RubberDuck

No, this is misrepresenting older hardware as state of the art, switching out hardware component of the system if you select the rental option, then asking a predatory rental fee, and littering the contract with mines that give the company cause to charge you extra or if they make mistakes reducing a 2 year legal period to adress the problem to a mere 60 days. And then using an army of influencers to lie and misrepresent this product in order to drive sales.

Corporate fines should be GDPR style… a percentage of global revenue.

I know… but plenty of writers of articles seem to use the term gamers to identify everyone that plays any game… so of you don’t identify your target audience good enough you run the risk of making something that on paper will appeal to everyone but in practice to no one.

And also successes of iterative games like fifa run on the fact that real world changes to for example teams players are in drive sales… Because the player base is invested in the real world sport… so they want this year’s game because now the players shifted teams. But a new iteration of other games will not have that external pull.

Well, gamers includes anyone sliding their finger on a phone screen now playing Farmville and stuff…and that is a looooooot of people. So that moves the needle on the average gamer a lot towards that end. And I think there is limited overlap between the people that use it as a time suck and the people that sit down and turn on their console/pc to play a game as a hobby.

So if the MBAs looked at statistics too much… you also get a warped idea.

It seems that stuff that gets people most excited are the inspired games made by creative people because they had a vision for their game…

They can turn off the game when they choose to.

Sure it has been brought up. But that’s why these investigations are good. If it’s true, slap em with a fine, if it’s not… valve can make a victory lap.

In the article

1. Price parity obligation clauses: We say that Valve Corporation imposes price parity clauses that restrict and prevent game developers from offering better prices on PC-games on rival platforms, limiting consumer choice and harming competition.

This seems to be common practice, but is anti competitive. If another platform would charge 20 instead of 30 pct and the publisher would give half this discount to the customers this would be against these clauses. Good that these are looked at.

2. Tying: We say that the restrictions Valve Corporation imposes, that mean the add-on content for games must also be purchased from Steam, restricts competition in the market.

And vice versa, steam dlc does not work with games on epic. Interesting case here too.

3. Excessive pricing: We argue that Valve Corporation has imposed an excessive commission, of up to 30%, charged to publishers, that resulted in inflated prices on its Steam platform.

The 30% market standard seems to be under fire across the board, so if there is a solid case to be made that this is excessive, I’m glad the watchdog is trying to make it.

In all good that this is investigated, cause just paying for another yaght or house for Gabe is not nessecary.

No it is not legal. Geo blocking within the EU is not allowed. But as always there are many exceptions… probably they will argue exception if ever taken to court, and if found in breach will just go “my bad” and get time to resolve the issue without a fine.

Probably not worth jumping though all the compliance hoops. Meaning it gets pretty risky if you do all sorts of shady shit without having lawyers and compliance people tell you which rules hurt and which are merely a small fine.

Or rooms of old people all sucked into their screen not talking to eachother

Mobile games are (mostly) pretty linear micro transaction hellscapes. But that is my opinion.

And I fully agree they (mobile games) have their market, which is fine for the people that play them. People can sit on the couch or on their commute and play some levels and spend the time.

The PC and console games are much more complex to create and draw in a completely different player base. It is more of a destination sort of speak.

Tossing these 2 on one pile means it is less clear how each of the markets are developing.

Yeah the conflation of mobile gaming with PC and console gaming is just bad. I don’t know how the cut should be made tbh but this seems silly.

On the other side, more and more midlife+ in online games like Helldivers, cod and such.

Fire GL 1000, Monster 3D, Matrox Millennium

Star Citizen has entered the chat…

This! I don’t understand this whole schtick… as doing it on the background is probably just as easy. The problem for Sony is that this is considered PII as it is unique to a human being meaning in the EU it can only be processed for a good and explicit reason or with voluntary consent.

Now using the argument it is required in order to provide the service might work… but then they (Sony) cannot use it for anything else without exposing them to liability of fines at a percentage or global revenue.

I played it without psn account so my experience is different from what you say. If in the first 2 hours I would have walked into this as a hard block I would have stopped and refunded.

Same is true for people unable to make a psn account but cannot because their country is not supported.

So while they indicated a 3rd party account it was not a hard requirement. If they would have shown all users a message clearly explaining that a psn account linking will be a hard requirement at some point… so better already do it… they might have had a better chance… but for me I disabled cross play in the first week also because the playstation players where insufferable mostly and it caused issues during gameplay.

Ha! I also turned off cross play as the function was nothing but causing me issues. Never looked back.