It’s Stusser, always assume sarcasm.
Yeah, except I think it’s true that they had no idea the shitstorm they were inviting.
Call it naive (cuz it is) but I’m similarly naive when it comes to human nature. I see it as a virtue to not accept that the world is as shitty as it often is. It may look like naivete but it’s also good self-defense for my mental and emotional well-being.
And people who behave abysmally deserve to be teased about it.
No. But I’m not the one claiming that Valve is engaging in practices that would almost certainly be found to be illegal due to their dominant market position. The burden of proof kind of needs to be on the people making that claim. Do you have something more concrete than that? Sure, a secret contract could contain a clause on pricing. But it might also contain a clause requiring sacrificing a goat each midsummer, and we don’t go around complaining about how Valve is being run by satanists.
You know, Epic obviously has copies of the contract since they’re the owners of several games sold on Steam. It would be massively beneficial for them to blow the whistle on this, since it’d force Valve to end this alleged policy and also tie them up in years of anti-trust litigation. Any idea why they haven’t complained to e.g. the EU competition authorities?
Are you implying this would be price fixing? That would require a conspiracy between Valve and Epic, not a contract between Valve and a publisher to not allow themselves to be undercut at other retailers. I don’t have any evidence other than the anonymous suggestion from developers who have said this policy exists. That, and it’s a fairly common sense restriction given the kind of business they are in.
I guess you could compare it to the case against Apple, but Steam isn’t literally the only way to sell applications on PC the way the app store is on iOS.
But it’s not because they are down, it’s because it’s unearned by any reasonable measure. Criticism doesn’t have to be mean or unhealthy, though, it’s can just be the world moving on.
I wouldn’t say price fixing, since it’s an overloaded term (most people will, like you, interpret it to mean just horizontal price fixing, and then the discussion will head straight into the weeds).
What you’d have here is a vertical agremeement. The EU has been cracking down on vertical agreements that restrict competition, when one the parties has a dominant market position. Most favored nation clauses, which you’re accusing Steam of, are a canonical example of such restrictions. See e.g. the fines that Booking-dot-com got due to requiring that hotels listed on their site could not offer a cheaper price anywhere else.
Epic have the Steam contracts, and would be a wronged party on both sides. They’re willing to do anything to win this particular war. NDAs will not be an issue since this is about reporting illegal activity. All the ducks are in a row. But Epic are not pulling the trigger. Why aren’t they just knee-capping Valve? Occam’s razor suggests that the illegal clauses in the secret contracts don’t actually exist.
“Crime, it’s just common sense”.
Sure, companies try that kind of shit all the time. Amazon tried it with e-books. They ended up rolling over like a puppy, with a consent decree where all such clauses in their existing contracts were voided, they would not introduce new such clauses in new contracts, and with the fines for breaking the consent decree being up 10% of Amazon’s total revenue.
Awfully convenient to add to the block list though!
So I decided to bite the bullet and try Epic. Not good so far - I placed an order for Rebel Galaxy Outlaw and I keep getting a message that says “Looks like something went wrong. For your protection, this transaction has been voided and your funds will be returned in 3-5 business days.”
Has anyone else encountered this message?
Are you using paypal?
No, but it looks like the issue has been resolved… somehow.
No pre-load for Borderlands 3 on EGS.
Not shocked, but does it matter? I can’t imagine the install size being that big with the graphics they use.
If it was the 165GB install that Destiny 2 requires, that would be a different story.
Destiny 2 is seriously 165GB? Wow, there is nothing in that game that warrants that kind of install size. I’m guessing that like a lot of console games, it includes VO for all the different languages in one megadownload which probably bloats the size but…
Still, I wouldn’t expect a small download size due to the cel-shaded graphics. I see 40GB listed on the various system specs sites, but I don’t see anything officially from Gearbox so that might just be a guess.
This is an example of why it would be nice if EGS had a dedicated system requirements section and required info for each store page. @tbaldree did a terrific job with Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, but I wish this information was standard:
This kind of information used to be mostly standard. Now we have some devs/pubs that list a third tier and then some I guess can hardly be bothered at all.
The two upcoming free games are apparently Hyper Light Drifter & Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden.
Isn’t the latter a relatively new release? Quite surprising to see it in the roster already.
It was in the Humble Monthly a while ago. There seems to be a lot of overlap.
In time for the upcoming expansion I think.
Also a lot of overlap with Xbox Game Pass.
Wow, that latter one tempts me dearly. I already have most of their free games that I like but not that one.
Hyper Light Drifter was a Twitch giveaway several months ago, too, and I think it’s been in a monthly.