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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 7th, 2023

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  • I have more than a soft spot for Valve. Their price recommendations over the years Turkish Lira reached the moon was stellar for the consumers here, and it wasn’t just us. There are whole regions of countries that Steam has provided affordable game prices, which would otherwise simply have to resort to piracy completely.

    On another side, Steam’s many features like lenient refund policies, extensive yet on-point and open profile/library/workshop/community infrastructure add more than 50% of the content and quality on some games, and a complete easy of use for consumers.

    Whatever one can say about their specific policies on some topics, I’m going to argue no other for-profit company has ever put this much feature on display without immediate gain from all of them. This is almost on par with many FOSS projects with such development behind them.

    However, on this price-matching practice, I believe it is totally not a pro-consumer one. It is not exclusivity, which could completely bankrupt and erase all other competitors long ago if Steam went that way, but it is still somewhat meddling with blocking cheaper options for consumers.

    All that said, and with another commenter mentioning that 30% price cut is standard in the industry and a developer selling a game expensive on Steam and having the possibility to sell it cheaper on another wouldn’t make sense with the same cuts in place, I don’t think this policy completely lacks any merit. Having unreachable presence on Steam and using it as an advertisement platform thanks to its reach while selling the game cheaper elsewhere with the same cuts, or even no-cuts in their own stores, would open a hideous scam many of the well-known companies in the industry would jump on without blinking an eye.





  • 5.15. isn’t that bad of a kernel version in my experience. Admittedly, I’m don’t have any latest gen hardware at the moment, but using one generation back RX 6700XT without problems on it with Mint. Alternatively, one can install the newer 6.x kernels with a few clicks if needed, they are not actively blocked or unlisted.