267
Dutch consumer foundation sues Sony for overpricing digital PlayStation games
(www.gamedeveloper.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
267 points (98.5% liked)
Games
17596 readers
390 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That's the biggest problem I have with consoles. They're essentially expensive boxes that are tied to a single service, in this case PSN.
You don't like their store pricing, DRM or other policies? Yeah, well, unlucky. Sell your box and buy a different one (or don't). Too expensive to play online on PSN? Well unlucky, because that's the only way to play online. If it's more expensive tomorrow, you better pay if you want online play or you'll be locked out.
Xbox now locks out uncertified controllers, maybe PlayStation as well? Even their own previous controllers (DualShock 4) don't support playing PS5 games on PS5, so if you want to play a 4 player couch coop game you better own 4 controllers specific to that one console. I get it, the new controller has some new features like "adaptive triggers" - but that's entirely optional. Heck, you can play the PS5 games ported to PC with a DualShock 4 on a PC/Steam Deck.
Isn’t it effectively the same on PC but just voluntary? Nobody buys stuff outside Steam so they can do whatever they want. Long gone are deep discounts and you have to hunt for good deals on key shops.
I don’t know. Most of my games are on Steam but I have lots of games on EA, Ubisoft, Epic Games, GoG and Blizzard platforms, not to mention Battlepass. But yeah Steam is dominant but it’s third party and not controlled by Microsoft
EGS just published their sales numbers and it’s a fart compared to Steam which has the defacto PC gaming monopoly. It’d be fine if it was some open platform but it’s just another unaccountable company that prints money for being first to monopolise the market, no different from Microsoft.
Not being publicly traded makes this very different from Microsoft, actually.
Yes, it’s even less transparent and accountable.
In what world do you think publicly traded companies are more accountable? If anything it's the opposite.
Private company is not a subject to many regulations and duties that a public company has to adhere to, mostly on external reporting. How much do you know about Valve? What’s their profit for 2023?
You mean the regulations that force public companies to prioritize shareholder profit over all other concerns?
That's because Steam offers a better user experience than EGS. Here are some nice things about Steam that EGS lacks:
While EGS has:
Why should I use EGS? Steam is better.
Valve has an arguably better platform but is more expensive and doesn’t have some exclusives. That would be a great opportunity for a competitor yet nobody broke through despite pouring billions in. Weird, huh?
Valve didn’t figure out how to port Steam to ARM and dragged their feet on x86-64 so I’m not sure where that money goes, probably gambling research.
Yes, I think everyone would agree that Steam is the best PC games platform
Well yeah, that's the definition of exclusive. Sony, Epic, and Microsoft pay to have games not available on other platforms. First parties don't release their games on other platforms to increase the attractiveness of their platform. Valve does this with their first party titles as well (CS:GO, Half Life, etc), but they release very few games.
Exclusives are the definition of anti-competitive behavior. Valve only does this for their first party titles, and other than that is very competition friendly, since they allow devs to release on any other store, as well as make free keys to sell elsewhere.
As a platform, they behave much better than pretty much everyone else, with maybe only GOG beating them due to license transfers and DRM-free commitment. Steam arguably has the best customer service in the industry (or if not best, very close to it), so it's less of a concern.
Why would they? Windows on ARM is pretty much nonexistent, emulating x86 on ARM on Linux has severe performance issues, and the best platform support for ARM is from Apple, where there's even less game selection.
Most games don't work on ARM, so there's little point in supporting it. But Steam does work on macOS on ARM (I think it uses Rosetta still?), where devs are actually going to port their games to ARM. Windows and Linux on ARM are incredibly niche and games just aren't ported for those platforms. I guess they could do a compat layer like Rosetta, but it'll be a terrible experience running a game through a compat layer.
AFAIK, EGS and GOG don't support ARM on anything other than macOS (and phones for EGS), and why would they?
Why does that matter? The main reason to port to x86_64 is to access more memory. Even while Steam was x86, games could still absolutely be x86_64. During the transition, they still needed to support 32-bit, so why do extra work when the benefits don't really apply?
I've helped update to 64-bit, and it can be a lot of work. Why prioritize that?
They're not public, but it's not hard to estimate since they publish a lot of data about the platform.