E tu, brute?

My yard guy only charges $45 but I tip $15 on top. Still a great deal. I don’t have the energy for that shit after work.

I think that’s part of the argument. It isn’t just for Steam keys, it’s for alternate storefronts like GOG, Ubi, EA, Epic, etc. If you want to sell on Steam, you have to keep it the same price as anywhere else. It seems a bit harsh, but I am tentatively siding with Steam on this one. I’ve never had a company be as consumer friendly as Valve has been over their lifetime, and they’ve earned some brand loyalty. It’ll quickly dissolve if they start fucking people over, but for now, as far as I’m concerned, they get the benefit of the doubt.

Yeah, on the other hand, I’m also an idiot, and I could be completely off with what I’m talking about. IANAL, so we’ll have to wait and see.

It wouldn’t make them available to more people, it would make deeper sales available to certain storefronts. Right now, Valve says that if you want to do business with them, and you offer a discount on another storefront, that same discount must be reflected in the Steam price when it sold for a discount on Steam. What the lawsuit says is that Publishers should be allowed to publish whatever discount they want on whatever site they want. That sounds like a better deal to consumers, but what it does is open the door for anti-competitive loss-leaders.

It’s the same strategy that companies like Wal-Mart have employed to gain marketshare. They come in, sell everything at a loss to drive out competition, and then raise the prices to the same price the competition was charging. They haven’t given the consumers a better option, they’ve only ensured that they don’t have another choice. If you look at Valve and you look at Epic, you can easily see who has the deeper pockets: Valve is worth a little over $3 Billion from what I can tell, while Epic is worth over $40 Billion. If Epic wants to sell at a loss to drive Steam out of business, they can, easily. As a matter of fact, they’ve already tried this by offering the free weekly games that they do.

I’d wager that if this goes through and Steam loses, we’ll see that free weekly game go away, and then large doorbuster sales of everything on the site just to undercut every steam sale as it happens. Where are you gonna buy that new game at? Steam where it’s full price, or Epic where it’s half price? What about the Steam Winter Sale? Will you buy the game for 80% off, or go over to Epic offering it at 90% off with a $10 coupon for another game on the site? Pretty soon you’ll only be shopping on Epic, and once Steam is gone, Epic can charge whatever they want. It’s the long game. They don’t need to be profitable today. They just need to show their shareholders the path.

It’s actually kinda the opposite. It’s claiming that Valve makes deals with publishers that use Steam forcing them to maintain price parity with other storefronts. So, if you want to discount a game on something like Fanatical, you’d have to run the same discount on Steam, you can’t just have one or the other. I don’t want to put on the ol’ tin foil hat, but it reeks of Epic. Epic wants to run cheap sales through their storefront that Steam won’t get, so they can pull users away from Steam. If they both have the same discounts, then Epic can’t get the upper hand. That is complete conjecture on my part, but it fits with Epic’s shit strategies. Instead of making something that brings people to them, they want to kill off the competition through anti-competitive practices. It’s the same thing they are doing by signing exclusivity contracts with third-party developers.

CSI: YMCA trying to crack the case of who pissed in the pool, again.

Well, just feed it to the cat.

It didn’t tank this morning. It’s been going downhill for exactly a month.

Like the Pizza Hut turned Bank turned Chinese Food Restaurant turned Fed Ex Pack and Ship

Sweet Lord.

My sister got me a llama wool beanie a few years ago, and I will sweat at near zero. That shit is WARM.

nice

Fuck yeah! I can’t wait for their reunion tour, just as soon as Charlie gets back from Australia.

What are you doing, step-city?

Me? That’s usually my job, but Jill Stein can jump off a bridge, so I won’t be giving any hot takes in this thread.

I love Mr. Elliot and I appreciate the message, but that felt phoned in. Like they gave him the script on a zoom call and used the first take.

One of my best friends was also a neighbor of mine. I was on my porch smoking a morning cig and he yells over to me, “Hey, you want some hot chocolate?” I’m not the kind of person to turn down hot chocolate, so I say, “Sure.” He brings it over, and we both drink our hot coco and smoke cigs while the sun rises over Tampa Bay. This is some real bro shit, and one of my fondest memories. However, it took a turn when I noticed the flavor of the hot chocolate. It was earthy. I really liked it, though, it was such a unique flavor, and I thought that it may have been some high quality chocolate or something, so I asked him. He said, “No, it’s POT chocolate.”

Now, I smoked some weed back in high school. You know, that brown basement weed that had been harvested from the roaches of that one friend’s parent’s ashtray. That weed. This wasn’t that weed. This was high quality. This was potent. Still, I thought to myself, “I used to smoke weed all the time, this can’t be that bad.” I was wrong. That shit wiped me out. I was too stoned to move. I was fully ready to die in that chair. I watched the sun rise and set like the OG Time Machine film.

I hold no ill will towards my friend for the mix up. He legitimately thought I understood what he asked, and I know he would never do anything like that on purpose, but damn, that shit was wild.

Sounds like you are in the market to buy whatever they are selling. Best of luck with that.

Ok, we’ve jumped the shark on the apocalypse, and I fucking love it. This shit is going sideways so hard and so fast that I’m really just waiting around to see how fucked up it can get. I’ll be real, I’ve already made my peace that the planet is going to be mostly human-free in the next century, so I may as well enjoy the fireworks. Fire up the reactor, boys! We’ve got SEO to write!