• Woozythebear@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Why would they? They still get a %30 cut of those $70 games. Blacklisting them would just be giving GoG and Epic a leg up in being the only stores you can play Sony blockbusters.

      Just a reminder that the steam Refund policy in America is illegal everywhere else in the world. They aren’t this great company that’s consumer first. They are trying to make as much money as possible and have Allowed the likes of 2k games and EA to be as scummy as possible on their platform.

      • Vlixz@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        I’m genuinely very confused - why is the steam refund policy illegal everywhere except America?

        • Bad_Company_Daps@lemmy.ca
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          2 years ago

          I think he means Steam’s refund policy is not available to anyone outside the US because they only implemented it to comply with a US law, so like if you are in a country without similar consumer protection laws they don’t offer the refund policy. (its not just the US btw, places like Canada and the EU also have the Steam refund policy)

        • Woozythebear@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          Because everywhere else has better consumer protections than America. 2 hour refund policy is some real anti consumer shit.

    • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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      2 years ago

      Don’t give your competitors a win

      It’s the same reason sports leagues don’t punish good players

  • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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    2 years ago

    I’m not in an affected country, nor did I plan to play multiplayer, but I still removed it from my wishlist and decided to boycott all titles requiring a PSN account. If you want to have some option but annoying account service, fine. I can survive clicking the X on that. But if they push this hard then we know they’ll push this onto all games next.

    • baconisaveg@lemmy.ca
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      2 years ago

      Have you looked at the list of affected countries? Are you really that upset that these titles aren’t available (for purchase) in places like Haiti and Afghanistan?

      • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
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        2 years ago

        Have you? Because it also contains countries like Baltics. But that’s not even the point. The point here is that Sony forces restrictions upon users for absolutely no reason or benefit for them, just so that Sony has some numbers to show to their shareholders. But thanks for proving my point about you people. You’re literally the reason why companies like Sony, EA, Ubisoft, etc. can ruin the gaming market without repercussions.

        • Auzy@beehaw.org
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          2 years ago

          Honestly… That’s a fairly harsh response to someone with an opinion…

          I kind of feel they don’t deserve that attack… It doesn’t mean they have any plans to buy it.

          I wouldn’t, and I’m actually selling my ps5 and set up my old PC with steam and big picture mode… But, pointing out the disadvantages in a normal way is more effective than attacking people

      • olutukko@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        yeah fuck people from other countries and let the corporations fuck over people who aren’t me am I right?

        it’s not whining people who fuck the gaming community. it’s the corporations who are making decisions that cause people to whine over them

  • Quacksalber@sh.itjust.works
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    2 years ago

    I hope they bill Sony ten times of what they are losing out on now. They need to set a precedent that no other publisher will want to repeat what Sony did.

        • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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          2 years ago

          I’m just not sure if the refund goes all the way back to Sony, or if steam is fronting the loss. If the latter, I imagine punitive action would be figured out pretty quickly.

          • CleoTheWizard@lemmy.world
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            2 years ago

            It seems that steam pulls refunds directly revenue in most cases which means that the publishers and studios feel an immediate impact in their numbers from them.

            Valve may choose to absorb some of the refunds but I don’t see why they would. Sony made the games unplayable in certain regions while telling Steam they wanted the game sold in those exact regions beforehand. They misused the store and I’m sure they paid dearly for it with those refunds.

  • Melt@lemm.ee
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    2 years ago

    Sony could resolve this by allowing any country to register an account, but they don’t lol

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      2 years ago

      There are often legal issues to be resolved for each individual country. It’s possible, but expensive. Ultimately, linking accounts at all is an unnecessary requirement that exists for Sony’s benefit, not yours.

  • rtxn@lemmy.worldBanned
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    2 years ago

    Good guy Steam ensuring that people with peg legs, hook hands, and eyepatches get that 100% disability discount

    • TexasDrunk@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      There’s a multiplayer mode. I believe, although I do not know, that it was announced that there would be no PSN requirement for single player mode.

      I have no fucking clue what the play is here. Why the ban instead of a huge flashing disclaimer on the store page and when you first open the game saying “You have to use our shitty services if you want multiplayer”? That would solve a lot of issues and they wouldn’t need to ban it anywhere.

  • kibiz0r@midwest.social
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    2 years ago

    Maybe this is a hot take, but… I kinda understand not selling a product in a country where nobody in your org knows the laws or speaks the language.

    3-person indie teams self-publishing can skate past, cuz they’ve got nothing to lose and can’t spend time triaging crashes due to unicode chars and weird keyboard layouts even if they wanted to. Big companies have to decide what’s worth the risk and the potential demands on their time.

    Sucks, but it is what it is.

    • GoodEye8@lemm.ee
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      2 years ago

      Except they’ve been selling in some of those countries for years? GoW, days gone, returnal, horizon series and Spiderman series are all available and some have been for years. It’s not about selling games in those countries, it’s about wanting to force PSN on the players. Can’t force PSN to people in countries where it’s not available so they’re not going to sell there.

      • kibiz0r@midwest.social
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        2 years ago

        I would not be surprised to hear that this was a disconnect inside the org.

        One place I worked had both physical and digital products. We initially listed the digital stuff anywhere and everywhere. It stayed that way for years and years. It was only because of an incidental meeting about localization that folks from legal and customer support went “Wait, you what? You can’t do that. Can we stop that, like today?”

        They assumed we were just gonna do the same markets that the physical products do. We assumed there was no reason to limit it.

        I guess a good question is: Does Sony sell Horizon for PS5 in any of the countries they don’t sell it for PC?

        • GoodEye8@lemm.ee
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          2 years ago

          I can verify that retailers are selling the console and games, including forbidden west and ghost of Tsushima.

          • kibiz0r@midwest.social
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            2 years ago

            Sorry, I meant digitally.

            I realize the personal experience I shared was a mismatch between the physical and digital depts, but that was just to explain that these mistakes can go on for a long time before they get fixed.

            The mismatch I could see happening at Sony would be that their PC dept was listing titles in regions that their Playstation digital dept doesn’t.

            • GoodEye8@lemm.ee
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              2 years ago

              There is a digital console for sale, but I have no idea how that would work if you can’t make a PSN account. I imagine officially they don’t sell digital.

              But even if we assume they shouldn’t sell digital it doesn’t explain not changing the listing for all games. The supposed “oh shit” moment was week / two weeks ago. Business critical issues get fixed immediately which means all games should’ve changed by now.

              • kibiz0r@midwest.social
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                2 years ago

                There is a digital console for sale, but I have no idea how that would work if you can’t make a PSN account. I imagine officially they don’t sell digital.

                That makes sense. Users are probably signing up and accepting T&C’s for other regions. Thanks for investigating!

                But even if we assume they shouldn’t sell digital it doesn’t explain not changing the listing for all games. The supposed “oh shit” moment was week / two weeks ago. Business critical issues get fixed immediately which means all games should’ve changed by now.

                Yeah, I’ve got no benefit-of-the-doubt explanation for why it’s so piecemeal and staggered. It definitely reeks of some bigwig throwing down a technical mandate and letting everyone else deal with the consequences.

                I wanna be clear, that I’m not saying Sony is on the right track here. Staying region-locked is not a good strategy long-term, for them or their player base — even if they set aside the PSN mandate permanently.

                I’m just saying there are some perfectly legitimate organizational reasons why they might need to region-lock in the short term, because I’ve seen those reasons in my own experience.

                FWIW, nobody involved in that decision particularly liked it either, but it was either region-lock or drastically change the international structure of the org over the course of a couple months, all just to potentially please a handful of consumers who might ultimately disproportionately experience bugs, adding to support costs, dev burden, and negative ratings.

                Btw, thanks for the good conversation! It’s so rare to have a pleasant interaction on the socials, especially when it starts out as diametrically-opposed positions.

    • Drigo@sopuli.xyz
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      2 years ago

      Surely hireing a person so they could sell it other countries would would make them more money than that person wages cost

      • kibiz0r@midwest.social
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        2 years ago

        You can’t just hire one person to manage that many countries. Even if they spoke all of the languages, and the incoming customer support workload was low enough, they would still be operating in countries with different laws and probably requiring their own corporate entities with their own accounting and legal experts, and any third-party software that you use to do all of this also has to be licensed for that country.

        Big companies are just a mess, and they’re not gonna spend the time, money, and risk building out a thing in a new region for probably a few hundred K per year.