Important to note that the fines were for behavior from 2010-2015 for Valve and 2007-2018 for the other companies. I used to be more in tune with this world as a poor student taking advantage of Steam trading to score some cheaper games and the publishers that got hit certainly track with my experience of CEEMEA-locked versions.
More good work by the EU. Good for gamers, good for game publishers, good for business. All done with openly trivial fines mean to warn rather than punish. Happy with that.
It’s the right choice for the EU; the common market is not something you can compromise on. But just how is this good for the gamers and the publishers?
- Publishers: In practice have to set the same price everywhere. If this was beneficial, they would have just done that in the first place rather than wait to effectively be forced to. So they’ll clearly lose income.
- Gamers in the poorer countries: Games become unaffordable. Localizations become less likely to happen, since the market is smaller.
- Gamers in the richer countries: Nothing changes. They couldn’t buy cheap import games before due to geoblocking. They can’t do it now because the cheaper copies don’t exist.
The only way you make this work is by ensuring that say the Bulgarian copy is technically usable by the German customers, but unappealing in practice. Having the Bulgarian copy be localized to only Bulgarian would be one way, but then that screws over the people who’d like to play it in the original.
Well, Estonian and Polish citizens get to use the non-Russian version for around the same price (even if they might still have to get it elsewhere). Other than that, nothing will happen, Steam already equalized prices upwards years ago.
In a new interview with 1 News, Newell said again that there’s “strong interest” among some Valve employees about making the move, [to New Zealand] although he added that there’s no plan in place to start bringing people over just yet.
“You don’t want to uproot a bunch of families, have them come here, and then the situation gets a bunch better and then they have to turn around and go back,” he said. “So that’s why getting a better handle on how long the epidemic is going to be affecting our operational decisions is important to that.”
He did confirm that Valve has new projects in the works, and maybe more importantly a renewed enthusiasm for game development driven by the success of Half-Life: Alyx.
“We definitely have games in development that we’re going to be announcing. It’s fun to ship games,” he said. “Alyx was great. To be back doing singleplayer games, that created a lot of momentum inside the company to do more of that.”
Oops.
So it looks like most of the older EA Play stuff came with a CD Key to permanently unlock it for free on Origin.
The look at CD keys feature is now disabled for some games.
I find it kinda fascinating/stupid that Steam discussions censor even stuff like “god damn”. So god damn stupid.
I find it kinda fascinating/stupid that Steam discussions censor even stuff like “❤❤❤
❤❤❤❤”. So ❤❤❤ ❤❤❤❤ stupid.
I have 370 friends on Steam. In Steam, go to Store -> Your Store -> Popular Among Friends -> Lifetime to see how many hours combined all friends have in which games. I was wondering how big the franchises (like Civ) were when added all up.
Here is a list of all of my friends top games played of all time, with the franchises combined. (I removed two idle games from the list, ugh.) If you are looking for a game to play on PC, all of these are very good. :-)
Rank. Game = Total Hours
- Dominions V + IV = 25,829
- Civilization V + VI = 24,799
- Skyrim + SE = 18,001
- XCOM + 2 = 13,884
- Path of Exile = 13,272
- Fallout 4 + NV = 13,154
- Team Fortress 2 = 7,570
- Slay the Spire = 7,199
- Stellaris = 6,622
- War Thunder = 6,373
- 7 Days to Die = 6,023
- Borderlands 2 = 5,742
- Europa Universalis IV = 5,322
- Rimworld = 4,997
- Warframe = 4,757
- Battletech = 4,739
- Grim Dawn = 4,677
- Crusader Kings II = 4,606
- Rocket League = 4,579
- Battle Brothers = 4,503
- Total War Warhammer 2 = 4,369
- Terraria = 4,280
- Football Manager 2019 = 4,115
- Kerbal Space Program = 3,983
- Age of Wonders III = 3,801
A lot of similarities :-) Those popular games are very popular!
It’s clear we are not friends on Steam, because I would single handedly move EU IV into the top 10 from there.
Also lol @Hereafter I love how the hours stack up, and how many more the comparable time games are than EU IV. Everything else is in the 40-60 range. EU IV is… 15
I believe it, I’m at around 1000 myself (plus another 300 or so in EU III)
lol yeah. All the games above are more casual friendly. I’m really surprised EUIV is even in the top.
I wish I can extract this data to get highest average, lowest, most owned, etc.
Edit: I’m actually almost 3K hours with PoE. So if you’re on my friend’s list then It should be in your top 10!
My friend’s top three: Civ 5, Steam VR, Path of Exile. #4 is Terraria!
What the heck is Steam VR? Is that a catch-all for any game played in VR through steam? Because that makes this list somewhat less useful.
Nope, because #1 is Civ V at 5292 hours.
I’ll admit, I didn’t see STO or Terraria being in the top of the list.
I have a friend who leaves whatever game he is playing on all the time, for weeks or months at a time. Usually the Civ games. Every time I look at my friends stats it’s completely skewed because of him.
I don’t see “your store” anywhere.
You have to click on Store first then it’s in the same spot.
Very hidden. Thank you.