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Yeah I’m testing out dynamic buying. If it’s too expensive I don’t buy it.
I’ve been doing that for years 🏴☠️
I’ve been going back to all the previous generation games I didn’t play since they’re all very easy to access these days in various forms!
GOG 💪
I just don’t buy things I can be getting for free anymore. All of the people selling it want to treat me like a piggybank instead of a person, so I don’t treat them as humans either.
This also goes for indie devs. They still do scumbag shit like ending prices in .99 while expecting the community to show goodwill.
Fuck that.
It’s not “surge”, it’s not “dynamic”, it’s not “personalized” pricing… It’s price gouging. Look forward to paying more for games during peak times and months. It’s never enough for these greedy giant corporations.
I might be part of the problem. I bought a PS5 years ago, thinking GTA6 was close to being released.
Turns out no.
But what I’ve discovered is that with how the gaming industry has gone, I don’t see any need to buy games anymore.
I’m sick of games being an online focused experience, which requires subscription costs.
I’m sick of every game needing a multiple deluxe collectors editions that are the only way to play the full game, but cost $200 each and come with cheap plastic junk “collectables” to justify the cost.
“But you won’t get the super rare coin and lapel pin if you don’t get the collectors edition!”
“Thats fine. Just sell me the full game at $60.”
“The full game requires the collectors edition. But it comes with this lapen pin and rare coin!”
“How many copies of the collectors edition are there?”
“About 2 million.”
“So, not exactly rare, is it?”
The term of art is “price discovery”
That’s nice…
Meanwhile, I am testing piracy: one game - same price on my private torrent tracker.
Then I will continue my 20 year Sony boycott.
What was it that initially sent you down that path?
Steam and PC gaming if anything. That and changing life priorities in my 30s and 40s. GoG and epic too. Between them I have almost 1000 games I didn’t pay for. Combined with hundreds on steam from humble etc. I probably spend more time trying to decide what to play than playing it.
Valve is also the only company out of these big gaming companies who do lot of Open Source (working on it and funding other projects) and care about Linux. It maybe coincidental, but these care and goals align with my personal interests. No other company in the gaming industry does that to this extend, plus its an open platform. And being a private company brings also lot of freedom to not listen to shareholders.
The only thing is, that Steam itself is not Open Source… and the uncertainty what will happen if one day Gabe will no longer control…
That last note. Ughhh… Don’t put fear in my heart. Every generation it’s “all you have to do to come out on top is not step on your own dick” and every generation these massive companies manage to find at least one way to fuck up spectacularly. Steam ISN’T just doing nothing, but even if they did, it would be a lot better than most of the major players most of the time
Preferring a different option is not a boycott of the one
But refusing to buy from one company specifically is. Just because you buy similar products somewhere else doesn’t mean that you aren’t boycotting the other company.
I refuse to buy from Blizzard, Activision, EA, and Ubisoft. I refuse to buy Sony games so long as they require a PSN account for PC games. Just because I buy indie games doesn’t mean that I’m not boycotting those AAA companies for their actions.
Yes.
But that wasn’t the reasoning that was given.
I don’t buy from A because I prefer B… Is not a boycott.
Not the person you asked, but for me:
- The music CD rootkit
- removing OtherOS from the PlayStation 3
- trying to push various proprietary formats like MemoryStick and MiniDisc
- DRM in ATRAC3
- etc.
Take your pick!
I’m still pissed about the rootkit scandal. That was 21 years ago now, and I haven’t spent a penny on Sony products since.
Omg their stupid ass 4x normal price proprietary memory sticks lmao
Trying to only establish proprietary media in the past, mostly ignoring open standards.
Oops I didn’t fully read, you got it ♥️
Ugh God. I remember that “Magic Gate” bullshit when the PSP launched. They started a trend with the Walkman and they’re trying to get lightning to strike twice. Never could do it though. Good.
Those greedy assholes need to engineer and innovate in other areas.
Dynamic pricing = unbridled greed
Don’t buy anything from Sony, got it
Fuck dynamic pricing, anyone even considering it should be jailed.
So tired, so tired of these ultra rich finding new and creative ways of squeezing the plebs and we just, again, let them
THEY’RE A BUSINESS AND THEY NEED TO MAKE MONEY!!!
Stop being fucking poor and serve the people richer than you.
🏴☠️ might be the answer to this conundrum
I wonder why steam is so successful
It’s almost as though Valve provides a valuable service and respects their customers. Rare traits in the corporate world. Answering to a board of directors is a hell of a lot easier than answering to shareholders.
Enshitification hasn’t struck there…yet.
Integrity.
Valve does the least amount of scammy/scumbag bullshit, and they’re rewarded accordingly.
Companies like EA only want customers that have no self-respect, so that’s what they get.
Doesn’t valve also do this for different regions?
They do but that’s regional pricing, meaning that basically if the median income of a country is lower, game prices are lower as well. According to the article, that you apparently did not read, Sony is showing different prices (up to 18% lower in some cases) to different users. I take that to mean that the geographical position of the users could be the same.
Yeah I misunderstood the article
Next up: highly personalised dynamic pricing by analyzing your bank account, payment behaviour, your age, gender, location, your app and website interaction patterns, the color of your shit, the time spend on digital media and breathing, your credit score, your biometric data, whether you are white or a terrorist, your political voting behaviour, the number of hairs you have, your likely age of death, your medical and mental health history, your probability of being captivated by addictive patterns anf gambling mechanics, and maybe even your game collection, to maximize squeezing each and every last penny of your barely or even non-existent disposable income.
I’m not sure I follow the dynamic pricing explanation. This article shows evidence of A/B price testing with different sized discounts, but not specifically dynamic pricing. It seems to be regional at most. If I’m missing anything let me know.
Exactly what i was thinking. A/B testin is the best way to get data.
What worries me more is what they are going to do with that data and if it will lead to predatory business model or not.
It absolutely will be used in the most shitty predatory way. They’re not going to simply delete the data and most digital marketplaces are excited at the prospect of dynamic pricing.
Yes, predatory use is what i fear.
What i can gather from the article at the moment they are testing what is the percentage they can discount the game and make most profit still from it. I dont inherently see any proof they are aiming for full dynamic pricing.
If they give for group A, 50% discount and make 1000 sales from 70€ game they make 35 000€.
But if they give group B, 25% discount from 70€ game they make the same 35 000€ with only 667 sales.
Then they have group C as a control. If the control group will make as much money as the other groups they know for sure discounts are not good busines.
Simple so far.
After the initial numbers they most likely will follow the retention. If i were there i would follow each group weekly and take a note how much money each group generates. At this time it would be best that each group gets the same discounts and adds etc. My hypotesis would be that people who buy only games from big discounts are more unlikely to buy games at full price. Meaning that even if there were more sales there would be less income and the customers have lower CLV. It does not mean they are bad customers per se, but it would mean they are not the core customer group they should focus their effort on.
If they are doing what they are doing to figure out their audience really is, this is not predatory. A/B testing is unfortunaly the best way test it, and to company as big as Sony, the data they collect is unmeasurable in value. Everyone of us had been part if some companys A/B test at some point. Adds, news site headers, youtube videos, hell even telemarketing calls do this all the time.
Im not saying they are not looking into to dynamic pricing, but with what information the article gave me i cant say that they are.
Sorry for the long text. I wanted just to justify why i dont see this for a reason to immediadly jump in to conclusion that Sony is trying to screw everybody up.
testing if there is a call to boycott or people swallow it I assume
Doesn’t matter if there is boycott or not. They are letting the cat out of the bag and it’s not going back in.
This is the start of normalizing surge pricing in gaming.
the PS4 can be jailbroken with a €4 disc from aliexpress nowadays, and it has a great catalog of games. slap a 1tb external hdd on it, download games from archive.org, presto
Intriguing…
this will do the trick, scroll down to the product recommendations and you might find an even cheaper listing
Wait, you can get jailbreak discs from aliexpress? That might be worth looking into…
(although, how do we know if it’s got malware on it?)
you can also burn it yourself if you have a bluray burner, the software the aliexpress discs use is freely available (search for “goldhen”)
Oooh awesome. I figured normal burned discs wouldn’t work.
We don’t have a bluray burner (only a CD/DVD drive) but have been kinda wanting to get one.
Shoot, apparently it’s not open source. That’s not confidence-inspiring… but then again PS3 CFWs weren’t either (*sighs*)
Does that apply to PS4s running 11.something? I can’t remember what OS version our PS4 is on, but it’s new enough that a jailbreak only came out pretty recently. Needed a specific game disc to work.
it works up to firmware 12.52, if you haven’t updated for a couple of months it should be fine
Oooh lovely!! We’re uh, pre-12.5 I think.
A DVD won’t work, right, it’s gotta be a bluray? Because if we can do this with a DVD-R and not need another reader, that’d be great.
it has to be BD, it’s exploiting a vulnerability in bluray video decoding. honestly just get it from aliexpress, a BD burner is €100+, not really worth it to buy one for single use
In some cases the ps5 can as well but only older firmwares have the full chain of exploits. That said you can run game backups and if you get an old enough firmware you can even install Linux and run steam games
true, the only issue i see is that newly released games might have higher firmware requirements. the ps4 is de-facto end-of-life, no need to put much thought into modding that
Might have to snag a used PS4 now…
probably not a bad idea :) ps3/xbox360 are also totally worth it and easy to crack, if you have one lying around or are on a budget. my xbox360 is rocking ~120 games on 1tb (including xbox classic games), more than i could ever play in a lifetime
Why disc? Been few years since I used my PS4, but I remember jailbreaking it as long as you are on the correct firmware was as simple as caching a website offline and bookmarking it to run the exploit whenever you turned on the PS4.
exploits are getting fixed over time 🤷♂️ check out modded warfare on youtube if you want to learn more
I haven’t kept up, since the exclusives I wanted to play worked on the low firmware and new ones stopped coming out and later ones like Ghost of Tsushima ended up coming to PC.
Last I remember is higher ones than mine requiring a usb stick.
I guess higher firmware requiring bluray now isn’t any more strange than the RCM jig method on older Nintendo Switches. Now that was an excellent solid jailbreak experience being able to install custom firmware.
The dynamic pricing will not affect my static boycott.
More incentive for people to go to PC and chances for Linux gaming to grow. We’ll get a Linux GOG client someday and drag EGS kicking and screaming to Linux too. Steam lets devs generate keys for free for deva to sell on other stores with no Valve cut. Bundle sites like Fanatical, Humble Bundle, Digiphile
Closed hardware platforms with closed software distribution loops are destined for enshittification
How do you justify “dynamic pricing” on downloadable content?
It’s nothing new. It’s been done for the past 20 years. Products are priced differently in different countries based on their economy.
You have been able to do this in Steam for decades now. You can/could use VPN along with changing your location in steam, to trick it into thinking you are in that region. You would then get that regions prices.
E.g, lots of Steam games used to be noticeably cheaper if Steam thought you were in Russia as opposed to Germany.
I don’t think this story is about that. It’s about making games more expensive based on how much they think you’ll pay.
This specific study in the article is about making games cheaper to see if that makes people more likely to spend, but you just know they’re going to also make them more expensive if this works out
The former part has been a thing for hundreds of years.
But yeah I suppose they would use it to change the price dynamically on a constant basis based on demand.
Though I’m not sure that’s even legal to this extent in EU. It’s a product for purchase. Not a stock. But you’re right. It does sound bad.
So they aren’t gonna say “loads of people are downloading the same game in the same region, let’s increase the price”? Cause that’s what dynamic pricing means.
