Quoting: JahimselfAre they buying them to better kill them?

It wouldn't be the first time the company was bought to just kill the competition.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeYeah, I separate DLC with full blown expansions. Like Crusader Kings II is a good example, they had shit loads of DLC, with a few expansions. Sure they are called DLC, but they really are expansion packs for the game. Like a new civilizarion or sound tracks are DLC. When you are adding continents and new rules, etc it is an expansion.
The worse offense is when they sell you the data on the physical disk but you have to pay extra to unlock it...

I must say I really like the DLC for Total War: Warhammer, most of them are adding new playable races with new mechanics.

As you said the worst are the ones that are just unlocking the content you already have. EA could be probably a good example of this, you pay full price for the game and most of the things are still behind paywall, when you start playing.

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Quoting: kuhpunkt

Quoting: Zlopez

Quoting: MohandevirReally not sure about this one... Nothing forces them to sell on Steam, anyway.

I disagree with this. If you want to hit a bigger audience you need to be on Steam, because it's a #1 platform for most of PC gamers.

Also the EPIC has it's own flaws, like exclusive titles or forcing the devs to drop Linux support for the games if they want to publish on EPIC. (Phoenix Point as an example or their own Unreal Tournament)

I'm using Steam because of what is Valve doing for the Linux community, but there are plenty of things I don't like about the Steam, like vendor lock-in or some of the ethical problems like this one. Next time I will look for something, I will first check the GOG, with minigalaxy it's really easy to manage your games now.

How is this en ethical problem? They don't dictate prices.

They are saying that you can't have different prices on different platforms. So they actually dictate the price you need to have elsewhere. So if you have a game on Steam and GOG and there is GOG sale going on, you need to lower price on Steam too.

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Quoting: MohandevirReally not sure about this one... Nothing forces them to sell on Steam, anyway.

I disagree with this. If you want to hit a bigger audience you need to be on Steam, because it's a #1 platform for most of PC gamers.

Also the EPIC has it's own flaws, like exclusive titles or forcing the devs to drop Linux support for the games if they want to publish on EPIC. (Phoenix Point as an example or their own Unreal Tournament)

I'm using Steam because of what is Valve doing for the Linux community, but there are plenty of things I don't like about the Steam, like vendor lock-in or some of the ethical problems like this one. Next time I will look for something, I will first check the GOG, with minigalaxy it's really easy to manage your games now.

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Quoting: slaapliedjeThis is why it's almost a breath of fresh air for me to just play games on an Amiga or Atari ST. That and to be able to just double click on an icon or put in a (sometimes virtual) floppy disk and have it load up the game. No DLC, no pay to win, Just the game to play!

I'm now playing Blood Bowl 2 and it could be played without creating an online account, but the game is just missing some of the functionality. But I can't agree with the DLC part, we had them in the 90's there were just called datadiscs and added plenty of new functionalities. What is shame, that the DLC often lets you pay for only cosmetic things or something that should have been in the original game from beginning.

And the worst DLCs are those that are just dividing the online community, like DLC with multiplayer maps, which are not playable for others.

As you said the games should be just fun to play and not only for making money. I have some favorites developers in this case, which are creating games that are fun to play and you don't need to pay additional money to enjoy them. Some of them are even updating the games years after release. :-) You just don't see them creating any AAA titles.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: Arten

Quoting: TheSHEEEP

Quoting: ArtenSo, you propouse use regulation (forcing valve enable regional pricing) for deal with consequences of another regulation?

You are shifting the blame here.
The consequences of not allowing region blocking should not be that there is only one EU region. Imagine if that was the case for other goods - EU would have imploded the moment that happened.
That this was the result is entirely Valve's fault - they could have, and easily so, only removed the region locking without also removing different EU regions (remember, they had those, even if only three).
They did not do that out of good old corporate greed - capitalistic entities will always strive to maximize profit, no matter the negative consequences. Which a state (or in this case, the EU) exists to regulate in order to benefit its citizens. It's called social capitalism and is working fairly well in most European countries.
It requires regulations, believe it or not.

Now, what can the EU do here?
Abolish its own principles because one fringe entity (in the grand scheme of things, when talking about the entire EU, Valve doesn't amount to anything) chose to be greedy about implementing laws?
I'd hope not - if they did that, it would show that just about anyone could strongarm the EU into backpedaling.
Force Valve to not f*ck over its customers? That would be optimal but as I said, I have no clue if there is legal ground to enforce regional pricing.
Or just do nothing and accept being blamed for another's fault? Unfortunately the most likely scenario here, there are bigger tasks to tackle right now for the EU than Valve.

Quoting: ArtenAnother regulation only do situaction worst in another place!

Not the one that I proposed, at least not for customers.
As I wrote before, regional pricing has not lead to price increases so far - just look at Russian games that aren't region locked, there is no price increase on the scale some seem to be afraid of.
Assuming that this would somehow be different for the EU is just fear mongering without a base in reality.

It would lead to Valve and publishers earning less money per purchase in lower income regions - while also leading to a lot more purchases in these regions. I'm not even sure it would lead to a net loss. I could very well imagine lots of people from lower income regions purchasing a lot more after such a change.

Besides, seriously, what is the worst that could happen?
We already ARE in the worst case for most Steam customers in the EU! Everyone's paying the highest price. Having regional prices again would mean an improvement for pretty much everyone.
Even in the (highly unlikely) case that those regional prices would be rising - they'd still be lower for most than they are now.

I'm not shifting blame. I identified true criminal in this case and it is EU. Whole EU is just regulatory hell which make hell from living in here. Idea of duty free trade is good, but EU evolved into mutch closer to totalitarian organisation. Ok, not china level yet, but wait couple years.
EU is evil organisation to begin with.
Which negative consequences have maximizing profit in this case? That rich germans with houshold income mote then 2* greater then for example czech houshold income can't buy games on third party regional sites and use it? Without this barier, germans can maximize their profit at the expense of citizens of poorer nations. So local third party stores need choose higher prices.

In this case, Valve is purely victim of EU oppression and regulatory hell.
So, some games are using regional lock in russia. Is logical to assume one who change price are the one which move price.

I was going to actually reply in detail and dismantle every single non-argument in that load of poorly veiled anti-EU propaganda.
But I think that would be waste of time and instead I'm going to abbreviate it all with:

Careful, your mouth is foaming.

I for one think that EU is really good thing, it really helped the countries in it to have better living conditions. There are plenty of things about EU that are not nice or just pure bureaucracy, but it really helping as a whole.

It just needs time to find out what is working and what is not. Remember it's here for just few decades.

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Even if they get most of the things running on the M1, the games will be a problem. Because most of them is not targeted on the ARM architecture (with exception of mobile games). But what I read about the M1, the SoC (System on a Chip ) architecture on desktop computer is a big step forward and it will probably take over the desktop segment in the future.

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Quoting: randyl

Quoting: Egonaut

Quoting: rkfgThis is very bad and stupid. They basically force Valve to set the same prices everywhere, no matter how strong economic is in certain countries. I

No they don't. They force Valve and other Publishers to redeem keys all over the EU no matter in which EU country they have been bought. If Valve changes the Prices due to this, it's all up to them and not forced by anyone.

Valve doesn't set the price of a game, publishers do. Valve applies publisher set regional pricing and key validation restrictions so some countries don't have to pay the same price as more economically powerful nations and regions. This was asked for by both players and publishers.

This will just result in poorer countries paying more, or video game pricing going up for all. It sounds to me like richer Euros don't really care about that though. Let those poor nations eat video game cake if they can't afford bread!

Or going down if they earn less, because plenty of people will stop buying them.

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Quoting: mylkawhats the solution to this?
make games expensive for everyone, or cheaper?

In this case, treat EU like one country. Make the price same for all the countries inside it. I think it will not take long and the worldwide digital market will be without borders.

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Quoting: LungDrago

Quoting: ZlopezMost of the people doesn't bother with these things. You need to accept them to play the game, so you really don't have choice, if you want to play it. It's the same as with EULA, you can't really Disagree with it and still use the product.

Fascinating, we do have a choice, though. There is plenty of other products for us to use, it's not like we're forced to play games with shitty DRM and anticheat shenanigans. We could just move on to something else. That applies to us as in Linux gamers, so definately for Windows gamers as well. Strangely people seem drawn to the same shitty games like moths to a flame. Publishers would realize quickly that anticheat=bad if it made cuts into their revenue but gamers seem notoriously bad at voting with their wallets. Or just generally incapable of any more complex decision save for "game fun, me play" and "game not fun, me not play". It might've just killed them, but it is fun, so it is technically a good game :D

You have a choice if you don't want to play this particular game. But if you want to play it, you don't have any. It's same like being excited about one movie, but going to see another, because that one is only on Netflix. Most people would buy the Netflix subscription to watch the movie instead of choosing to watch something else. The hypetrain usually works as manipulation strategy well enough. If it didn't there wouldn't be exclusive titles on only one platform.

Not everybody is able to sacrifice something he loves, because it has some (in this case big) flaws.

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