The Trump-Esptein class of people have just been reusing old plans from that era and the 80s, these greedy CEOs are doing the same thing just so they can make a bigger profit. Crash whatever ecosystem is in place then extract the wealth within without a care for making it better than it was before, not any real care.
I've been saying this more and more, but guys, are we having fun? Cause I'm not having fun. All the food has turned to cardboard, the media is rehashed and overpriced, and live shows are unaffordable. People can only afford to sit at home on their phones. The circus is in bad disrepair.
AI crash is gonna have lots more effects than that, too.
I can't even open youtube now without seeing a bunch of AI slop videos on nearly any topic. Tons of obviously fake bullshit but also a bunch where the "footage" looks realistic and you can only tell because they're doing ridiculously implausible things, like animal rescue videos where the animal "thanks" the person in a way animals don't.
All sorts of BS like that, churning out what gets views on masse but complete fabrications. Dead Internet Theory becoming less a theory every day.
That's just what capitalism does dawg. It comidifies everything to minimize cost and maximize profit, the end product is irrelevant as long as there are "people" buying.
I've got my eye on the kingdom hearts series in the summer sale. But I'm hesitant because I've got an ever growing list of "to plays" lol. Are they long games?
What do you consider long? My KH1 playthrough took about 50 hours on proud mode but a good chunk of that was mat farming for weapon crafting. You can beat each one in under 30 hours on normal mode.Ā
The more money you give them the more you encourage their greed.
The more theyll test boundaries, the more you give in, the more they ll test boundaries
Gaming needs another hard crash like in the 80s when it became a cynical slopfest and consumers simply lost interest and did other things.
I wont buy a single game anymore and luckily i spend a lot of my free time with my partner and traveling so i couldnt give a shit if i dont buy new games
Amen brother. I wish everyone did that too instead of preordering broken day one 100$ usd game.
I would do the same thing here, with the little difference that in case I really want to play something, I would buy indi games on gog (as they are DRM free and probably the only company I am interested to make sure it survives due to that very unique factor), also fisical copies of pre-owned games on e-bay or sail the seven seas.
Wait til people find out every single person with a pension, 401k, or retirement portfolio is a "shareholder" who directly benefits from these corporations performance.
Surprised I had to come this far down to find this kind of comment. At the end of the day these are all publicly traded companies that are trying to make their stock price increase.
Dynamic pricing should be illegal. Itās wholesale price fixing, discriminatory by nature, by default chooses winners and losers, and doesnāt allow for equal participation in the consumer market.
To be honest, personalized dynamic pricing is practically illegal in Europe. It's not that it's legally banned per se, but the compliance requirements are so strict that most companies just rule it out entirely.
Companies get around because all consumer electronics are "unilaterally priced." Meaning, everywhere you go, it'll be the same price.
How is this different from price fixing? Because these companies tell retailers that you can sell their products for whatever you want to. (But if you do, they stop selling to you wholesale and you're no longer authorized to sell their products.)
But because there's no contractual price, it's not considered price fixing.
Source: worked for a consumer electronics company for a decade and this policy was beaten into us.
this is essentially how all business works at every level where there's a big power imbalance
i worked a for a pretty big company that sold consumer products (health and beauty) but not a megaconglomerate like loreal, it was one specific brand
a couple years ago leading up to black friday, tiktok told us to commit 1% of our top-line revenue to go into a pot that tiktok controlled, to be used to give on-the-spot discounts to users. if we didn't, the algorithm would deprioritize us.
it was a shakedown, straight up, but phrased as like "oh its gonna be great its gonna drive sales right back to you" but we had no choice because what are we supposed to do, just ignore the biggest source of social sales on the planet? of course not, and they knew that.
google did something similar, forced us to switch over to some new ad buying process that was annoying and a little more expensive, or else we wouldn't appear in the list of black friday deals on google searches.
every big company that controls something smaller companies want flexes that power to squeeze smaller downstream companies all the time. its toxic and i hate it
I had the video on mute, and yet somehow the timing of his movements had the song play in my head. Imagine my surprise to finding out that was the exact song playing in the video lmao.
Yeah Valve does not care about you, they've just realised keeping their customers happy is better for long term stability so they're less shitty to you than other companies, they're not doing it out of the good of their heart, they do it so you won't leave
I dont need a company to care about me. Valve is great at what they do and htey give me a wonderfull experience. Their hardware is... barely if at all "overpriced" so no im not gonna be mad at a price tag if you dont want it dont buy it.
You fuckers need to stop whining and go fix your relationships with your parents if you need everything and everyone to "care"
The criticism of valve on this video isn't even really the same as the others, they didn't shut down studios, fire people, or make game playing harder... they just are pricing things in the reality of today's market because that's what it cost to build the thing to sell. (pretty telling that he's reaching for stuff to cricitize and had to pull out something like "didn't make another game in my favorite series yet")
It sucks, sure, but it's nowhere near as bad as the other two. Nintendo also is mostly fine, that palworld lawsuit was dumb. I'd argue valve and nintendo aren't really bad here, just living in our new economic reality and people are kinda mad about it. Which, sure, I get it, it sucks.
There's also so much more to be mad at Nintendo about. The Palworld lawsuit is just the barest tip of the giant "Nintendo loves suing indies" or "Nintendo hates its fans" iceberg.
They have a long, long history of callous, stupid, or anti-consumer moves.
I mean, how little self-respect do you need to have these days to buy their actual Pokemon games? It's not like they or Game Freak put much effort into making them, right? So many titles that are glorified cashgrabs and have been for years, because they know chumps will buy it.
Not here to defend Nintendo or anything but you don't have to buy the upgrade though. The Switch 2 is backwards compatible, so the games are playable on the new hardware, something that wasn't as common as people make it out to be. So you're not exactly forced to do anything. Not to mention, this is a steam reddit page, so you can take a lot of PC gamers advice and just wait for a sale, which seems to be happening a little more frequently for Nintendo lately
I prefer a company that seeks to make their customers happy than companies that seek to profit short term even at the expense of their reputation and customer happiness.
Yeah Valve does not care about you, they've just realised keeping their customers happy is better for long term stability so they're less shitty to you than other companies, they're not doing it out of the good of their heart, they do it so you won't leave
Not really. You're just warping reality to fit your agenda. The fact is Valve was being decent to its customers before they had that reputation, they didn't HAVE to do that to survive, and they still don't have to.. they are literally the default service which people will use regardless of whether they are nice are not. This is what every other company on the planet has realised at this point.. customer satisfaction is not a core goal, people will buy your shit regardless.
The fact is that almost any other company would have simply sold out for profit at this point and started introducing extreme gouging tactics to make even more money, and the fact Valve haven't stooped to that level should be applauded.
Instead you wanna shit on them and try to force them to change to be like every other company, then you'll just complain even more.
Yeah it's so insane to me to see that hatred because Valve sold the steam machine at cost. It opens the floodgates of people who just want to lump every company so they can not think about any nuances.
People who think the Steam Machine was gonna be 500 usd or something are delusional and haven't built a pc in the past 5 years. It's all been going to shit post covid.
And yeah couldn't agree more. Many don't even know the sff premium.
Which is what Sony realized during the PS4/Xbox One generation. Be pro consumer for a generation to kick Microsoft while theyāre down. And once theyāre basically terminally ill, open the floodgates of anti-consumer practices because thereās nowhere else for the casual gamers to go.
Every disease sucks too but I'd much rather have a cold than terminal cancer.
Doing this relativism BS is not only meaningless but it robs people the ability to critically compare and critique things. Every corporation doesn't suck equally, and some are way way way worse than others.
I feel like people are looking at this through rose tinted glasses. Recently played through pokemon red when it rereleased on the switch and almost every city has 1 pokemon center, 1 arena, 1 market and then... 3-4 civilian buildings. I swear little me didnt feel that way back then, but jesus these games were empty af.
But the people in those buildings sometimes gave you pokemon or rare items or useful tips, so new areas felt kind of exciting and interesting. Now it's just cardboard boxes and bug-eyed soulless npcs staring into space, "My Lapras carries me over water...:D"
Am I the only one who thought those were mostly tedious and not that interesting?
I went into every building and talked to the people, checked the trash, etc. to make sure I wasn't missing something good, but I wasn't excited about it most of the time.Ā
Broooo I'm glad you said that cause YAH. Old pokemon games are tedious af. I mean I love em, I grew up on em, but holy shit they are tedious. Running around talking to NPCs hoping to get items that will sit in my bag and never be touched, and the NPCs that do trades are like. You're only gonna talk to them if you have the pokemon to trade and want to trade.
I get what people are saying, it's just a little strange that the things they're missing are the things that were tedious padding that didn't really... do anything hahaha. When I was a kid I literally just cared about the pokemon and the battles. I couldn't give less of a shit about the human NPCs
I mean tbf I dont think most people are referring to pokemon red when thinking about full/alive feeling towns. For me, I think of HG/SS or DPPT where all the environments were thoughtfully populated. Jubilife City comes to mind. Im not saying the npcs were crazy deep or interesting or anything but they did exist and the interiors of the buildings were accessible, I really enjoyed talking to everyone as a kid
Back then, this was due to technological limitations - today, there's no reason to release such software-garbage anymore. Oh wait, there is: People are still buying it like hot cakes.
XD love how steams biggest issues are no continuations of old games and steam machine price which its not their fault, while other companies have 100x worse issues
You shouldāve seen the ps5 subreddit with all the ps5 pro owners sniffing their own farts after the steam machine price was announced. āThey all laughed at us for paying $800 for a ps5 pro look whoās laughing nowā x 500
Saw the same with some Nintendo bootlickers. Acting as if Labo wasnāt a thing, and thinking that Nintendo was better than steam cuz they saw the price of the cube
Most console players donāt care to know that consoles are sold at a loss to make their money back in ecosystem purchases. If a ps5 pro is $900 it surely cost as much or more than a cube to produce now. I assume they made 90% of them 4 years ago, though.
The whole laughing at the other guy thing is stupid anyway. Weāre all losing in this situation. The end game is owning no console, no pc, and streaming all your content that you have to rent for a monthly fee. Thatās what they want.
More expensive, are built mostly to play games (while pc can do so much more), games are more expensive, sony can just delete games from your account (as they done multiple times), subscriptions to play online, bad support, much fewer games etc. Consoles are good only if you want cheap entry, want just to sit on couch and play mainstream titles lets say once/twice a month, just typical casual. (But id still argue if its better because you can get cheap good used pc that will cost the same yet in long run will be much better in everything)
Something people like to forget is that everyone needs a form of personal computing either way. Nobody gets around buying a laptop or a PC for writing job applications, even if it's just a cheap one for basic tasks.
Whatever their ipdad/shitty dell laptop cost, needs to be added to their console price. Because PC gamers have all that functionality built into their build.
I think the bigger point to make about the Steam machine is that nobody is required to buy it. You can build your own hardware if you don't like the price or buy a prebuilt from another company.
Iām no Nintendo apologist, but having like 2 $80 games is not equivalent to things like closing entire studios, and the rest donāt even really make sense. Joycon drift is an issue from 6 years ago, I donāt know why he bothered to list a Pokemon game (they come and go and the mainline ones are about all the same. There are of other, better games coming from Nintendo all the time. If heās gonna list a Pokemon game he needs to list how badly Microsoft bungled Halo for starters), all of these companies are constantly in lawsuits (saw a headline today that Sonyās tied up in multiple suits over their PlayStation store being a monopoly, for example), and Nintendoās price is still hundreds lower than any of the others.
My biggest issue with Nintendo is just, selling full priced games 5, 6, 7 years on. Which is precisely why Sony and co have been so horny to kill the secondary / physical market for so long, because they want to get away with that too, but people won't tolerate it from them.
Without physical copies, Nintendo's model is going to become the standard.
Yeah I am a big Nintendo fan but this kind of shit kills me. Especially because my son really wants a Kirby Air Riders but I'm not convinced he'll play it longer than an hour... So I want to wait for a sale. Except it'll never go below $50.
If you're gonna say steam machine being $1000 isn't valves fault you gotta point out GKCs only exist because cartridges are too expensive to produce as well
I mean, that's DRAM pricing right now. We're talking about a 600% increase. They're no more immune to it than consumers are, especially when you have big players pre-purchasing stock. Valve even said it, if they say no to a DRAM supplier's pricing, they're fucked because the supplier doesn't need their business. There are other buyers.
"The console we said would be overpriced will be overpriced, two games we didnt announce we're still not making, and no, we have not yet turned into a herd of alpaca, we are in fact still a business"
You don't own the games you buy on Steam. I like Steam and use it for the majority of my purchases, but people need to remember this. And people who defend it by saying well in the past Valve has let you still download delisted games, are missing the point.
Idk who actually expected the Steam Machine be under 1000 with the current component prices. And I'm not justifying the price, I think it's too high for what it offers but it's reality
Yea they said that the price hike for the Steam Machine was around the same as for the Steam Deck so the real price for Machine was maybe around 700 which would've been much more manageable
Anyone who has no followed hard ware prices in the last year. Heck, about 3 years ago i bough a new pc and I decided to throw away my old ram as it was 20 ā¬ worth at most, if I would find a buyer and was not worth the hassle in my eyes. Today I could have sold it for over 100.
You don't need to ignore those things for Valve/Steam to still be light years ahead of Sony's shitty hubris, Nintendo's legal attacks, and Xbox's delusions that stem from Microsoft.
Most important is "you thought I was your friend". None of them are your friends! Corporations, games companies, soft drink brands, fast food companies etc etc etc, they do not and never will have your best wishes at heart. Never ever ever think that any of them are on your side.
How will Rockstar (for example) justify getting people to pay full price for the same game 3 times if there's no physical copies? When GTA 6 releases on newer hardware, I mean.
I mean, even with physical media backward compatibility wasn't always a guarantee so you'd need to re-buy it to play on a newer consoles.
But even digitally, sometimes when they release an enhanced edition that gives 0 new content you get a free version if you own the original version but even this isn't the norm. PLENTY just sell it and go "oh what about a small discount?"
What do you mean? There are people who bought multiple editions of Skyrim every platform switch. I bought two back in the day, one for PC and one for Switch.
they're digging for anything to put PC in. You don't need a 1k steam machine. You can game on anything for PC. No one cares about a rushed hl3. And the team that did left 4 dead went on to do back 4 blood. Where that at? Oh in the gutter.
It's all media at this point. Lots of regurgitated ideas and a lot of "my opinion is fact and you are wrong and bad for disagreeing with me" whether that be positive or negative critique of a piece of media.
People are still treating the steam machine like itās only a console and itās annoying me. NO it shouldnāt be 1k, but itās also not entirely Valveās fault.
Putting Valve in here when their only fuckup was releasing a 1.000$ PC (because of the RAM shortage) is funny to me.
The other platform are genuinely fucking over their customers,all while you can just decide to not buy a Valve PC and you are still fine on PC lol
Lmao, what's hilarious is when Steam released the Steam Machine and everyone b*tched about how expensive it is, citing how cheap a new PS5/Xbox is in comparison, and then like a week or less after both Microsoft and Sony are like "actually fam, stuff is just damn expensive now, so get ready to pay more". Steam Machine is still a letdown, other companies have done it better already, but not really as outrageous as people made it out to be.
Meanwhile every console maker is speed running how fast they can turn their next console into a worse version of a modern PC.
Valve's nobody's friend, but the hardware prices increasing across the board is the result of AI bullshit rather than the actions of any of these divisions.
Of course, Nintendo actively raising their employees' salaries and hiring more on while other corps are laying off developers left and right makes them look a lot better, even if they did... put out one game you don't like
believe it or not nintendo doesn't use the key cards. they provided the options for other developers but every nintendo owned property I have purchased was an actual game on the card.
Lol everyone thinks they're dunking on valve when they point out the bad value to cost ratio on the steam machine.Ā
Like... Yeah... When they started developing the thing, they didn't expect component prices to double/nearly triple by the time it was ready for release, fuck them right?Ā
Just wait until the unsold stock of Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft runs out, you think consoles are going to be immune to the price gouging? Good luck with that.Ā
I love that the valve criticism is "gabecube too expensive and they didn't give us a 3rd game for nearly 20yo IPs" lmfao y'all really don't have any actual beef do you
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u/Slydoggen 20d ago
Gaming have never been bigger and more popularā¦ itās insane how far the big corps have gone to destroy everything for CEO profit