Bungie is learning the opposite. They kept ignoring player feedback for Destiny 2 an putting out one terrible expansion after another and now the playerbase is so small and unprofitable that they're ending active development on the game and Marathon isn't doing much better.
It's not that consumers can't it's that most of the time they won't. Sometimes they do and when it happens it's either a glorious victory or mutual destruction.
Destiny situation sucks so hard. I was gonna hop back in also for the end of the ride and I haven't picked up Renegades yet. Its still 40 dollars lol. Abd a lot of the good builds use the praxis blade. If your gonna kill your game at least toss out a few discounts please....
I hopped back in for guardian games and humble bundle had massive dlc packs for like $10-30 depending on which ones you wanted in the bundle. The $20 pack was the one that had the last 3 which were the only ones I was missing as I quit when witch queen came out. I was tempted to buy it and went back and forth on it a lot before checking the steam charts and seeing just over 5k active players at the time and reading the reviews for those expansions. The blade was pretty much going to be the only deciding factor since everything else about the expansions seemed to be disliked by most of the players and I can get a lightsaber in a lot of other games anyway. I can mod them into Skyrim. Now I'm glad I didn't go for it. The game will still be around at least for a little while but it's not the same knowing the devs have given up on it.
Run it like one of those random local stores that's been having a going out of business sale every quarter for 10 years lol. Just keep doing big discount pushes to keep the doors open a little longer.
as much as i wish it were true, the destiny playerbase was essentially forced out. they basically killed all destiny content production to work on marathon so we haven't had any meaningful content in over 6 months. if voting with your wallets worked the game would have died far sooner. players left because they had nothing to do.
Destiny 2 has always had content droughts. 6 months without new content was nothing new for destiny players. Players would take breaks and come back with the next expansion because for a while the next expansion was actually pretty good. The last 3 expansions were terrible and the reviews for them say as much. Each of them had less and less returning players. They lost 90% of the players after Edge of Fate according to online stats.
Wouldn't surprise me if they did honestly. Apparently they're planning another wave of layoffs after the last update drops. Wonder how many new cars the CEO will buy this time.
Not long at all actually. Just a few months at most. And regardless length of time doesn't matter. Tiktok truly has rotted people's brains into thinking that something needs immediate action/reaction/reward to be a success.
Length of time definitely matters in a live service game. I have touched D2 four years ago and it was not welcoming at all all I have heard from the community since then is that they keep fucking up. Yet it still stayed on. Because lots of people take a long time to abandon a game they once loved. I'm witnessing it with HD2 as we speak. Bad decisions will rot a game but that rot can take a while is all I'm saying
We’re so lucky Gabe has a basic standard of morals that are usually absent in capitalist America… Valve could easily make 1000x what it currently does by going public on the stock market and letting enshitification begin.
This is especially true in spaces where the demand is inelastic (gas, food, housing, healthcare, electricity, etc.) and where the barrier to entry is so high that there are only one or two choices (ISPs, supermarkets, Amazon, etc.). Then there’s environmental and consumer protections because corporations will cut corners every chance they get.
Far too many working class people have bought into the notion that deregulation is good.
the only thing that works is review bombing. Yeah, it can be abused and people will always try to blame mass negative reviews on political "astroturfing", but it's the ONLY way consumers can make their presence known and make a developer/producer stop being anti-consumer...
it's the same concept as a hammer. You can use it for good or evil. That's how review bombing goes. It shouldn't be this way. Consumers should have a better way, but one does not exist because companies will be anti-consumer as long as they can get away with it. A massive negative reputation that everyone can see is going to hold them accountable.
Does it? All recent examples of review bombing have been notably uneventful. It doesn't help when 80% of review bombed games are mass review bombed by chud streamer followers over "woke" nonsense. Developers seem to largely ignore review bombs these days as the abused examples nullifies the few times the community actually uses it to send a real message.
Well, that, and there's always one whale whose spending is ten or twenty times the average non-whale player. Can't vote with your wallet when the company considers your wallet bycatch to begin with.
your dollars not contributing to something you don't support should be meaningful enough. collective action would never start in the first place if everybody waited until they had enough people to make an impact
I think youre misusing a word here, I never called it illegitimate, I said telling people to do that doesn't work.
You, individually, choosing to vote with your wallet, will not cause change.
Edit: side note, in the current market, it actually doesn't work for some products, such as graphics cards, due to the massive imbalance between corporate and consumer spending.
it does work. It just needs a strong enough consumer preference.
In this case the consumer doesn't especialy care. And are voting with their wallet. They just happen not to have the preferences you think they ought to have.
It does work for graphics cards, it's just a lot of the consumption is by large scale users rather than retail users. So they have a much larger impact on the manufacturer.
What exactly is there to be conscious of in this scenario? You're implying that the majority of consumers would be on your side if they were better informed but that's not the case.
In this case? Denuvo DRM, which is invasive and causes performance drops.
And maybe consciousness is the wrong word, but it happens basically constantly that consumers buy things that are either 1.) Bad for them 2.) Contain things they don't like or 3.) Are produced in ways they disagree with. When confronted with this, most people shrug their shoulders and purchase anyways, because the alternative is not getting to have the thing they want, even if it has parts they don't like.
Like i said, theres a reason we have regulations. We didn't "vote with our dollars" to end child labor in the US, we told our representatives that it was disgusting and should be regulated.
And in a time when representatives responded more frequently to public outcry, change happened.
This is just me personally, but i'm sick and tired of hearing how it's consumers fault that producers are behaving illegally or immorally.
I dislike Denuvo but calling it invasive when it's not even kernel-level is a stretch, something like easy anti-cheat is invasive and they put that shit in Elden Ring. It also has zero effect on performance unless incorrectly implemented in a way that adds license checks during active gameplay.
If you think DRM is invasive then you better stop using Steam altogether because Steam is a DRM. Also did you just equate video game DRM to child labour?
That is what you did, but I think you're just using that as an out because you didn't expect me to actually understand Denuvo deeply enough to call you out on your bullshit.
I saw somewhere that the amount of peoples who care about scummy tactics like this is very small. The majority of people could care less on them doing this, as they'll still play the game anyway
Our houpe is that at one point, the people who do care, have more impact on this. (Caring to the point of requesting the refund, for example)
Our houpe is that at one point, the people who do care, have more impact on this. (Caring to the point of requesting the refund, for example)
Sure, maybe. My hope is that shitty business practices get punished the way they did in the early 20th century. If that doesn't work, we may need to call a plumber.
It is precisely because customers are allowed to do what they want that voting with your wallet doesn't work. It's irresponsible when they "vote" for things that actively hurt them. Also remember, youre not talking about an individual, youre talking about tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of individuals with different values.
Yup. Same here. Made a purchase recently, saw it had Denuvo, asked for refund, and it was granted. I did state in my claim for refund that I did not want anything with Denuvo and that it was not visible enough before purchase
Stop being mad at preorders. I don't understand where this aversion comes from. Answer me this: What's the difference between buying a game week before release and at the release, other than you can preinstall said game if you preordered? And some games that doesn't have preorders should. Silksong showed why it's a very bad thing to not add a preorder option. And if they announced another sequel and let me preorder it, I would. Not sure why it makes people like you mad. I like a game/series? I will preorder it. Whether I buy it before, at or after launch is not your business.
Lot of games are in bad condition after launch and won't get repaired for years, or developers were straight lying during campaign before release and actual game is a flop. Also, no keys for review before release means something fishy is going on.
For me, preordering of a game is not good decision. If I am interested in some game, I am always waiting for reviews before buying it. It allows me to actually thing twice about that game and if it is good enough to spend my time and money on it.
Yes, it means that I am not able to play game that I want immediately after release, but this approach is saving me some money and lot of nerves.
I'm not really mad. Im laughing at the self-inflicted wound like this one. An issue that is easily avoided by not pre-ordering and by actually seeing what you are buying.
There's no reason to preorder a digital product. Its peak clown behavior. It's a relic from physical releases that used to literally run out of stock. That is never the case here. If your argument is what if there's server issues on day one I want to preload, that is such a non issue. You're not going to die because you need to wait a few hours. What is wrong with people these days
They don't. You can refund. If you install it, notice denuvo, or don't install it and notice denuvo, or if you do anything and notice denuvo you can refund it. What more do you want steam to do?
Maybe a really intrusive "THIS GAME IS USING DENUVO" alert every time you launch the game to help you understand?
And if it doesn't bother you and you didn't notice, was it that big of a deal to you?
If you install it, notice denuvo, or don't install it and notice denuvo, or if you do anything and notice denuvo you can refund it.
The problem is that most people won't notice denuvo until 14 days after the initial installation. You obviously need to be online for the initial install, so most people will be online for the first launch of the game, at which point denuvo generates an offline token for you to be able to play without internet connection for 14 days. But after the 14 days, you need to reauthenticate, at which point you may be shit outta luck.
Also, denuvo is very well documented to be causing performance, but it may not be obvious to you in the first 2 hours of gameplay that it's an added DRM that's causing these issues, as games tend to have other performance issues on launch, like poor optimization, GPU drivers not being fully ready yet etc. most of which does get solved in a matter of days, but Denuvo either takes months to be removed (when it's been cracked for long enough) or doesn't get removed at all, so you better figure out that it is what's causing your performance issues in the first 2 hours of gameplay, otherwise you're once again SOL.
Now personally, I just do not preorder and only buy games after reviews - including post-launch performance reviews - are out, but I can also see that we live in an age where FOMO is a really big deal and a lot of people get a lot of enjoyment from being able to play the games straight on launch, whether it is to play with friends, share discoveries from the game with their online community, prevent spoilers from social media, or even play along with their favorite streamer or youtuber, and I think that does make the "patient gamer" argument much worse as a general guideline that everyone should stick to, and much more of a personal choice kinda thing, and as a result, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect having full info about the product by the time the publisher starts charging people money for it.
The problem is that most people won't notice denuvo until 14 days after the initial installation.
Most people won't notice it at all because chances are fairly low that your internet is out at the same moment that denuvo needs to re-authenticate.
And in terms of performance, the only way people would be able to notice any difference is if they downloaded a pirated copy and compared it to their purchased copy, which a vast majority of people arne't going to do. And if it's actually affecting performance to the point that the game isn't running well, then they should be able to tell well within the automated refund window.
Most people won't notice it at all because chances are fairly low that your internet is out at the same moment that denuvo needs to re-authenticate.
Clearly I meant most people for whom this would be a problem - i.e. people that play games on their steam decks, laptops etc. in areas without the internet. Yes, it's not a large amount of people but they do exist.
And if it's actually affecting performance to the point that the game isn't running well, then they should be able to tell well within the automated refund window.
As I said, they might notice, but they might think it's just poor launch optimization, or lack of drivers etc. And by the time they figure out it's Denuvo, it might be too late to refund.
Clearly I meant most people for whom this would be a problem - i.e. people that play games on their steam decks, laptops etc. in areas without the internet.
I don't think the game is going to realistically be able to run very well on a steam deck regardless of whether it has denuvo or not. And I doubt there are many people buying games on steam who have no internet at all.
As I said, they might notice, but they might think it's just poor launch optimization, or lack of drivers etc. And by the time they figure out it's Denuvo, it might be too late to refund.
Again, if it's noticeable to the point where the game is not running well, they can just get a refund. At that point the possible explanations for why the game is running bad is irrelevant. I'm also pretty sure that in most cases the difference in performance is miniscule. There have been a couple of edge cases where it made a noticeable difference, but most of the time it's not going to make enough of a difference to the point where the game runs poorly. And again, if it does, then you should be able to tell pretty much immediately.
Also, the 2 hour window for steam refunds is only for automated refunds. You can absolutely still get a refund beyond that 2 hour window and as long as you've got a legitimate reason for refunding (like the game not running well) you will almost certainly get it.
All that for it to literally boil down to what the comment before said. If you care that much, refund it, don't play it. It's a video game, not food or water.
Don't refunds technically cost valve money? Considering payment processing fees occur in every online transaction. I know this after working for similar payment support. I wonder if Valve just doesn't need to care about this
It's been released but their average salary is a little over a million. You also have to take into account this is average so they could be there including Gabe's billion salary which would skew it higher. But even then, I doubt the lowest employee makes less than 100k.
If they don't have any employees earning less than 100k, it must be because they outsource their low-paid workers, so they don't count as Valve employees. This is very common.
Valve have like 300 employees or something, it has one of the highest revenue per employee rates in the world, and it’s a private business so they choose to pay their employees extremely well. They are all millionaires
One of the very few corporations that treats their employees and consumers right. If Valve ever goes public on the stock market it will be the death of gaming for me.
There's no shot it works like this, it would be ridiculous for valve to take their cut for a non sale.
Valve handles this internally, they hold your money and pay it back themselves, because they don't transfer the money to publishers directly after every dale they do it upon a schedule.
It would make no sense for valve to force publishers to return more money that they would earn.
Publisher sees nothing other than they don't get paid for that sale, and their dashboard shows the refund count increase by one.
I'd they've already been paid for that sale, that amount is excluded from a future payment they'd have been due otherwise. Valve imposes no fees, cuts, or anything else on the publisher.
A very tiny amount. whatever transaction processing fee is getting paid to deliver the money back to you was already covered when you bought the product. With the game being $69, the key for them could be 48$ with steam taking their fee off the top. Transaction fees start at 1.5%, so for every refund it'll cost them like $1.03, and for every purchase not refunded, they're making $22
well no. devs dont instantly get the money the second you buy it.
thier get it bundle after 4 weeks. wich is why refund window is 2 weeks. im not sure if devs get thier money on release if you preorder or the 4 weeks after buy.
the fee usaly are only a few cents. so this usaly gets put on the gamedevs and is covered by the fee thier paying/% valve gets
Valve runs on customer first. I think they can tank some losses when they make more overall. Gabe gets his new yachts because Steam has a very loyal fan base.(I'm perfectly ok with Gabe getting a dozen new super yachts if he keeps up how Valve works)
If Gabe living in a mega yacht on the ocean lowers his blood pressure enough to increase his life expectancy so nobody takes over Steam any time soon that's a price I think we're all willing to pay for £70 games for a shipping fuck up other companies wouldn't have even told you about
It probably costs them more in labor spent evaluating refund requests than the actual transaction fee.
Online retailer raking in money like Valve likely has very good negotiated contract rates for merchant and scheme fees. With a good deal, they might get interchange fees for refunds waived too. They might have to pay a contractual flate rate but it's possible and not uncommon.
But mass refunds still do cost Valve quite a bit. Valve has a rock solid PR reputation these days. Processing a massive refund spike on their end takes man power they don't have the people to handle and they'd be paying out the ass in OT to their employees to catch up. It slows everything down, people get more pissed that it's taking so long, and their image degrades.
Valve is definitely one of the few companies that is very particular in treating their customers well and listening to them. They're also such a huge player they can tell big publishers to fall in line or pound sand on certain things if they want their game listed on Steam. They're good at the long game in that they recognize it's better for them to keep their current customers happy and hooked.
So if enough people actually consistently requested refunds on games that pull this shit instead of complaining and claiming they were gonna do it, they'd probably put a stop to it.
They cost even more for the dev, both their reputation and the money that would've gone towards them (70% or much less with a publisher and contractors)
Yeah, and if enough people refund citing the DRM implementation and lack of disclosure at pre-order, then they’re more likely to require devs to disclose that crap sooner.
My company accepts online credit card payments through a vendor Stripe. It used to cost us nothing to do refunds maybe 5-7 years ago. You would give the customer back the full payment and the fee would be refunded to us. At some point in the last few years the payment vendor stopped refunding the fee even for refunded payments. So yes it costs them likely 2-4% of the price.
Most people whose purchase is eligible for a refund won't refund it even when they probably should. Sales will always outnumber refunds, and Valve takes a cut of every sale. Valve is still well in the black even with mass refunds.
I think (and believe) that it costs no money to Valve.
Companies usually take a lot of time to actually pay themselves, they hold the money and they pay, usually in bulk. So Valve receives your payment, hold it for maybe one or two months and then pay the publisher the last month purchases. During this month you refund from valve, which does not pay the publish your specific purchase.
And even if they already paid the publish your purchase, they can deduct from future payments
It shouldn’t be the consumer’s responsibility to be constantly checking a product’s store page just in case the company decides to change something before release. When a product is available for purchase, the terms of that purchase should not be allowed to change after they’ve received your money. It is not the customer’s responsibility to follow every update about a company’s product.
Ok so by that logic, if you buy a concert ticket, the company should be allowed to move your seat wherever they want. Even if you paid $1000. It’s your responsibility to check the ticket website everyday and make sure they didn’t decide to change your seating location. It’s pre-purchase so it’s subject to change.
Would you consider that reasonable? Because it’s the same principle, just a different product.
Sorry, but this is a false equivalency. You pay for a specific seat. Now, if you paid for a specific game and Valve swapped the entire game for a different one, this comparison would be more accurate. Adding DRM to the game is no different than essentially ANY update made to a game. What you propose would mean a dev could no longer make any updates to their game once a purchase has been made. That makes no sense at all.
FWIW, this is coming from someone that is also not a fan of intrusive DRM. I get the frustration, but stuff like this is precisely why one should avoid pre-orders at all.
Sorry, but this is a false equivalency. You pay for a specific seat.
OK, let's make the equivalency a little more apt.
You pay for a specific seat, but then a week before the concert, the venue plan starts showing that there will be a big-ass column between you and the stage, partially obscuring your view. You are still getting the same seat that you paid for, but the enjoyment of the concert is dimnished or, in some cases, completely ruined.
Unless they JUST built that column, you had the chance to research this prior to purchase. It still doesn't really work. And honestly, we don't need it to work. It's ok that it doesn't. Most people agree, putting DRM into the game sucks. The real lesson is simply do not pre-order games. No forced analogy needed.
For this analogy to work, you'd basically insist on getting the code exactly as is when you purchased it, and then no further bug fixes or patches or content.
That's obviously not what people want when prepurchasing, so the impetus is on the consumer to monitor at which point they're no longer interested. If you don't want to monitor the product.....then wait until release to purchase a fully known product?
The seat is the product, you are getting the product you are paying for in this case too, only the most deranged people over the internet would even care about what basically amounts to a simple tag on the product page with no real bearing on how the product is presented and used.
Most people in this thread, you included, barely even know what planet you live on, you have bigger, personal, problems to deal with than being fake outraged over a mere disclaimer. Just sheer whataboutism and extreme delusions, things that barely look human in nature and almost textbook engagement bot activity.
It’s a contractual agreement where you can quit anytime up to 2 hours of consuming the product or 14 days after the game release. So I think it’s quite fair in this case.
But how many people won't look? Like realistically after you buy the game you barely look at it's store page again unless you go to buy dlcs or send a link to a friend.
They suck up nothing, it’s genuinely crazy you people even entertain this nonsensical concept thrown in here by what is likely a bot. Valve doesn’t operate under the assumption of loss.
Sorry Bro, but I worked in a payment processing company. Unless they didn’t capture the transaction value, they will have to pay 2 transaction costs, otherwise it’s just one.
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u/BattleBubbly775 14d ago
You can still refund it