A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.
Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
Noticed this update got pushed just now.
Edit: Seems they’re doing this to prevent costs from arbitration. Read comment below.
They're only doing this because of the class action being brought against them. It's cheaper to let this go to court than to try and settle tens of thousands of individual arbitrations. In fact, there are plenty of companies now reversing course and realizing how badly forcing arbitration can backfire.
Edit: For those unaware: https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/video-game-giant-valve-hit-with-consumer-class-action-over-pricing-2024-08-12/
It's a little hard to square "steam is over charging for games" with "look at all these games I bought for 80% off ($5) off", but I guess there's more to it.
I think part of the issue is steam allows publishers to set region specific prices and lock users into a region.
You pay $89 for an annual subscription package, somebody in brazil pays equivalent to $32.58.
By definition it is discriminatory.
Discrimination only applies if the two parties are similar. In this case the location makes these parties dissimilar due to the inability to just go from one place to the other legally. Brazil gross national income is 1/3rd the US. It makes sense to price things at 1/3rd the US price.
Steam taking 30% is a better deal than any other form of media gets by a mile. It's crazy folks complain when it is so easy to self distribute a video game, people have been doing it for years and years. Steam doesn't even require you to sign up for exclusivity like basically every other distribution/marketing service does for all media including other video game services.
The game company can afford to sell digital goods and services to Brazil at a fraction of the cost and they profit.
If they sold redeemable codes on cards and cardboard locally it would solve their issue.
They should have to offer any two people online the same price when they list things. An American with Brazillian Currency should have the right to buy a digital good with said currency at the price listed.
A sudden demand for Brazilian Currency certainly does not hurt Brazil, either.
If you do it that way you are importing a good.
The end of this would not be that Steam relenting enables folks to start using foreign currency to get cheap games on a publicly traded space.
What will happen if that goes through is a swift increase in taxation of export of digital goods. You'd have countries fighting tariff wars over video games.
The idea that you can use foreign safe spots to buy and sell goods at a cheaper cost is something that only rich people get to do. As soon as it becomes broadly available to the general populace the governments crack down on it quickly.
That's more complicated than it sounds. An export strengthening the currency is a significant part of Dutch Disease.