Quoting: Julius

Quoting: F.UltraThe EU is not a single country but the whole idea behind the EU is to create a single market, and that is the whole crux here. If you sell items in one EU country then you cannot deny the purchaser from reselling that item in another EU country since the whole of EU is one large single market.

This is not about prohibiting Valve from having different prices in different EU countries, this is to prevent geo-locking on cross-border resells, nothing more, nothing less.

Exactly, but this is one of the cases where a digital economy doesn't quite work as the regular physical goods/items one.

Being allowed to freely resell cross-border will lead game companies to abolish (lower) regional pricing most likely unless they find another (probably even less customer friendly) way to prevent large scale key "smuggling".

Yes this is a consequence of the producers simply putting activation keys inside the physical copies thus virtually creating a physical product that is no longer physical. The regulation in itself does not apply to pure downloads so if Valve and the 5 other companies can successfully argue that these physical boxes should be seen as pure downloads then they might have a case here.

Remember that today's press-release by the EU is not a decision to fine these companies, it's just the EU giving notice of their preliminary findings so that the involved companies can give their replies. The first real response will not be given by the EU until 23 March 2020.

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: KithopGeo-blocking is BS, so for once the EU is in the right of it with their demands.

In Canada, the price for a game is the same across the country, whether you're in Ontario or the Yukon (barring GST/PST/HST differences, similar to VAT).

In the US, same deal - it doesn't matter what state you're in, the price of a game is the price of that game.

The article lists some EU member states in the Eurozone and some that aren't - sure, the requirement for currency exchange tends to mean there are winners and losers on the price difference... but isn't the point of the EU the whole 'single market' thing? So set the price of a game in Euro, let non-Eurozone-but-still-EU members buy it for whatever that converts to in their local currency, and otherwise treat the EU as a single 'country'.

But the EU isn't a single country. It does not act fiscally, budgetarily, or in terms of many regulations, like a single country. It does not have EU-wide public pension plans paying the same amount across the region, it does not have EU-wide minimum wage laws, it does not have EU-wide unemployment insurance, it does not have payments moving between wealthier and poorer states to try to equalize their economic situation (if anything the reverse--it has EU-mandated rules redistributing the wealth of poorer states to the banks of richer ones). In the absence of these sorts of fiscal provisions to pull the economy of the region together, the Euro actually tends to broaden economic disparities in the Eurozone by worsening the economies of the poorer states, because it deprives them of a lot of fiscal tools needed more by the poorer states that go with control over one's own currency. Like devaluation to encourage exports, and stuff.

I'm not sure of my position on this, but using actual countries as an analogy to the EU is a poor argument for whichever side and as a side effect leads to a misunderstanding of the nature of the EU.

The EU is not a single country but the whole idea behind the EU is to create a single market, and that is the whole crux here. If you sell items in one EU country then you cannot deny the purchaser from reselling that item in another EU country since the whole of EU is one large single market.

This is not about prohibiting Valve from having different prices in different EU countries, this is to prevent geo-locking on cross-border resells, nothing more, nothing less.

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Quoting: Valck

Quoting: kuhpunkt

Quoting: Valck

Quoting: SolitaryPrice of admission will go down with every VR generation.

That has been the mantra for the last 25 years – anyone remember the VFX-1 and Cybermaxx? Good times were had in Descent, back in the 90's...

Because the technology wasn't there yet. It's pretty damn good right now and more and more affordable. The PSVR is rather cheap and even those WMR HMDs are supposedly rather fine.

Better, yes. More affordable, marginally. Still too expensive, and still too clunky, for anyone besides enthusiasts. Without mass market adoption, it's going to stay niche. Maybe I'm jaded, but I see it fade away just as it did back then, and have a big revival in another ten or twenty years ;)

The VFX-1 sold for $695 back in 1995, that is equivalent to $1166 in today's money when accounting for inflation. And it was 263x230 72Hz which is orders of magnitude in comparison with a HTC Vive.

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Quoting: Klaus

Quoting: F.Ultra

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: F.UltraI assume here that it's part of the 30% cut so if they would open this to any one then a dev who only publishes on GOG or the Epic store would utilize these nodes for free. Not that this would be a bad thing but I understand if Valve is not interested in it.

I'd rather guess, if they open it to everyone, developers will pay them some fee for it, to be able to use however they want. Like it's with any cloud service like OpenShift, GCP, AWS and what not.

Of course, but now Valve have decided many moons ago that they cover all such things with their 30% cut. Then again, any one could in theory create a version of these Steam Networking API:s that added the NAT traversal bits and charge a small fee for it. I don't honestly think that it would be a viable business model, but it's feasible.

Main issue is probably, that Valve have no reason to provide such a service. Their source of income is their store, so they build services, that make using the store attractive to developers. Why would they invest into a service, that effectively strengthens competitors?

Such a service would need to come from a third party. But then the developers would have to pay for it -- and keep paying for it indefinitely. In the end it would be GameSpy all over again. The Steam-tied solution has the advantage, that the services are likely to remain available just as long, as access to (downloading) the game remains available, as Valve either (a) has no relevant costs, because barely anybody is playing anymore or (b) they still get revenue from occasional sales, by keeping the online services up.

Idealism aside, given limited developer resources, I can't imagine a better outcome.

Yes, however as I wrote earlier, GOG (or any other store) could just as easily create a similar service and even use the vary same API to do it so games compiled for Steam would work without a change or even a recompile. The only stopping block there would then be a store like GOG promoting the use of the Steam API which they kinda might not be that much into.

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: F.UltraI assume here that it's part of the 30% cut so if they would open this to any one then a dev who only publishes on GOG or the Epic store would utilize these nodes for free. Not that this would be a bad thing but I understand if Valve is not interested in it.

I'd rather guess, if they open it to everyone, developers will pay them some fee for it, to be able to use however they want. Like it's with any cloud service like OpenShift, GCP, AWS and what not.

Of course, but now Valve have decided many moons ago that they cover all such things with their 30% cut. Then again, any one could in theory create a version of these Steam Networking API:s that added the NAT traversal bits and charge a small fee for it. I don't honestly think that it would be a viable business model, but it's feasible.

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: F.UltraWell the problem is that some one have to pony up the servers/nodes necessary and apparently Valve have no interest in providing free such machines for their competition (wonder why).

If they are paid for the service by developers, it shouldn't matter.

I assume here that it's part of the 30% cut so if they would open this to any one then a dev who only publishes on GOG or the Epic store would utilize these nodes for free. Not that this would be a bad thing but I understand if Valve is not interested in it.

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Quoting: YoRHa-2B

Quoting: PatolaSo, Philip is better now?

Yes, but that's not really what should be discussed here.

I think that people are just worried about the bus factor here (while honestly being worried for you). Could be far worse, I once had a CEO that told me that I was a liability to the company due to my competency "everything would go to hell if you left or where hit by a car so I see you as a liability". Yes I left some what close in time after that and yes that company does not exists any more.

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Quoting: ShmerlSure, developers decide, but if they do want NAT traversal, they can't use Steam one without being tied to Steam. At least now.

Well the problem is that some one have to pony up the servers/nodes necessary and apparently Valve have no interest in providing free such machines for their competition (wonder why).

I agree with you that this adds to the Steam lock-in but I find it hard to criticise when #1 the libraries themself are open source, #2 the service is not forced upon you as a developer and #3 any other store/service provider could step up and provide an equal service at any time.

Now other stores might not want to provide this since it would be following Valve but since these networks libs are open source and the NAT traversal functionality happens automatically as soon as your application links with the SteamWorks version any one should be able to add similar functionality. However as I said I don't think that say GOG would want to provide a steamxx.lib for their users, nor tell them to use this SteamNetwork library.

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Quoting: razing32All i recall was looking up pictures for school essays.

Cannot honestly say that the pictures I downloaded back then was for school essays

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Quoting: EikeI wonder how hard it can possibly be to fix this 0 byte update bug.

I imagine something along the lines...

int updateSize = steamServer.calcUpdateSize();
if (updateSize <= 0) return false;

(Obviously, if it would be that easy, Valve would have solved it in the first attempt.)

Doing a wild guess here but I assume that one major problem is that the checksum of the files on the steam server somehow differs from what the one on the local machine which triggers a download and then it somehow finds out via some other means that all of the files in the package are unchanged so the download size gets to be 0 but that it still needs to do that last step where it's queued up in order for it to change the checksum on the local files.

So doing the simple obvious check that you posted would make the checksum still be wrong on the local side which means that the client will perform needless checks on the steam servers which valve wants to avoid in order to lessen the load (imagine the load generated when several million people launch steam for the day). And this checksum is probably messed up due to proton for some reason.

As I said however just 100% guesswork here from how I would imagine a situation like this arising when building a distribution system like steam.

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