Evening Newbs

This is completely incorrect. Their contract states that you can’t sell Steam keys for less elsewhere, which is entirely fair in my opinion. If your game is on multiple platforms or storefronts, you can sell it for whatever price you want there. The fact is that nobody does; they list it for the same everywhere and pocket the difference if someone buys on EGS.

If this was true, games would cost 18% less on EGS because they only take 12%. Shockingly enough, they cost the same.

Because support is missing from SteamVR, existing games, or both.

None of these features are usable in SteamVR, or if they are, aren’t supported by any games, like HDR.

Nature is healing.

Most games have a day one patch, but the game on the disc is usually playable without it.

I wish people would stop parroting this. For the vast, vast majority of games it isn’t true.

It’s much faster.

Most of those were preexisting contracts they needed to fulfill. You’re the one who’s arguing in bad faith.

Astroturfing is a very real thing that major companies participate in to sway public sentiment.

The suggestion here is that the type of game that can thrive on a subscription service is either a small one that benefits from better curation and visibility or a live-service one that can make up revenue on the backend by charging all the new players microtransactions (the new store shelves are inside the games themselves).

I’ve been saying this since Game Pass launched: it encourages scummy monetization. The kind of games that come to it are going to have more and more content locked away behind microtransactions to make up the money lost by not selling copies. It’s going to gradually become full of “free” to play garbage, and people will accept it because they didn’t pay for an individual game outright.

This smells like desperation.

I said “generally.” There are a few publishers that ship empty discs, and some games that are completely broken without a day-one patch, but most still have a playable game on the disc, at least on PlayStation. On Xbox, for games that have backwards compatibility with One, they often couldn’t fit both game builds on one disc, so they made one version download-only instead of shipping two discs.

For PC games, no, they’re not actually on the disc. For console games, they generally are the full game, albeit sometimes buggy without the day-one patch.