. As a matter of fact, they’ve already tried this by offering the free weekly games that they do.

I’d wager that if this goes through and Steam loses, we’ll see that free weekly game go away, and then large doorbuster sales of everything on the site just to undercut every steam sale as it happens. Where are you gonna buy that new game at? Steam where it’s full price, or Epic where it’s half price? What about the Steam Winter Sale? Will you buy the game for 80% off, or go over to Epic offering it at 90% off with a $10 coupon for another game on the site? Pretty soon you’ll only be shopping on Epic, and once Steam is gone, Epic can charge whatever they want. It’s the long game. They don’t need to be profitable today. They just need to show their shareholders the path.

It’s actually kinda the opposite. It’s claiming that Valve makes deals with publishers that use Steam forcing them to maintain price parity with other storefronts. So, if you want to discount a game on something like Fanatical, you’d have to run the same discount on Steam, you can’t just have one or the other. I don’t want to put on the ol’ tin foil hat, but it reeks of Epic. Epic wants to run cheap sales through their storefront that Steam won’t get, so they can pull users away from Steam. If they both have the same discounts, then Epic can’t get the upper hand. That is complete conjecture on my part, but it fits with Epic’s shit strategies. Instead of making something that brings people to them, they want to kill off the competition through anti-competitive practices. It’s the same thing they are doing by signing exclusivity contracts with third-party developers.

Just a reminder that if you don’t like the way that the entertainment is presented, your best option is to ignore it. If you pirate it, you’ll probably talk about it with others. That will lead to engagement, and in turn others will pay to see the content. If you ignore it, then the company gets nothing from you. If you truly want to punish these companies for policies you don’t like, piracy isn’t the answer, boycotting their product is.

Edit: The downvotes on this prove that you only pirate because you want shit for free, not to protest. You are the same as the looters during marches. You don’t do what you do to make things better, you do it to get free shit. You are the reason we can’t have nice things.

Ok, we’ve jumped the shark on the apocalypse, and I fucking love it. This shit is going sideways so hard and so fast that I’m really just waiting around to see how fucked up it can get. I’ll be real, I’ve already made my peace that the planet is going to be mostly human-free in the next century, so I may as well enjoy the fireworks. Fire up the reactor, boys! We’ve got SEO to write!

Come on, snail bro, I believe in you!

I’m fucking dying right now.

Ok, but all they did is paint a hot guy like The Crow, give him a badass lightsaber, and put horns on his head. If they’d cast Gary Busey as Maul it would be a different story. A much more horrifying story.

Just so long as they are fed well with meats.

It would be an instant buy for me if it has full backwards compatibility, and I’d let them tack on another hundo for psp/vita games. That’s basically what my Steam deck is. Every console emulated and PC games.

I’m swerving. I won’t even think about it. It’s an involuntary reaction.

Why would I convict him? He just whooped that ghost’s ass.

THESE PIPES ARE CLEEEEEAAAAANNNNN!

I recently decided to play through the Konami Castlevania collection, and holy shit they are bad, I’m sure they get better, but I got to Dracula in the first game and the controls are SOOO fucking bad. This picture encapsulates exactly how I feel. Just at work, hating Castlevania, and thinking about playing it when I get home.

It was just that one time and he said he was sorry.