What?

As far as I have always heard, it’s about the MSRP, unless a shop has a permanent sale, which essentially also causes a lower MSRP.

FH4 was heavily discounted before it was removed from stores (because of license deals), so FH5 will most likely get the same treatment, although it might take a few more years (and FH6 much later after that).

When my order went through (20 minutes after launch, Germany), it had changed to “delayed due to high order volume” (or something like that).

Practically there wasn’t really a difference with the Steam Deck. You still had everyone rushing at the same time to get the deposit in. People got errors during the check out, just like this time and scalpers popped up immediately as well.

Sure, you might have had a few people less, trying to buy it, if you restrict by age, but the controller was announced last year. Do you want Valve to sell the first controllers only to accounts that are older than 6 months or a year? Or do you go by the time the review embargo was up, which got broken because a few reviews leaked early.

I think the Steam Machine was the weakest part of the line-up, even before all the memory shortage stuff, which is likely going to increase the price. I think, the only reason that’s going to sell out, if Valve just doesn’t have a lot of them.

As for the Frame, VR is just too niche, so similarly, I don’t think it will be hard to get one.

I think the price reveal put off a bunch of people who might have bought the controller “on impulse” to maybe waiting for a sale or something, if they get it at all.

I was thinking more along the line of PaysafeCard or things like that, although that might have similar currency restrictions. Or of course you can just buy foreign prepaid cards from third-party resellers. You’ll pay more than the card is actually worth, but if you would then be able to buy games for half price or even less, it would be worth it.

Directly in Steam it’s not that easy, you need a billing address and Steam checks the payment method to verify the country (although I don’t know if certain prepaid cards work for this as well).

You still have Steam keys, that can be sold anywhere though, and not everyone will care that this cheap key, intended for the Polish market is bought by someone in Germany.

I think the law doesn’t say that prices have to be the same, it’s just that you can’t block people from other countries from buying stuff at the cheaper price.

With physical goods you either have to actually go to the country or get it shipped to you, which can make this not as easy or “profitable”. However, with digital goods you just go to a website and there’s not really anything to ship, except maybe an email, so those same hurdles don’t exist, which is why those lower income countries usually get the short end of the stick with prices for games and stuff.

They can’t realistically restrict keys

I think it’s actually illegal to restrict this stuff in the EU.

In the past Steam had separate keys for lower income countries in Europe, that could only be activated there. However, either because laws changed or they started to actually be enforced, Steam had to change it.

You can still make the games cheaper to buy in those countries, but you also have to allow people from Germany, France, wherever to buy them (as long as it’s in the EU), which very few publishers want to do.

So true! Remember the good old days with games like Expedition 33, Baldur’s Gate 3, Resident Evil 9? Those were the best. It’s a pity games like that don’t get made anymore.

WTF are you talking about.

I think for most of your examples it’s your rose-colored glasses speaking.

also a ton more Toxic and Mean

You’re just forgetting all the console war stuff from the past. Or the “CoD lobby” type shit.

E3 or even Gamescom from the 2010s im like “Holy Shit look at all these Cool Games” but obviously nowadays its just “meh” really

Again, I think you’re just not thinking about all these mediocre games that have existed since the very beginning. All the shitty movie tie-ins or whatever, that got pumped out all the time.

Gaming has been toxic and mean for a loooong time. Shitty games have been made since basically the very beginning.

It’s the only policy that really makes sense right now.

With the disclosure policy they had before, basically nobody said they used some AI coding agent or whatever, because probably nobody would ever see the code.

Generated assets are still at the point where we can often identify them, so it’s easy to call people out. Though once they’re indistinguishable from human-made stuff, I doubt anyone is ever going to admit to using AI.

Yeah, but it’s not like it was at almost 5% in January.

As I wrote in another comment, if you ignore February completely, ~3% to ~5% in a month or two is gigantic.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it drops back down again next month, but maybe it stays at 5% because the old data was faulty.

Sure, but there are so many Steam users every month, that even if only 1% or 0.1% of people get the survey, that’s still a ton of people (over 40M concurrent, estimated 130M+ users every month)

Also, have the Linux users increased by over 50% month-to-month? The jump from ~3% at the start of the year to over 5% is huge.

It’s possible there was something wrong with the data before and the 3% wasn’t accurate or there’s something wrong now and the 5% is not correct. That’s all I’m saying.

The drop last month was because Chinese users increased by 30% (which were removed or whatever this month).

So even if you’re going to be pedantic and ignore the whole of February and just go from the January stats to March directly, 3.5% to 5.3% is a massive jump that doesn’t make sense. Why suddenly this month? Why not last year when W10 support ended?

One possible explanation is that maybe the old 3% Linux base was wrong and now something has been accounted for or has been corrected, so in reality it has been around 5% for a while, which is now shown correctly. That’s why I’m saying I’m gonna wait a bit to take these stats at face value.

That 3% jump seems almost too big for me to believe. With the seemingly annual increase of Chinese users in February, which is then corrected in March (which we can see this time), I’d probably wait another month or two if more stats get adjusted or if Linux stays at over 5%.

Not really.

The next D4 expansion releases in two months. The current season has been running for two months and the next one is coming in a bit over two weeks, so things are definitely winding down.

As great as Jeff was, he’s the one that did all the stuff to Overwatch.

As far as I’ve heard/read he was never really interested in making a PVP game, he wanted to make Titan, the MMO. Then he got another chance with OW2 and the PVE mode, and even got an offer to make a separate dev team that would focus on PVP, so he could put his all into PVE, but declined, so the game was left to die (even though it never really died). Then PVE in OW2 was a bust again and he left.