Steam Developers Can Now Set Their Own Discounts

Aha! I knew Steam was setting the prices in the store all along! On the official steam community hundreds of users are spreading false information that the publisher decides on steam sale prices. Now it's revealed that Steam has been deciding the prices all along. I knew I was right!
 
ZodaEX said:
Aha! I knew Steam was setting the prices in the store all along! On the official steam community hundreds of users are spreading false information that the publisher decides on steam sale prices. Now it's revealed that Steam has been deciding the prices all along. I knew I was right!
Click to expand...

What? Steam did not decide the prices on the software. Developers would let Steam know what price they want during sales. Steam then would set the price according to what the developer wanted.

Now developers can do all that stuff themselves without waiting for Steam to act like before. Steam didn't just pick a game and change the price without developer's permission.
 
ZodaEX said:
Aha! I knew Steam was setting the prices in the store all along! On the official steam community hundreds of users are spreading false information that the publisher decides on steam sale prices. Now it's revealed that Steam has been deciding the prices all along. I knew I was right!
Click to expand...

From the article:
"Prior to this, Steam and developers had to work together to create individual Steam sales."

Good job on reading the article first.
 
I can see this as a benefit. Lets say a developer wants to put an ad on a bit torrent site and say 1 day only sale for game tomorrow.

Before, sometimes their web site would have one price, but steam wasn't on sale.

Much easier to do now. :)
 
This is how it worked previously (random google image search):
Steam-Autumn-and-Winter-Holiday-Sales-2013-Get-Leaked-Start-Dates.png
 
I can't wait until someone from a big gaming company accidentally sets their price from 59.95 to 5.99, or screws up even more and sets it to 0.59 cents. :D
 
Uh yeah, I'd like to buy 10 copies of the game...
oh wait no, better name it 100copies :p
 
Geef said:
I can't wait until someone from a big gaming company accidentally sets their price from 59.95 to 5.99, or screws up even more and sets it to 0.59 cents. :D
Click to expand...

As much as I enjoy a good discount I do actually dislike taking advantage of a company who makes an honest mistake ... although there are a few companies who I wouldn't mind taking advantage of (cough cough **EA** cough cough) I generally prefer paying a realistic price for a game (doesn't mean I don't wait for a sale but I am not waiting for a clear mistake to occur either) :)
 
About time. Now if they can just unban all the falsely accused cheaters.
 
Kenworth said:
From the article:
"Prior to this, Steam and developers had to work together to create individual Steam sales."

Good job on reading the article first.
Click to expand...

WTF dudes? How many exclamation mark atoms do you need to detect traces of Sarcasium?
 
kbrickley said:
As much as I enjoy a good discount I do actually dislike taking advantage of a company who makes an honest mistake ... although there are a few companies who I wouldn't mind taking advantage of (cough cough **EA** cough cough) I generally prefer paying a realistic price for a game (doesn't mean I don't wait for a sale but I am not waiting for a clear mistake to occur either) :)
Click to expand...

$5.99 is a fair price for just about anything EA puts out on the shelf and dares to call it a game worth owning lately.
 
SamuraiInBlack said:
$5.99 is a fair price for just about anything EA puts out on the shelf and dares to call it a game worth owning lately.
Click to expand...

Eh I dunno, I would still have a hard time buying it. EA has pissed me off pretty hard. Of course if it tried to force origin I wouldn't even take it if free.
 
Its good to see things like this, anything that helps devs promote their stuff, is good for gamers.
 
I don't get steam, why should I sign up and buy a game and then beg them to let me play it?
Am I missing something?
Sure you might get a discount but it's still 3rd party.
 
Honestly, you have to try it. I hated the idea of Steam at first. Now, that's about all I use (haven't bought a boxed game in years). It isn't as bad as you say. It works very well in reality.



ep0x73 said:
I don't get steam, why should I sign up and buy a game and then beg them to let me play it?
Am I missing something?
Sure you might get a discount but it's still 3rd party.
Click to expand...
 
"Like us on facebook to find out which hour we will have a flash sale of awesome"
 
dgz said:
WTF dudes? How many exclamation mark atoms do you need to detect traces of Sarcasium?
Click to expand...

Damn. I needed more hyperbole to be won over. Maybe he could use millions of users next time. I would then be convinced.
 
Guess I am just old school and like a physical CD to install and then keep the CD in my holder rack.

I suppose I could look into it more but it still looks and feels like a subscription and you giving somebody access to your computer through an account.
 
ZodaEX said:
Aha! I knew Steam was setting the prices in the store all along! On the official steam community hundreds of users are spreading false information that the publisher decides on steam sale prices. Now it's revealed that Steam has been deciding the prices all along. I knew I was right!
Click to expand...

:facedesk:
 
ep0x73 said:
I don't get steam, why should I sign up and buy a game and then beg them to let me play it?
Am I missing something?
Sure you might get a discount but it's still 3rd party.
Click to expand...

You ask a very good question actually. Steam is a double-edged sword, and I have a love/hate relationship with it. On the one hand, the way you phrase it is perhaps more apt than you know, and I'll get Steam's downsides out of the way first:
  • Steam has one of the worst Terms of Service/EULA's ever devised by scumsucking lawyers this side of hell. Game publishers have been trying to erode the concept of consumer game ownership and first sale doctrine for a long time, but Steam's EULA completely barfs all over the idea that puny little individual consumers should ever actually own anything of value at all: You pay for a license to play a game for as long as they choose to let you in their almighty benevolence, as if you're renting games at purchasing prices and have to give them back with little recourse the moment you upset the lender. Steam has a limited built-in gifting/trading feature for unactivated games, but you cannot sell/trade/give away your games or exchange them between accounts once they're tied to an account. You can partake in a "family sharing" program, but only *one* game connected to your account may be played at one time: If you "own" both Fallout and Skyrim, you can set it up so you and your wife can play either...but not at the same time, unlike any other games or forms of media you have ever owned. (I don't buy the excuse that "the publishers make Steam do it like this" either, because Steam was the trailblazer for excessive corporate power and anti-consumerism in this particular area.) After all, according to Steam, you don't own these games. It's more like Netflix, where you pay a subscription fee for temporary access to movies, except with Steam you pay an individual fee for each game, and the games are not replaced on a cyclical basis. Instead, you keep them indefinitely, and usually forever (but the account isn't transferable upon death, because you own nothing in reality you puny human, lololololol)...unless they're utterly revoked according to the whims of the almighty banhammer.
  • It's relatively easy to run afoul of Steam's almighty banhammer and get locked out from playing your games without doing anything wrong...you just have to be unlucky: For instance, say some scammer buys a whole bunch of unactivated games with a stolen credit card number and trades them to other people. If you're one of the people he trades with, and you make enough trades, Steam employees may decide that you're working in concert. Once the chargebacks come and Steam doesn't get paid, they not only ban the scammer but *you too* by association. Their policy here isn't sane or reasonable either: It's not like they lock the games in question and put a moratorium on your account from making any new transactions until a thorough investigation is complete. No, you *instantly* lose all access to every game you've ever paid for (even thousands of dollars worth). There is no due process or presumption of innocence. There is no jury trial, no public trial, and no charges (and if you try to sue, your hands are somewhat tied by the EULA's terms, arbitration clauses, etc., although you can still manage small claims if necessary). Basically, you have *no rights* over anything you "buy" on Steam, because you own nothing, and all of the money you paid is just so Steam would give you access according to - ultimately - the whims of its staff. You can appeal to that same staff, but...
  • For such a lucrative company, Steam's customer support is some of the worst in the world. There's absolutely no transparency at all: No matter how serious your issue (e.g. being locked out of thousands of games), your only channel of communication is email, and you will almost always get a form letter back the first time saying, "Sorry, but you're guilty of something and we can't help you. Have a nice life." The same thing happens if your account gets hacked, because it's simply easier for Valve to make that *your* problem than to take any responsibility for ensuring their punishments are just or fair. There's a thick opaque separation between the customers and staff, and the staff have no accountability to individual customers, so you never have any idea whether your issue will reach a reasonable empathetic human being or some power-drunk minor tyrant basking in the glory of his banhammer while the orange Dorito dust accumulates on his belly-button hairs, who responds to every serious plea for help with "LOL, denied. Form letter on its way." Sometimes, *eventually*, with enough persistence, you can get your issue resolved by someone who cares, but it can take a lot of work: There are a lot of good people working for Steam, but there's no way to know who you're going to get...and even the good ones are generally inundated with support tickets from morons, scammers, cheaters, etc., so they've grown jaded, and their first instinct is usually "impersonal form letter that expresses insincere regret over being unable to help." However, even *if* the customer support representative recognizes the issue was not your fault and revokes your ban, it's not like the slate is wiped clean: No, it's more like they "let you off with a warning" in their great magnanimity, but if anything ever goes wrong with your account again, well...good luck.
  • The same shoddy customer service applies to less serious VAC-bans: If Valve Anti-Cheat detects what it believes to be an exploit, your account will be banned from playing on VAC multiplayer servers for any game running the same game engine...forever. If it was a false positive, you'd better hope it's not an engine that's widely reused by many games. Now, VAC is much more conservative than e.g. Punkbuster and has a much lower rate of false positives. In fact, it's probably the best anti-cheat system that has ever been written, but this has created a very unsettling mentality of blind faith: According to Valve, VAC is *infallible*, and all bans are final and irreversible, etc. Now, the funny thing is that there have been isolated instances in which a specific good-hearted support representative has admitted an individual ban or two was a mistake (after enough persistent pleading), and there was also a highly publicized incident in which about 12,000 accounts were banned as the result of a VAC bug...but Valve still maintains that VAC is basically infallible, because they *have to* in order to seemingly justify their usual stance of "Zero tolerance, zero recourse, zero investigation, zero common sense, bans are final, have a nice life." It's like Minority Report: The stability of the system depends on the lie that it's infallible. Moreover, Valve can only get by on such a lean staff with such large profit margins so long as the lie persists...and so it does. (A lot of people seem to believe that Gabe Newell doesn't really care about money. That may be true, but even so, he still apparently cares about minimalism and extreme efficiency at the expense of service quality.)
  • The biggest problem here is that there are so many players so fed up with online cheating and enamored of the positives of Steam (below) that they actually buy Valve's bullshit about infallibility. They know from experience that VAC is relatively conservative (because cheating is still prevalent, mainly from people who make new accounts so they can cheat in a single free or cheap game), so they've convinced themselves that VAC only concerns itself with the unique signature of specific exploits, precluding the possibility of false positives. In other words, they take Valve at their word when they say VAC is infallible and then project onto VAC their personal idea of how an infallible system must work. However, that's NOT how VAC actually works: That is, VAC *does* do those things, but not exclusively. It's not some simple little program that checks only for unmistakable signatures: Instead, it's so complex that Valve never lets more than a portion of VAC run on a single machine at once. It's always changing and evolving and being run in small pieces, so that hackers can't learn the entirety of VAC to develop effective countermeasures...but as any software developer should know, this complexity inevitably breeds bugginess. Moreover, not every exploit has a fingerprint so obvious that it can be detected without false positives, and the moment you involve heuristics (no matter how conservative) to bridge the gap, there are going to be false positives (no matter how occasional). Combined, this can result in sporadic bugs where, under certain conditions which only pop up from time to time, legitimate mods (or game updates VAC isn't aware of, as in the 12,000 bans case ;)) will be detected as a forbidden exploit.
  • However, as mentioned...the community is so enamored of Valve and so tired of cheaters that a witch hunt mentality has developed. Not only does Valve get away with terrible customer support, but the community actively shields Valve from any accountability. Let's say you get banned by mistake and post to find out if it happened to anyone else, or Valve is totally unresponsive and unhelpful and you need the community to help you exert pressure on them: Be prepared for a deluge of comments to the effect of, "You must have done something," or "Just admit it, you're guilty of cheating," or, "It's so obvious you're lying, because VAC is conservative and infallible," and "If she doesn't drown, she's a witch!" No matter how many times the facts demonstrate VAC is fallible, it's always the same story, and you're always going to have people saying, "Well, given the track record of cheaters pretending they didn't cheat, I'm going to believe Valve over you." The irony here of course is that this track record has itself been written according to the prejudices of the witch hunters, wherein any banned player who *isn't* redeemed by Valve is assumed guilty until proven innocent, and the historical record reflects that judgment.
  • Occasionally Valve support *will* redeem someone. Here it was done without a fuss (which is EXTREMELY unusual), but here the victim had to put up with a lot of bullshit before someone actually looked into his case for real. These occasional benevolent admissions of error by Valve demonstrate that VAC is flawed...but instead of getting this message, the witch hunters take it to mean it somehow "proves" that Valve's support will always come through in the end for real victims, and if they don't, it means you were a cheater. It's absurd, but that's how the community works, and they never stop to consider the possibility that maybe a lot of bans were mistakes that were never actually addressed, and that Valve gets away with this total lack of transparency and accountability because the community is too blinded by their hatred of cheaters to realize it could happen to anyone. I mean, I don't know if ZodaEX was being serious or sarcastic, but rudy's eye-rolling smiley basically epitomizes the attitude of the Steam community toward the idea that VAC is fallible.

So, why does the Steam community idolize Steam/Valve so much and put such a naive amount of trust into them? WHY would you ever want to go through gatekeeper Valve to play your games? Because, despite all its problems, Steam still adds a TON of value:
[*]Assuming nothing ever goes wrong, you can have access to all of your games on all of your machines, whenever you want. You don't have to go through the manual chore of installing a game from a stack of CD's or DVD's: Instead, you just point to a game in your Steam list, tell it to install, and your client will download the game over your high-speed connection and install it overnight (or while you're eating a sandwich, for a smaller game).
[*]That may not sound like much until you realize: Most Steam players have a TON of games in their library, some of which may or may not be installed at any given moment. No-fuss on-demand installation dramatically cuts down on tedious human work when you're reinstalling your OS, and it's also great when your hard drive isn't even big enough to store all of your games at once, or when you're reinstalling Windows (ugh, Windows ;)) and need to reinstall your games too.
[*]So, why do Steam gamers have such large collections? Because Valve is *smart* in the area of pricing and marketing, and so are a lot of developers that publish on Steam: They constantly put games on sale and make them impulse purchases that gamers just *have to buy at that price*, like Randy from South Park going to Wal-Mart in the middle of the night because he *has* to buy what's on sale. :p The pricing model for the PC gaming market is MUCH different from console games, because it's much more responsive to consumer demand and price optimality...and a lot of it is thanks to Steam and Valve. Basically, for all the corporate BS in their terms of service, Valve at least understands that it's the *demand* side that determines the true value of a good or service, and they've done a lot of good in encouraging that mentality among developers and publishers in the PC-space. Steam makes a ton of money off of impulse purchases by gamers who wouldn't shell out $60 or even $30 for a game they may or may not have time to play...but who won't hesitate to buy a blockbuster for $5 a year or two after release, just on the off-chance they might play it. (Indie bundles also epitomize this mentality.) This means Steam makes a ton of money, developers make a lot of money off of gamers who otherwise never would have bought their games, and gamers often have a TON of games in their library to choose from at any time. This makes no-fuss on-demand installation invaluable to gamers.
[*]Moreover, Steam eliminates the need to manually synchronize your saved games across machines and backups: You can automatically synchronize all of your saved games to the Steam cloud, so you'll never lose them, and you can always pick up from where you left off no matter what machine you last played on. It's pretty awesome.[/LIST]

In other words, Steam is both great and terrible all at once. I truly despise their policies, and I'm worried that my continued business with them is contributing to the problem rather than the solution, but the advantages Steam brings still seem worthwhile enough to me for now (especially in comparison with the blatant spyware that EA (Origin) and Ubisoft (Uplay)), and Valve is doing enough good in other areas that they may someday improve in this area as well. I haven't had any disputes with Valve myself, but I use Steam in the fear that someday something might go horribly wrong with my account, just as it has for so many others. I'm paranoid enough of their "shoot first, ask questions later" policies and rabid fanboys that I'll probably never use their trading features with someone I don't trust implicitly, and I'll probably set up a totally separate account if I ever have the intention of playing any one online game on a regular basis. I originally had the intention of using a separate account for every game, but that's too much of a pain, and it destroys almost all of Steam's advantages. Instead, I just do what I can to stay in Steam's good graces, and I'll figure out what to do about losing all of my games if I'm ever unlucky enough for it to come to that.

I do worry though: As time passes by, gamers invest more and more money into their Steam accounts, which gives Valve/Steam an increasing amount of leverage/power that they can abuse without recourse. I really hope Gabe Newell decides to turn the ship around policy-wise, but I don't know if it's going to happen. He's reasonable enough about issues like DRM that I see it as a possibility, but I don't know the man either. At this point a lot of Steam's Terms of Service problems probably come from undisclosed agreements with major publishers that Valve is forced to adhere to, but even if this is the case, Valve dug its own hole trailblazing the worst and most disempowering model of consumer non-ownership the gaming industry has ever seen, before the other publishers even dreamed of going so far. Still, hopefully Newell will see the light someday and maneuver Valve into more consumer-friendly terms of service in the future, and hopefully he'll get some motivation someday to bring some transparency and accountability to Steam's authoritarian policies and support model.

Steam has the potential to be God's gift to gamers...or the potential to destroy the idea of consumer game ownership for the forseeable future. Only time will tell.
 
Oh, CRAP. This is why I need to preview things before I send them...no edit. Okay, the big "second paragraph" after the first list should be another list, and I'll reproduce it here for better readability:
_________________________
So, why does the Steam community idolize Steam/Valve so much and put such a naive amount of trust into them? WHY would you ever want to go through gatekeeper Valve to play your games? Because, despite all its problems, Steam still adds a TON of value:
  • Assuming nothing ever goes wrong, you can have access to all of your games on all of your machines, whenever you want. You don't have to go through the manual chore of installing a game from a stack of CD's or DVD's: Instead, you just point to a game in your Steam list, tell it to install, and your client will download the game over your high-speed connection and install it overnight (or while you're eating a sandwich, for a smaller game).
  • That may not sound like much until you realize: Most Steam players have a TON of games in their library, some of which may or may not be installed at any given moment. No-fuss on-demand installation dramatically cuts down on tedious human work when you're reinstalling your OS, and it's also great when your hard drive isn't even big enough to store all of your games at once, or when you're reinstalling Windows (ugh, Windows ) and need to reinstall your games too.
  • So, why do Steam gamers have such large collections? Because Valve is *smart* in the area of pricing and marketing, and so are a lot of developers that publish on Steam: They constantly put games on sale and make them impulse purchases that gamers just *have to buy at that price*, like Randy from South Park going to Wal-Mart in the middle of the night because he *has* to buy what's on sale. The pricing model for the PC gaming market is MUCH different from console games, because it's much more responsive to consumer demand and price optimality...and a lot of it is thanks to Steam and Valve. Basically, for all the corporate BS in their terms of service, Valve at least understands that it's the *demand* side that determines the true value of a good or service, and they've done a lot of good in encouraging that mentality among developers and publishers in the PC-space. Steam makes a ton of money off of impulse purchases by gamers who wouldn't shell out $60 or even $30 for a game they may or may not have time to play...but who won't hesitate to buy a blockbuster for $5 a year or two after release, just on the off-chance they might play it. (Indie bundles also epitomize this mentality.) This means Steam makes a ton of money, developers make a lot of money off of gamers who otherwise never would have bought their games, and gamers often have a TON of games in their library to choose from at any time. This makes no-fuss on-demand installation invaluable to gamers.
  • Moreover, Steam eliminates the need to manually synchronize your saved games across machines and backups: You can automatically synchronize all of your saved games to the Steam cloud, so you'll never lose them, and you can always pick up from where you left off no matter what machine you last played on. It's pretty awesome.

...
 
Geef said:
Uh yeah, I'd like to buy 10 copies of the game...
oh wait no, better name it 100copies :p
Click to expand...

Buying multiple copies of games on Steam, unless it's a bundle, is a PITA. Like seriously, you have to repeat the process from step 1. You can't even just keep selecting the add to cart button because if it's already in your cart it takes you to your cart so you can check that game out.

Although if a game for $60 was set at $.60 by mistake, I would continue ordering it until they fixed the price mistake. I'd say $59.40 for ~3 minutes of my time is worth it.
 
ep0x73 said:
I don't get steam, why should I sign up and buy a game and then beg them to let me play it?
Am I missing something?
Sure you might get a discount but it's still 3rd party.
Click to expand...

I've never begged anyone to play my Steam/Origin games. :confused: I do agree that the idea of them being deactivated in the future can be worrisome, though I doubt that will happen anytime soon. Currently, games cost less and are less of a hassle to install with Steam/Origin.
 
Skillz said:
Buying multiple copies of games on Steam, unless it's a bundle, is a PITA. Like seriously, you have to repeat the process from step 1. You can't even just keep selecting the add to cart button because if it's already in your cart it takes you to your cart so you can check that game out.

Although if a game for $60 was set at $.60 by mistake, I would continue ordering it until they fixed the price mistake. I'd say $59.40 for ~3 minutes of my time is worth it.
Click to expand...

Bottomfeeding at its finest
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top