I hope people here give Valve the same flack they gave Nintendo and Sony for raising prices.
Hell, the Switch 2 went up $50 and everyone on Lemmy lost their god damned minds in that thread because “Nintendo bad” or whatever. But I’m sure because it’s our sweet baby angel Gabe on his 20 yachts we’ll all be reasonable about the $200+ upcharges.
Look, none of these companies WANT to raise prices on these consoles. It’s just the AI bullshit and stupid ass tariffs ruining everything. That’s what needs to change.
Valve doesn’t have 50+ years of hardware experience though. Sony, Nintendo, and Msoft can all swing their big dicks all over that industry and get whatever the fuck they want, Valve cannot.
Valve can and does strongarm the software side all the time, the gaming industry would have died instead of exponentially surpassing the film industry if it weren’t for Valve setting strong precedents.
And finally how in the fuck are you blaming AI at the same time that you are trying to defend Sony? The company that’s adding AI to PLAY THE FUCKING GAME FOR YOU?
Last week, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa told shareholders that the house of Mario had no current plans to raise the price of its $449.99 Switch 2.
Then they raised the price of the original switch and a bunch of the accessories.
Then the tariffs in the US were deemed to be illegal and they sued to get their money profit back and didn’t want to repay the price increase they passed along to their customers.
There’s also the fact that Nintendo was on a lot of people’s shit lists for their litigiousness and other anti-consumer crap they had done so people were already mad at them before they raised prices.
When you look at it that way, Sony (who were also on people’s shit lists for a laundry list of reasons) are no better in many’s eyes.
Also, this completely ignores how small a company Valve is in comparison to Nintendo and Sony. I think that’s the main problem actually. Valve isn’t a hardware power house and they can’t command the kind of sales contracts or parts/fab that Nintendo or Sony can. So they are less likely to be able to withstand raising prices on their hardware as a result. The fact that they have raised prices so late in comparison to their counterparts in the space is interesting even if you don’t find it laudable.
At the end of the day, the backlash that Sony and Nintendo faced wasn’t because of the price increase so much as it was because of all the other stuff.
Requiring proprietary hardware for $80+ games that almost never go on sale or have online subscription services that also keep going up, and then anti-consumer practices like (in Sony’s case) the whole have to have an account to play their games on PC and not wanting to issue refunds where a PS account wasn’t available but people bought the game and oh well we just won’t port our games to PC at all then, and so on.
Like. There’s way more to it than Valve good, Sony/Nintendo bad.
I hope people here give Valve the same flack they gave Nintendo and Sony for raising prices.
Hell, the Switch 2 went up $50 and everyone on Lemmy lost their god damned minds in that thread because “Nintendo bad” or whatever. But I’m sure because it’s our sweet baby angel Gabe on his 20 yachts we’ll all be reasonable about the $200+ upcharges.
Look, none of these companies WANT to raise prices on these consoles. It’s just the AI bullshit and stupid ass tariffs ruining everything. That’s what needs to change.
Valve doesn’t have 50+ years of hardware experience though. Sony, Nintendo, and Msoft can all swing their big dicks all over that industry and get whatever the fuck they want, Valve cannot.
Valve can and does strongarm the software side all the time, the gaming industry would have died instead of exponentially surpassing the film industry if it weren’t for Valve setting strong precedents.
And finally how in the fuck are you blaming AI at the same time that you are trying to defend Sony? The company that’s adding AI to PLAY THE FUCKING GAME FOR YOU?
They lost their minds because Nintendo said:
Then they raised the price of the original switch and a bunch of the accessories.
Then the tariffs in the US were deemed to be illegal and they sued to get their
moneyprofit back and didn’t want to repay the price increase they passed along to their customers.There’s also the fact that Nintendo was on a lot of people’s shit lists for their litigiousness and other anti-consumer crap they had done so people were already mad at them before they raised prices.
When you look at it that way, Sony (who were also on people’s shit lists for a laundry list of reasons) are no better in many’s eyes.
Also, this completely ignores how small a company Valve is in comparison to Nintendo and Sony. I think that’s the main problem actually. Valve isn’t a hardware power house and they can’t command the kind of sales contracts or parts/fab that Nintendo or Sony can. So they are less likely to be able to withstand raising prices on their hardware as a result. The fact that they have raised prices so late in comparison to their counterparts in the space is interesting even if you don’t find it laudable.
At the end of the day, the backlash that Sony and Nintendo faced wasn’t because of the price increase so much as it was because of all the other stuff.
Requiring proprietary hardware for $80+ games that almost never go on sale or have online subscription services that also keep going up, and then anti-consumer practices like (in Sony’s case) the whole have to have an account to play their games on PC and not wanting to issue refunds where a PS account wasn’t available but people bought the game and oh well we just won’t port our games to PC at all then, and so on.
Like. There’s way more to it than Valve good, Sony/Nintendo bad.
Narrator: they did not.
“We can’t get mad at Gabe and Valve! PC Master Race loves not being able to buy physical games and loves buying a license to them from Valve!”
Waiting for the “bu-bu-bu-Game Cards!” response to this. I can still sell a game card.
True! I own both and I remember people losing their minds over the switch 1 price increase.