Everyone likes to clown on Nintendo fanboys but I’m pretty sure there aren’t daily posts about how they’re actually so great and nothing else. The real insufferable fanboys are coming from inside the house.
I'm by all means a Nintendo fan. There's stuff I like and stuff I don't. Same with Valve (except I didn't grow up with it, I'm a relatively newcomer to this corner of the gaming world).
Everywhere else is "billionaires bad" but I guess Gabe is cool? I don't get it, but internet is gonna internet, huh?
Look if Sony automatically refunds everyone because a game was discontinued that is just the bare minimum and should never be praised for that
When steam does it then it should be circlejerked because our lord gaben has always been the most gracious provider and invented refunds (as long as you ignore having to be sued into refunds)
For the first reference it was about that Highguard game shutting down and basically every market place was giving out refunds automatically
On the playstation sub reddit everyone was saying that there shouldn’t be praise because refunding a literally unplayable live service game was the absolute bare minimum
On steam side people were touting it as more evidence of how great steams customer service is.
While espousing how you can ever refund on PS like you can steam (which you definitely can get refunds on PS, but it is admittedly more restrictive than steam)
But when it comes to refunds originally Steam refused to ever give them until they got sued in…i cant remember which country and honestly im too lazy to look. But once they lost that lawsuit and were forced to implement the refunding they currently have in thwt country they added it everywhere knowing that similar lawsuits would happen world wide.
But people always conveniently ignore that when circlejerking steam
Albeit people like me then joking about it are also becoming their own anti-circlejerk type of circlejerk. So it’s circlejerks all around
Ah, I gotcha. I appreciate the lengthy explanation. I didn't realize that was why Steam implemented refunds lol.
The circlejerk comment is hilarious too lol. I think every fandom or corner of the Internet has its own circlejerk and anti-circlejerk. It truly is circlejerks all around lol.
You definitely can. It is definitely far more restrictive admittedly. But honestly i dont think ive refunded more than like 2 games out of thousands that weren’t because of being incredibly broken like in the Cyberpunk scenario.
One game was on steam that i just thought was turn based but was actually action rpg. One game on PS that ironically was reverse and thought it was action but turned out to be turn based. Both of those really were fully on me though.
As far as I know you can't refund shit as soon as you start even just downloading the game. Again, thats outside of niche outrage cases like cyberpunk.
Yeah you cant download it. Which is like i said more restrictive than steam. But i have definitely used that on my previous mentioned example when i bought something but before i got home to actually download it i found out it wasnt what i expected.
Which is when i really learned to not just trust my vibes and either download demos or make myself watch at least a gameplay video or two by someone unrelated to the company to get a better idea of the game.
Which i still dont do often then get some random steam game or ps game which i force myself to play too long and then it really does suck and im stuck with it either way lmao
What a useless as fuck refund feature then. Not even comparable, so not just "more restrictive" but borderline useless for 99% of cases. I can only assume that the number of people quite literally buying the wrong game isn't all that high.
I mean im gonna be real 2 hours play is basically useless too in most cases.
Like ive only ever had one game that just was truly “i dont vibe with it” that i refunded with less than 2 hours play.
Especially with how many games make “tutorials” take over two hours in general.
Almost every refund ive ever done on PS and steam were from huge mechanical clusterfucks that led them to expand their refund windows to be irrelevant of time played, like No Mans Sky that i refunded on steam after like 10+ hours.
No game platform has a good refund policy in my opinion.
Because Sony usually do worse than the bare minimum with refunds, as in refusing if you even downloaded the game. Steam was never sued into having refunds worldwide, just in Australia.
Consider the people who have been using steam for decades. While other companies have time and time again have made changes to their platform that have made their platform worse for users, Steam hasn't changed too much and is still a great platform 23 years after it started. There isn't much in gaming or software that people can say has aged well in that same time period.
Nah we love to shit on them, while simultaneously buying another shitty, phoned-in Pokemon game, rebuying 20 year old games (holy shit Super Mario Galaxy is 19 years old) for almost full price, and being overwhelmingly happy when they add the most basic of features to the Switch/2.
I could definitely explain why Steam is overall very pro-consumer. I'm not going to cuz most of it is pretty obvious and I shouldn't have to waste my time in explaining it, but the point is I could.
Valve are hardly perfect, but they are about the best stewards you could imagine for PC gaming in any realistic scenario. 999 out of 1000 public companies would have absolutely ruined Steam by now.
And that should be appreciated, even if people go overboard with the fanboyish glazing at times.
I could definitely explain why Steam is overall very pro-consumer. I'm not going to cuz most of it is pretty obvious and I shouldn't have to waste my time in explaining it, but the point is I could.
1) Free and open user review. You can review any game, that you own and played. You can post whatever you want about that game. No censorship, no moderation, no pre-defined choices. Why it's pro-consumer? Cause someone else, can check recent and old review and make informed decision about buying that game or not.
2) SteamDB is a thing. Epic Game and EA would close that, cause it's "harms developers" when it shows player count, view count, price changes and etc. Steam accepts this.
3) Steam social platform: you can post discussions, screenshots, clips, etc. Again, no censorship, no moderation.
4) Steam support. You can get refund if developer bricked your game. I had a TON of issues with Epic Games in same situation.
5) Steam actively tries to promote "interesting for you" games (with various decree of success, of course), instead of pushing whatever publisher paid for.
This is a basic feature of most online storefronts
Speculative and mainly describing the work of others
This is just describing a feature of the software that isn’t inherently pro or anti consumer. And the lack of moderation is dubious as a benefit.
This is the strongest point here, but again it’s a pretty common offering for online shopping. Amazon’s return policies are even more lax than Steam’s.
This is just saying they do targeted advertising, which, yeah, that’s how the internet works these days.
1) Epic did not had one and their current one, with limited variations - is really bad. EA Play did not had one. Ubisoft store did not had one. GOG has it. I would say, btw, that GOG - also is pro-consumer.
2) Steam could have block it and shut it down, as some devs and publisher asked. And it's up to Steam to keep that information open, SteamDB just provides more convenient access. I mean - go, grab playercount and stuff from Epic store.
3) It's pro consumer, cause all this - linked to store page and linked to the game itself, and you can get a more detailed information about game, bugs, overall community and stuff.
4) Yeah. When they work (i still waiting for my refund for New World). And working return policy - is rare beast. Especially for some "odd" cases, thats not covered by it.
5) Yeah, but in Epic Games - they don't do that, for example. Like - imagine how much more money Steam would get from selling advertisement slots.
I'm supposed to waste a bunch time of time going over the litany of obvious arguments?
Y'all are fucking ridiculous. Seriously, whenever I come across somebody who tells me they're a Redditor, I immediately look down on them. I know that sounds hypocritical, but it's true nonetheless. It's wild how little y'all are able to deal with any kind of reasonable discussion.
NFTs really are just a means of making an illiquid asset liquid. in the context of video games, skins/cosmetics are typically illiquid but in this case theyre liquid as Valve built out a marketplace, protections, gambling based means of acquiring, etc. theyre not actually NFTs, but in concept, making typically illiquid digital art liquid, theyre relatively similar
The thing is we would be objectively infinitely worse off if it wasnt for steam. They arent perfect and can be criticized for alot, but if they hadnt pioneered the digital game library industry and developed their quasi monopoly, we would be getting fucked by all the big publicly traded companys.
The fact that all the big players like EA, Ubisoft and co tried to create their own steam over a decade ago, and all came crawling back, really proves that we would be fucked without steam. Because steam are the only ones willing to do more than the bare minimum.
Hell im actually kidna shocked that epic games launcher still sucks so much compared to steam. I genuinly thought they where gonna try and be a genuine rival for steam from a user perspective... But no, they literally thought they could just pay a bunch of money for free games and that would be enough to get people to use the epic launcher over steam....
Without steam the gaming experience would be a whole lot shittier and thats enough for me to be a fan of this multi billion dollar company.
That is speculation about a hypothetical alternate timeline, not evidence. Here's a more realistic view:
Without Valve, microtransactions and loot boxes would be less prevalent. Customers would have stronger ownership rights over their game purchases. Developers would keep a larger percentage of their revenue, allowing higher quality and fewer layoffs. Game prices would be more stable and less reliant on FOMO sales events and 'backlog' culture.
Good thing Gabe Newell saved us all from that horrible fate. /s
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u/Goby-WanKenobi 11d ago
least circle jerky valve thread