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Then if you choose "no tip" a clip of an employee will play on screen, either looking at you judgementally or look away like you just crushed their dreams so you feel guilty.
"To save on costs we have decided to remove the 15% and 20% options. Our customers sometimes got decision paralysis and this will help streamline the experience"
This is genuinely how Jetstar Australia tried to justify charging for carry on baggage:
We're updating our carry-on options on Jetstar Airways (JQ) flights for travel from 2 February 2027. With new size-first allowances and no 7kg weight limit, these changes are designed to make packing for your trip simpler and help create a smoother boarding experience.
Bold of you to assume they wouldn't rapidly "remaster" them and take the old ones off the shelves/stores (Though pirates would probably preserve the "inferior" versions that don't have payment options lol)
Good thing emulation is easily accessible on a wide range of platforms and due to the nature of the internet is also hard to shut down in any meaningful way
This is how Warframe used to be way back in the day. You got 4 respawns per day, any beyond that cost platinum. I'm really glad they changed that haha.
I mean that drink verification can or the actual "say McDonalds" patent illustrates how often these stupid ideas never actually come to fruition, so there's that.
It really doesn't companies patent stupid shit all the time and never use it, MS had that patent for connect that would have you stand and name the product you are being advertised to continue and of course it was never used
If there is one thing confuses the F out of me, it's the "Steam is a monopoly" bs. They do nothing to stop people from selling games on other platforms. How would one even "break them up"?
The only way I can rationalise it is that people want to destroy anything that is making lots of money or is doing better than them in life.. just some weird jealousy thing.
On that same thread someone was asking when people were going to start benefitting from all that money valve makes... Like what ? Dude thought he was entitled to some of that money
A lot of it is actually them falling for the bait.
"Steam is a monopoly" wasn't a common sentiment until Sweeney started opening his mouth and a lot of people took the two parts of his strawman at face value.
The entire cohesive thought they have is that "Valve is situated in a position on PC where not releasing on Steam is almost suicidal for you company and Valve abuses that position to charge their 30% without doing anything significant to justify it, beyond simply being the biggest storefront."
Now, I don't have to spend the time explaining exactly why this is a stupid throughline of thought, anyone with half a brain understands that it's a bum's argument.
But without putting any thought in to anything, it's an incredibly easy sale for people who want to believe it's true.
WTF? Benefiting from the money Valve makes? I mean, while yeah, that's really just dumb, but in a way, we are absolutely benefiting from it because they use that money to make, maintain, and constantly improve the best game store online. Oy vey.
Like a benevolent king this only works until it doesn’t and we get a shitty leadership. That’s when the competition is supposed to shine. But it could be hard.
Also all of their effort into making Linux gaming an actual thing since they funded Proton and have literally hired devs to work on these open source projects. It's let sonmany of us jump ship from microslop and regain some amount of privacy and control with our own devices.
Even people who don't care about VR will benefit from Proton and FEX. When you can startup your steam library on your phone like you can currently do with Linux: that's valve.
IT should be partly that, but IMO? its mostly the brand loyalty, and how insulated your average gamer can be from the mechanisms of wealth extraction. how many of y'all grew up with play station, Xbox, Nintendo, etc? pretty sure we ALL did in some form or another.
those people look insane to us because we already realized long ago these companies NEVER had our best interest in mind
I agree, I had all the playstations except for 5, Wii, Xbox 360, DS Lite, multiple PSPs etc etc. but they're all shit compared to a PC and it's not even close.
Why buy multiple consoles when you can just have one PC and swap out components every 5+ years or whenever we want? Makes no sense.
They can sell on other platforms, but when it comes to pricing Steam doesn't like when it's cheaper elsewhere. There are emails about this found during discovery for one of the lawsuits. This was for the non-Steam version.
They threatened Ubisoft for selling a game cheaper on their own store for something that was completely on Ubis server and infrastructure. Steam controls pricing as much as reddit likes to pretend it doesn't.
>If there is one thing confuses the F out of me, it's the "Steam is a monopoly" bs. They do nothing to stop people from selling games on other platforms
I’m not a “steam is a monopoly” guy, but there is an argument to be made here, and this deposition goes into detail.
Basically the complaint is not about preventing people from selling games on other platforms, but how Valve maintains its price relative to other platforms.
Basically if you sell your game cheaper on other platforms, Valve isn’t going to promote your game, and it’s possible they might threaten to remove your game off steam.
Those practices are not unheard of, Walmart and Costco do similar things all the time, and AppStores do similar things with similar margins.
The break them up is ridiculous, but Valve has many anti-competitive practices. They're a corporation like all the others and they do a lot of stuff that's bad for consumers too until they're forced to stop.
Are they better? Yes. But they're far from perfect
Steam is a monopoly, but not because Valve uses their money to destroy the competition, drowning them in endless frivolous lawsuits (cough cough Microsoft cough cough) it's because they are so much better than the competition that no one wants anything else.
Let's not forget that this is a campaign driven by the CEO of Epic Games with all his media and financial resources. It didn't come out of nowhere or as something organic.
Frankly its not limited to the PC space unfortunately. Xbox's last decade can be summarized with "and then it got worse", which Sony has clocked and has decided to join the match with a series of terrible decisions as well, because they know they have no competition currently.
Nintendo is off in a corner silently doing their own thing. Though i suppose its easy to be silent when you don't fucking release anything.
Yeah I'm confused what they think Nintendo did. It would be funnier if they just had Nintendo playing that shitty plastic ocarina from the Legend of Zelda direct as they don't actually compete with steam and just are doing their own thing.
Nintendo is the exception in that they are a shitty company with some of the worst anti-consumer policies, yet it doesn't matter because Nintendo fans are addicted.
What did nintendo do? So far, to me they're probably the ones best positioned in the console market. And even xbox trying to correct their course. Only sony decided they wanted to shoot themselves.
It's an NFC reader that can also share media from for example your smartphone or reading your ID for age identification. Multiple countries are currently looking at identification to visit websites or apps.
Privacy is basically gone indeed. Unless they use anonymous tokens to verify your age without actually sending the data who you are to the website or social media you want to visit.
Honestly I'd rather have an app on my phone that can have 2FA local biometrics, and have it send a highly trusted yes/no response, even if it meant a lot more devices had the ability to tap to pay or what ever this BS is.
It's frankly ridiculous that all the governments are rushing to implement all these horrific privacy violations without any of them implementing any solutions that don't risk massive data leaks. Let alone what we've seen with the inside workings of stuff like Persona collecting every crumb of data it can possibly get about you in the process.
As much as I trust our governments about as much as a guy on a bus in a trench-coat right now, I'd still rather they have access to the data they could already realistically obtain, than handing it out to Peter Thiel or the rest of the paypal mafia.
Unfortunately it feels like I'm in the minority, as every iteration of Valve's pro privacy roll outs get a lot of backlash.
I feel like this has to be more of a "it gives us precedence to sue if others do it" because by recent slightly positive moves in the Xbox and Microsoft gaming departments it'd have to be actual corporate suicide if they put mid rolls in the next microslop title
It is not. Management and decision making for Sony in the 90s came from Japan. In the time since, PlayStation’s HQ has moved to California and all their highest leadership is American. This shift really began in the PS4 generation.
You're leaving mote important context than Japanese Sony good American Sony bad. Japanese Sony was lead mostly by people who had came through the ranks so they understood the product. In the time since then, middle management has become where people who know little to nothing about the games or the gamers come to make money because it's a corporate job with decent benefits and pay. It's the difference between promoting from within vs open interviews with a company.
It's a publicly traded company so it behaves like any other. They will do anything to show they can get more revenue next quarter even if it means alienating their loyal customers.
No wonder... I reluctantly bought the PS4, just end up only playing ahandful of games. When the PS5 dropped, I had no interest in it. It's a shame since I've been with PlayStation since the first
I still like their other products though, just not PlayStation. My TV, audio equipment, and mobile device are Sony
Sony is patenting this now, but Nintendo did this already in Japan on the Wii U and New 3DS.
Technically it’s not the exact same because Nintendo’s implementation only supported charge cards (cards that are loaded/reloaded with a balance at a kiosk, often used for train fare), but my point still stands - tap to pay on home consoles isn’t new
If this is allowing me to not keep my card information on the console, I'm for it. I don't like keeping the card info on for purchase from the store. Especially having been a customer during the hack.
I really dont think its crazy. My phone can do it. I've tapped my card to my phone to pay on Amazon. They're just killing the amount of time it'd take to type everything in on your controller
Lotta people in this thread who are forgetting that Sony has a history of getting dumb patents and never using them. They're often just for the sake of preventing competitors from getting them first. Doesn't automatically mean they intend to use them.
Besides the fact that yeah they probably aren't going to implement it. The reality is if they actually did, it would only be active for like buying shit off the ps store.
And it's not like Sony would be somehow able to prevent games from predatory practices as it's not like literally any gaming service does that now days, because you know gacha games, battle passes, skins, and general micro transactions already exist after all. All this would do is make it so you don't have to save your credit card information on your PlayStation account which has famously had multiple data breaches over the years
So an arcade machine from a certain point of view. But which you've purchased. I wonder how gamers into findom feel about this in case this becomes a thing.
it is kinda ironic how the gaming industry is trying to milk the gamer more and more for his money... but for me, I spend less and less lmao.
Only playing singleplayer games, only playing a bit older titles when they are fully finished and on heavy sale. I just bought anno1800 and prince of persia from 2010 and have my joy with them .. for 13.60€ haha
Fuckin why? If you're already paying for games wouldn't you have a card on file anyway? How would that even drive more sales, it just adds extra stupid bullshit for no reason
I don't like keeping cards on file for things, and it means if the account gets hacked they could have my card info. Presumably this saves from having to slowly type everything in on a controller, though I don't play console games anyways.
I could be missing something and if I am I don't mind being corrected of course
The main reason is to prevent others from using the ideas. It's not the only stupid patent they have, there's also ai controllers, spherical controllers, interactive ads
Hopefully they just sit on it like they do with the others
And how could we forget controllers that produce scents for immersive gaming?
Too many people in this thread don’t realize just how many silly/bad/weird patents Sony owns. They have over 90k Patents. One allows them to turn a banana into a controller!
This thread is little more than fear-mongering. I would be surprised if this tech actually sees the light of day.
Them patenting it just means Microsoft, Nintendo, or Valve can’t.
Bmean, this would avoid needing having the card saved on file whole also keeping the convenience of not having to type out your details each time, so you're then a bit more protected from a data breach leaking your card details
How this is patentable? Card readers and controllers already exist. Mashing them together shouldn't be something that can be owned by a single company.
Anyone* can file a patent application for anything, a
nd that's all this is - an application, not a patent.
It still needs to be examined, which will take a couple years. As part of that what it covers (and what you'd have to do to get accused of violating it) will very likely be narrowed pretty significantly, but the description will largely stay the same.
Outside of IP news outlets stories about patent stuff are usually pretty lacking, and tech patent news stories in particular are almost uniformly garbage because the writers focus on doom and gloom excerpts from the description and ignore the claims (which define what is actually covered, when an actual patent is issued).
The only exception is employees of the patent office.
Sounds like the PS5 is my last. Always had a gaming PC and a PS for the love of the game. Lately feels like I get less value from the PS and Sony gets more.
Couldn't agree more, even with the ps5 I was a bit of a fanboy and just bought it. When I think back to PS2, 3 & 4 there was always a game I wanted that MADE me buy the console and this isn't the story for ps5 untill recently GTA6. I'm spending waaay more time on my pc Vs ps5 the last few years.
I have so many games in my Steam library that I've never even started but I know are good and we're picked up ultra cheap in Steam sales. And some are the sorts of grand strategy games you can sink hundreds, even thousands of hours into. And that's before you factor in mods that refresh the game entirely.
If the console companies ever get too entitled I can very easily ditch them and start delving into my mountain of Steam games. They were partially bought for just this eventuality after all.
I miss the days of buying a game, inserting dial/cartridge and being and to jump right in. No day one updates, no install, no need for internet connection and no fucking micro transactions!
Now we don't even own the games we buy. Fuck these greedy corporations.
I work in the card processing industry. This is so impractical from a cost stand point that it doesnt make sense. The amount of risk for a card not present transaction, not tied to a vendor with an agreement with the card brands, and ran inside of someones home with only some kind of EULA dictacting its use? What could go wrong?
I hope tysys or global whoever processes for them fucking reams them on any of these stupid ideas from a cost standpoint.
How is this different than manually typing card info into a website? I don't know anything about card processing machines but it sounds like the same thing to me.
And morons will defend this somehow. They'll defend Sony, and keep mindlessly buying their shit until it starts costing money just to play games you already own. And even then, they'll be good little idiots and keep paying without question.
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u/PCMRBot Bot 18d ago
Welcome to the PCMR, everyone from the frontpage! Please remember:
1 - You too can be part of the PCMR. It's not about the hardware in your rig, but the software in your heart! Nationality, race, gender, sexuality, religion, politics, and PC specs don't matter! If you love or want to learn about PCs, you're welcome!
2 - Think owning a PC is too expensive? It's cheaper than you may think. Check http://www.pcmasterrace.org/builds for our famous builds and ask for tips and help here!
3 - Consider supporting the folding@home effort to fight Cancer, Alzheimer's, and more, with just your PC! https://pcmasterrace.org/folding
4 - Need a PC?! We're running a Worldwide giveaway for lots of awesome ASUS ROG hardware, including a Dream PC Build! Check here
We have a Daily Simple Questions Megathread for any PC-related doubts. Feel free to ask there or create new posts in our subreddit!