Artifact story is the most obvious and immediate proof that in gaming there are no untouchable Gods when it comes to publishers.

Valve is a beacon of light for gamers with Steam. But when it pushes to far and go anti-consumer they are as vulnerable to gamers backlash as anyone else. We've seen this many times and also with other companies (CD - project). These facts dismantle the rethoric other openly anti consumer companies argue to attack us when we strongly oppose their misdeeds, that in some way gamers are Valve groupies always ready to defend them against anyone and anything and at the same time attacking their competitors with no logic or reasonable argument.

Artifact in specific has been a well deserved failure. But it has been a publishing failure rather than a development one. The game was actually good, it was the monetization model chosen that killed it. Maybe making it F2P might allow it to live a 2nd, or better, an actual life.

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Quoting: Linuxwarper

Quoting: jrtI think optional Game streaming can be a good thing (for example to bridge the time with GPU shortages)

Game streaming as a option is undoubtedly a great thing! Noone can dispute that. With streaming you can buy a slim and cheap laptop and still be able to play major games. The issue with streaming is actors trying to monopolize it and tell you how and where to stream your games. Not unlike what Microsoft is doing with local releases. I hope Valve's streaming becomes better and better because I sure want them to succeed knowing their streaming option is one that gives you the most flexibility as of right now.

Valve is in a unique position, if it wants, to give us a streaming service where we still retain a reasonable control of our game licenses. I.e. Buy Steam game, play it on your rig and/or on steam streaming.
Instead any other streaming solution a la Google or Amazon will invariably tie your game license to their own streaming service. The day you stop paying subscription you lose everything. It's the infamous video streaming model brought to the gaming world.

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Quoting: MayeulC

Quoting: jrtIt's pretty obvious at this point that Valve has everything needed to make an optional cloud gaming subscription if they want to.

Yes, there's just a few missing pieces of the puzzle: I assume they're now working on getting this to work in web browsers?

If they support Android, Windows and Samsung I say they have everything they need for success. In this domain the convenience browser adds is marginal and it won't make that much difference imho.

Browsers truly matters only when it comes to circumvent censorship ans/or walled gardens (-> Apple).

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Everyone knows the level of engineers at Google. And Stadia (and most of Google dead projects) actually worked technically. Those failures, from an external perspective at least, look like a pure management issue.

I mean, literally every influencer and journalist out there warned that Stadia business model was flawed when it was announced. Even if management was borrowed from non gaming world and just did a mistake because of lack of knowledge of their business, by that time were they smart they would have take notice. But no.

Also, since the product is technically valid, I don't understand why they are killing it. Surely they complicated things a lot for themselves but it's not like that VG streaming market is settled. The competition now is really only started.

I can't help though, a part of me still hopes that videogame streaming dies horribly. Even though as an engineer I'm aware that it's just the "natural" evolution of things and it cannot be stopped.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyI think it's probably worth a watch, and I actually started . . . but it's a frigging hour, man!

You can always download the legal documents and read through hundreds of pages full of jargon and rethorics. :grin:

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Quoting: BielFPs

Quoting: MalIf anything they will increase it where they want to discourage the sells.

That was my point with my post (I don't know if it was clear)

Yeah, but the standard, typical, universally agreed fair price is that an AAA game costs 60. What they costs now, costed yesterday and will cost tomorrow (unless horrible avg income crisis happen). So when you say 65 on Steam and 40 on else, without specifing the context, it looks like you're impling that prices are going to diminish outside Steam, with benefits for consumers.

I guess your example was on an indie title, where yeah 40 or 30 are typically accepted as fair prices. In that case yeah, the example makes sense. But imho an example is more effective if it's simple.

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Quoting: BielFPsImagine for ExamPle If a Competitor make a shady contract with the biggest dev companies, and the next hyped game would cost $40,00 in others stores and $65,00 on steam, where do you think most of the sales would happen?

Make it 60$ on other stores and 75$ on Steam and then we have something close to what would actually happen. Once people decided that the game is worth 60$ why would publishers decrease that price? Philantrophy? If anything they will increase it where they want to discourage the sells. In this case people would learn fo the game on Steam, get angry at the price, goodle and then learn that the desired price(sticky price) is available elsewhere.

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Quoting: BasianiGuys, I'm reading your comments and still not understand games prises on Steam goes up or down, if Valve will agree that EU Commission Fine?
Not curious question.
chears all ;-)

Commission fine is a separate topic discussed in another article. But if EU wins, prices will remain the same in central Europe (Germany/France) and go up in the periphery (East Europe) to match these.

This article is about a sue being started by unknown people against valve. They claim they abuse their "monopolistic position" to influence prices among the whole market. If they win or not, nothing will change really.

Digital prices are always set to maximize total revenue (units sold * unit price) because they have near 0 fixed costs (it costs nothing to make an additional copy after the first one, and you don't have to rent warehouses to store unsold copies). So, to simplify things, if a publisher thinks he can increase the price of a VG of 20% in Europe and europeans will still buy it, he will increase prices. If he instead thinks that reducing the price 10% will allow him to sell 50% more copies, he will reduce price. In practice publishers kind of do both to maximize revenues: they first sell the VG at full price, then when all people willing to pay full price are done they reduce 10% and they sell all copies they can at that price. Then reduce again and again until they have sold max amount of copies at the max possible price.

Many facts are proof of this: when Steam "invented" digital distribution, prices remained the same even though suddenly distribution fee went from 50% to 30%. Because people thought 60$/€ was a reasonable price, digital or not. When Epic started their 12/88 crusade, prices remained the same. Because people still think 60$/€ is reasonable price. When you buy a game in Russia you pay less than same game in USA (geoblocking, purchasing power). Because people in Russia don't think 60$ is a reasonable price for them. Prices aren't determined by production or distribution costs. Only by how much we are willing to spend. So whatever happens to Steam, rest assured that prices won't change, for sure not in the way you like.

This specific case see a bunch of trolls trying to get some settlement money from Valve to avoid the legal costs or complications of a trial. It's part of a number of legal quarrels we're seeing recently that has been started or fomented by Epic. The issue at hand, once factoring out rethoric, it's purely about who's getting a bigger piece of the cake (digital platforms vs publishers). Not about consumer interests (value/price ratio) and only rarely on developer interests (publishers are almost always contractually stronger than developers, so any money they can absorb from distributors they will keep it and not pass it to devs).

As a gamer one should only take sides when value/price ratio is affected in a pejorative way. Because price is independent (or better, depends only on national avg income that is independent from gaming industry), for us it's only a matter of value. Thus all the hostility of gamers towards EGS, Ubistore and all the other half backed gaming platforms. We don't want to pay the same but start to get less.

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Lol. What's happening to the world? Ever since Tim Sweeney decided that play store and ios store are monopolies people see monopolies everywhere.

Soon somebody will sue GamingOnLinux for monopolizing its pages and preventing writers from posting about windows and not allowing other news providers to host their own comments section under the articles.

But of course not before I sue myself for monopolizing the space of this post.

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Quoting: minfaerI don't see how the USA not working in the background to the detriment of all involved EU-countries would cause a nightmare.

Because without them keeping the balance, eventually one capital will rise to rule the others (today that would be Berlin, in a few years Paris, London just went seppuku). And given last 100 years of history (during but most alarmingly after WW2) I don't trust any of the existing EU capitals (mine included) to build an hegemony that is a better world to live in than what Washington built. It's as simple as that. When I think to Catalan or Greek crysis I'm horrified at the idea of a EU army.
Then if you talk about Utopia, an EU where very people can self determine, keep its identity and local interests while being part of a bigger federation, like a super Switzerland, well I'm all for that. But that's not the foundation of present day EU so everyone should know that this is not where we are going (nor where anti-europeans are going too). Not without a revolution first.

Quoting: minfaerPeace and stability come from the aligned economic interests as well as a certain level of education, in my opinion, but not from the dysfunctionality in the representation of interests. Increasing economic entanglement makes conflict inherently lossy for all.

That would be very nice. But that is also naive. That's very OT for a linux forum but whatever. You should know that economic interests are not the end goal of foreign policies. Power, in its broad definition, is. Economic interests are just one aspect of power, and they can be "traded" for any other advantage in other areas that result in an overall growth of power. It happened and happens all the time. Wars pretty much always result in a worsening of economic interests, but they have always been fought anyway. Democracies or not. Wasn't in USA/GB/Netherlands economic interest to continue sell raw materials to Japan and make money, instead of give them no other option than to get these by force in 1941? Or Hitler to continue trade raw materials with Stalin instead of backstab him? Yes it was. Those guys not only went against their economic interest but triggered wars with different luck. But in a bigger picture, what they did was to trade their economic advantages to stop the power growth of a counterpart that was already set to outgrow them in power, before it was to late or to late anyway in these examples. That factoring out ideologies, it would have worked the same way even by swapping these.

Today as Europeans we came to believe that economic interests are the only thing that matters for peace and stability because being part of USA hegemony/empire/sphere of influence whatever one wants to call it, this is the only thing our governments are allowed to pursue under their umbrella (thus we vote politicians to be good at these and mostly only these). When a capital tries to extend its power pojection outiside pure conomic interests, that always irritates Washington (usually it's Paris starting wars or "destabilizing areas" on its own, less frequently London). At the same time the USA trade a lot of their economic interests for other advantages in Europe, like influence or military power presence/projection. And for us as individuals citizens it's not that bad. We have peace and a good life style. US citizens have their hegemony. I don't see how changing the status quo will result to a better life to me or my beloved ones. For what I read on history books Europe has never been a better place to live before. Not saying it's a perfect world. Just that now, in my opinion, there are no winds pushing the ship toward a better one.

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