Trying a switch to [email protected], at least for a while, due to recent kbin.social stability problems and to help spread load.

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  • 114 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 13th, 2023
  • tal@kbin.socialtoGames@lemmy.world•Valve loses a court case in the EU and has to pay 1.6 million euros in fines for geoblocking
    7·
    9 months ago

    The EU is preventing price discrimination within the EU.

    They do have that requirement as part of the Digital Markets Act, but I don’t believe that that’s what the case here is addressing. That is not what the article OP posted or the article I linked to is saying: they are specifically saying that what is at issue is sales outside Europe.

    EDIT: I am thinking that maybe the article is just in error. I mean, just from an economic standpoint, the EU doing this would create a major mess for international companies.

    EDIT2: Okay, here’s an archive.ph link of the original Bloomberg article:

    https://archive.ph/JuM0z#selection-4849.212-4863.277

    In the contested arrangement with Valve, users were left unable to access some games that were available in other EU nations.

    Yeah, so it’s just that these “mezha.media” guys mis-summarized the Bloomberg article.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoGames@lemmy.world•Valve loses a court case in the EU and has to pay 1.6 million euros in fines for geoblocking
    61·
    9 months ago

    But retail law attaches to a location, not to citizenship. Why would the EU be mandating sale of things in other regions? I mean, it’s not like the US says “if an American citizen is living in the EU, then vendors operating in the EU must follow American retail law when selling to him”.

    EDIT: Okay, I went looking for another article.

    https://www.gearrice.com/update/steam-cannot-block-the-activation-of-a-game-depending-on-the-country-of-purchase-europe-confirms/

    Steam specifies in its terms of use that it is prohibited to use a VPN or equivalent to change your location on the platform. Except that it takes the case of the activation of a game given to you by someone and sent to your account. Following Europe’s decision, this should technically change and it would be possible to change region in Steam directly to buy a game then activate it in France. Valve has not made a comment at this time.

    Hmm. Okay, if that is an accurate summary – and I am not sure that it is – that seems like the EU is saying “you must be able to use a VPN to buy something anywhere in the world, then activate it in Europe”. Yeah, I can definitely see Valve objecting to that, because that’d kill their ability to have one price in the (wealthy) EU and one in (poor) Eritrea, say. Someone in France would just VPN to Eritrea, buy at Eritrean prices, and then use it in France. The ability to have region-specific pricing is significant for digital goods, where almost all the costs are the fixed development costs.

    thinks

    If that is an accurate representation of the situation, that seems like it’d be pretty problematic for not just Valve, but also other digital vendors, since it’d basically force EU prices to be the same as the lowest prices that they could sell a digital product at in the world. I don’t know how one would deal with that. I guess that they could make an EU-based company (“Valve Germany”) or something that sells in the EU, and have a separate company that does international sales and does not sell in the EU.

    I mean, otherwise a vendor is either going to not be able to offer something in Eritrea (using it as a stand-in for random poor countries), is going to have to sell it at a price that is going to be completely unaffordable to Eritreans, or is going to have to take a huge hit on pricing in the EU.

    I’m a little suspicious that this isn’t a complete summary of the situation, though; that seems like it’d create too many issues.

    EDIT2: Though looking at my linked-to article, it seems to be that the author is saying that that’s exactly what the situation is.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoGames@lemmy.world•Valve loses a court case in the EU and has to pay 1.6 million euros in fines for geoblocking
    32·
    9 months ago

    Valve was fined €1.6 million ($1.7 million) for obstructing the sale of certain PC video games outside Europe. However, the company pleaded not guilty.

    Wait, outside Europe?

    Some countries make it illegal to buy certain video games. If Valve can’t geoblock sale of them outside Europe, how are they supposed to conform with both sets of laws?

    I remember that the EU didn’t want country-specific pricing inside the EU, and had some case over that. That I get, because I can see the EU having an interest in not wanting it creating problems for mobility around the EU. But I hadn’t heard about the EU going after vendors for not selling things outside Europe.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoGames@lemmy.world•The Xbox Series S Is More Popular Than The Xbox Series X
    2·
    10 months ago

    I mean, I would rather have a Steam Deck too, but then we’re getting into how much people value openness versus price, and that’s definitely not a constant; some people aren’t going to care much about openness.

    That said, if I were trying to compare Valve’s offering and Microsoft’s offering, I’d probably compare a desktop PC running Steam to the XBox, as they’re more-physically-comparable in terms of what they can do; the Series S doesn’t have one having to pay for mobility. If one were comparing to a mobile console, then sure, the Deck is a legit comparison.

    I still would say that the XBox Series S is going to be cheaper on the low end, though, than a desktop PC. You can get a $279 PC that can play games and a comparable controller, but I’d bet that it’d be more-limited than a Series S.

    That being said, Microsoft sells the XBox at a loss, and then makes it back by jacking up the price of games:

    https://www.pcmag.com/news/microsoft-says-xbox-consoles-have-always-been-sold-at-a-loss

    As VGC points out, Wright was also asked if there’s ever been a profit generated from an Xbox console sale, which she confirmed has never happened. To put that in context, Microsoft has been selling Xbox consoles for nearly 20 years now, including the original Xbox, the Xbox 360, Xbox One, and now the Xbox Series X and Series S. In all that time, every single console sale cost Microsoft money.

    The reason game consoles end up being profitable is through a combination of software, service, and accessory sales, but it’s still surprising to find Microsoft has never achieved hardware profitability. Analyst Daniel Ahmad confirmed that the PS4 eventually became profitable for Sony and that Nintendo developed the Switch to be profitable quickly, so Microsoft is the odd one out.

    We know that consumers weight the up-front price of hardware disproportionately – that’s why you have companies selling cell phones at a loss, locking them to their network, and then making the money back in increased subscription fees. I assume that that’s to try to take advantage of that phenomenon.

    If you wanted to compare the full price that you pay over the lifetime of the console, one would probably need to account for the increased game price on consoles and how many games someone would buy.

    Now, all that being said, I don’t have a Series S or a Series X, and I’m not arguing that someone should buy them. I have a Linux PC for gaming precisely because I do value openness, so in terms of which system I’d rather have, you’re preaching to the choir. I’m just saying that I don’t think that I’d agree with the above statement that the Deck is as cheap as the Series S.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoGames@lemmy.world•New Nintendo patent suggests Switch 2 may solve joycon drift
    1·
    10 months ago

    I loved my Dualsense too, and then the left stick started drifting so badly, it’s completely unusable now. It’s only about a year old, too

    I really think that something changed with a major potentiometer manufacturer in the past few years. I don’t recall stick drift on a PS2 controller that I used for many years, but I’ve seen it on a number of controllers from different vendors recently.

    Only thing I can think of other than recent hardware problems is that maybe the controller hardware imposed a certain amount of deadzone at one point in time and stopped doing so in newer gamepads, and that masked the drift.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoGames@lemmy.world•Microsoft documents leak new Bethesda games, including an Oblivion remaster
    5·
    10 months ago

    The Fallout 3 remaster (fiscal year 2024)

    If you consider that A Tale of Two Wastelands – where people forward-ported the Fallout 3 world to the Fallout: New Vegas engine and ruleset – was successful, that could be pretty solid. I still think I’d forward-port Fallout: New Vegas to the current Bethesda engine before I’d forward-port Fallout 3, though. Fallout: New Vegas was a better game.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout:_New_Vegas#Tale_of_Two_Wastelands

    Tale of Two Wastelands

    Tale of Two Wastelands is a total conversion mod for Fallout: New Vegas that merges the entire content of Fallout 3 and its DLC and New Vegas into one game. The mod implements features introduced in New Vegas into Fallout 3, such as the Companion Wheel, crafting recipes, and weapon mods. Players can freely traverse between the two games on a single save file, keeping all of their items and their progression between game worlds.[76][77][78][79]

    Also, most Fallout: New Vegas mods worked with Tale of Two Wastelands, which was pretty cool.

  • tal@kbin.socialtoWorld News@lemmy.world•California sues oil companies claiming they downplayed the risk of fossil fuels
    2·
    10 months ago

    So, first, that text is from the Declaration of Independence, not the US Constitution, which defines legal rights.

    But, secondly, the right to “pursuit of happiness” needs to be understood in the (somewhat euphemistic) language of the time. It is generally understood as referring to a right to property; this right was a core dispute in the American Revolution, and mirrors a nearly-identical “life, liberty” phrase from John Locke where the term used is explicitly “property”. That is, the right is not to never feel unhappy or depressed, but rather to not have one’s property taken away by non-elected parties.

    https://www.crf-usa.org/foundations-of-our-constitution/natural-rights.html

    The Tea Act, which imposed taxes on American colonists, was a critical dispute in the American Revolution:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Act

    The Tea Act 1773 (13 Geo. 3. c. 44) was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain. The principal objective was to reduce the massive amount of tea held by the financially troubled British East India Company in its London warehouses and to help the struggling company survive.[1] A related objective was to undercut the price of illegal tea, smuggled into Britain’s North American colonies. This was supposed to convince the colonists to purchase Company tea on which the Townshend duties were paid, thus implicitly agreeing to accept Parliament’s right of taxation. Smuggled tea was a large issue for Britain and the East India Company, since approximately 86% of all the tea in America at the time was smuggled Dutch tea.

    At the time, it was generally accepted that in England, only elected officials had the power to tax; this is one of the rights of Englishmen.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_Englishmen

    The “rights of Englishmen” are the traditional rights of English subjects and later English-speaking subjects of the British Crown. In the 18th century, some of the colonists who objected to British rule in the thirteen British North American colonies that would become the first United States argued that their traditional[1] rights as Englishmen were being violated. The colonists wanted and expected the rights that they (or their forebears) had previously enjoyed in England: a local, representative government, with regards to judicial matters (some colonists were being sent back to England for trials) and particularly with regards to taxation.[2] Belief in these rights subsequently became a widely accepted justification for the American Revolution.[3][4]

    However, American colonists had no elected MPs in Parliament. Parliament was willing neither to grant them elected MPs, nor to refrain from taxation and have locally-elected legislatures perform taxation. Parliament’s counterargument was that Americans had “virtual representation”, in that MPs elected by people in the UK – though not elected by American colonists – had their best interests at heart.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_representation

    Virtual representation was the idea that the members of Parliament, including the Lords and the Crown-in-Parliament, reserved the right to speak for the interests of all British subjects, rather than for the interests of only the district that elected them or for the regions in which they held peerages and spiritual sway.[1] Virtual representation was the British response to the First Continental Congress in the American colonies. The Second Continental Congress asked for representation in Parliament in the Suffolk Resolves, also known as the first Olive Branch Petition. Parliament claimed that their members had the well being of the colonists in mind. The Colonies rejected this premise.