They even do Price Discrimination on video games now
Submitted 4 days ago by bytesonbike@discuss.online to aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
https://discuss.online/pictrs/image/f38971bf-c15c-4b35-a6e9-87d66ec10a48.png
Comments
NateNate60@lemmy.world 4 days ago
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
How the fuck is this even legal?
kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I mean, if they generally advertise a specific price or discount, then bait and switch on you, it isn’t. But they can always give different discounts to people on whatever conditions they want. Like stores giving employee discounts, senior discounts, military discounts, student discounts, repeat customer discounts, partnership discounts, new customer discounts, etc. You can even get a discount on an individual basis by haggling. The slimy part here isn’t the different pricing as a promo to entice a new customer, or even that two people in the same household would be treated differently (military husband, civilian wife; senior parent, non-senior caregiving child, etc.), but in the lack of transparency as to why they are priced different or even that they are unless both go to look specifically.
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
Now that you put it like that, yeah, it really is completely normal to have “discriminatory” discounts (as a student I personally regularly make use of them), and for a moment I even wondered why it would bother me at all, why I even thought it is problematic - but as you say it’s the fact that it’s covert is what’s problematic.
Goretantath@lemmy.world 3 days ago
There’s a law saying grocery stores can’t give discounts to SNAP benifiters, why can’t there be a law saying you have to give the deal to EVERYONE.
verdi@feddit.org 3 days ago
Microsoft is societal cancer.
MoonRaven@feddit.nl 3 days ago
This is Playstation…
BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
He’s still not technically wrong.
verdi@feddit.org 3 days ago
My age is showing, every plastic box used to be a Nintendo now it’s an Xbox.
Tronn4@lemmy.world 3 days ago
He was just stating a fact 😅
reddifuge@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I’ll never forgive the Japanese.
BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Did he stutter
Covenant@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Yes.
And I’ve seen “special for you price” on xbox as well.
dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
The future we are headed towards if we don’t start caring about privacy and where we hand out our data.
Obviously Playstation has their own data, but stuff like this is gonna start being way more obvious in other places because they can so easily buy data on you through data brokers.
Websites you visit saying they share your data? Yes they sell it and it’s directly going to have an effect on other parts of you life just like this.
So you won’t just “pay with your data”, you’ll pay with your money too in a less direct way (prices on other sites shooting up because x website sold your data to y and they know you need this product so they price gouge you).
Not only will this occur for gaming stores or web shops, it can become a thing in banking (maybe they give you a worse interest rate on a loan, etc) and worse.
Washedupcynic@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Credit scores are already how banks discriminate. That system is already in place.
dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
True, but that won’t stop them from acquiring more data so they can squeeze more out of you.
Anything to make them more.
Maybe my examples would’ve been better for other industries, but yeah, I think this will happen everywhere if we don’t stop it.
Batmorous@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Get more active, get other people active too, and teach them the importance of it
Washedupcynic@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
I’m the sort of person that likes proof before I decide to be angry about corporate gouging. So the first thing I did was to look for other sources that discuss this. Vice is reporting on this screenshot and the OG reddit post, there have been no comments from Sony. Insider Gaming is also reporting on this screenshot and OG reddit thread, in addition to discussing an earlier instance where someone reported going onto their browser to look up Astro Bot on the PlayStation Store while being signed out. It was $59.99. when signed in, it appeared as $44.99. Sony likes to call this bullshit dynamic pricing. This means that as you play, Sony is harvesting data about what games you play, how long you play the games in question, along with data in your library which gets fed into an algorithm to determine what price you should pay. This garbage is fucking reprehensible. This is the type of stuff that made me drop consoles and turn to the loving embrace of PC gaming. If I saw shit like this via my digital distributor, I would absolutely stop using them and look for other ways to legally purchase the game, or turn to piracy.
DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
I wouldn’t buy rockstar products anyways, they are terrible and intentionally break Linux support.
Dojan@pawb.social 4 days ago
Yeah. Don’t buy rockstar. Just get it through alternative means.
Peruvian_Skies@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Naval aquisition.
Datz@szmer.info 3 days ago
Or don’t get it at all, never played them or felt like it!
(Bad news: I grew up with Nintendo instead)
mcv@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Have your wife buy it and gift it to you.
But yes, this sort of price discrimination is weird and deadly for any sort of free market.
nucleative@lemmy.world 2 days ago
This is something travel agent websites do too.
If you’re logged out, they’ll show you a price that’s really attractive. But if you log in with an account that’s got some history, they’ll suddenly say that price is no longer available now you need to pay the higher price.
Agoda.com I’m looking at you
yggstyle@lemmy.world 3 days ago
RBWells@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I know Pokemon Go did something like this as market research. They wanted to see what price would people buy at (in the coins you can earn without money, or buy with money).
Still yucky, so yucky. I would contact them with the screenshot and tell them you will buy it for the lower price on your account.
TBi@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I would say that I won’t buy it because of this. Let them know they lost a sale.
If you give them money they’ll just keep doing it in the background.
merdaverse@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Wow, this is pretty dystopian, but I guess it’s just the natural extension of supply and demand applied to the individual. Free market at its finest… The next step is to use your demographic data in calculating the price, like insurance companies already do.
absentbird@lemmy.world 3 days ago
So instead of taxing the rich we just let corporations scam extra money off them? Thanks I hate it.
mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
It’s not just the rich that get targeted by this. The goal is to see what price each individual will tolerate. The rich may tolerate higher prices, but the end goal is closing sales that otherwise would have been missed. Which means even the poor spend more money, because it’s something they wouldn’t have purchased otherwise.
And it unfairly impacts the poor, who have less disposable income to throw around, and who are more adversely impacted by surprise expenses. Because $40 isn’t a big difference for a rich person, but $20 could be the difference in whether or not a poor person is able to eat in two or three weeks (after the refund period has closed).
captain_unicode@feddit.org 2 days ago
I think Elmo’s gonna notice if his Hentai Games suddenly cost 10 Million Dollars.
rumba@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
I’m not a huge fan of pirating games, but shit like this gets me there real quick.
Goretantath@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Im a big fan, the only way I play new games is by 🏴☠️, if its good I go and buy it on steam or gog. Most the time pirated versions run better anyway since all the DRM is removed.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
arr 🏴☠️🦜
blave@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I learned that, decades ago, piracy was always the best option
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Reminds me of the time I installed a 3d modelling program at work and decided I liked it and pirated it at home.
The work one took weeks of troubleshooting on my own with the instructions followed by email back and forth with support. And the business I worked for had a partner license the whole time. Their DRM involved a dongle in the parallel port and a license server running on the local machine.
At home, I decided one day to use it to make test files for a raytracer I was writing, found it, downloaded it, installed it, and was running it by the end of the night without any of the fancy shit they tried to add to prevent this.
That was when I learned that that pain in the ass DRM was only a pain in the ass for legitimate users and lazy/naive piraters.
lena@gregtech.eu 2 days ago
I like to actually buy indie games like celeste or scarlet hollow, the devs deserve it
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
DO NOT SUPPORT THIS AS A CONSUMER
FreddiesLantern@leminal.space 3 days ago
Determination to install Linux on ps increases.
DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 days ago
Instructions too complicated. Ended up with OtherOS on PS3
MedicPigBabySaver@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
WalrusDragonOnABike@reddthat.com 4 days ago
What is the difference in price based on? Are they offering an extra discount due to lack of activity? Just random A/B testing? Demographics?
Gutek8134@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I remember hearing some time ago that mobile games give you progressively cheap “special deals” to make you buy anything from them, as that makes future purchases way more probable
I imagine it’s similar here - “Oh, you didn’t buy any games recently? But what if they went on sale?”
BarbedDentalFloss@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
I was going to sell my xbox for a ps5… but no way am I buying into that bullshit.
Goretantath@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I only buy nintendo, not much better over here… PC is and always has been king, haven’t even bought the switch2 due to all the bull with not owning anything anymore with it.
BarbedDentalFloss@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
I get most of my gametime in on a steamdeck. And I’m sitting the SW2 out entirely. Completely underwhelming.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 2 days ago
My wife and I got a switch a few years ago. It was our first console either of us bought that was current and we were both blown away by the sheer cost of games. We’re too spoiled by the sales on PC, so the idea of spending more than $20-30 for a major title is just foreign to us
MoonRaven@feddit.nl 3 days ago
Enjoy. This is Playstation.
KeenFlame@feddit.nu 3 days ago
“Soured me quite a bit”
Eeeeh… What?
So just – it inspired a social media post. You still gave them money… and now exposure. And you wonder how companies get away with it. Thanx for your work?
dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net 4 days ago
The base game is $60 on the PlayStation store for me 😭
CannedYeet@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I like price discrimination. Price discrimination lets airlines price first class tickets above cost so coach can tickets can be priced at marginal cost. It’s a way to charge the rich more. If you have an extensive library they figure you’re not poor. If your wife’s library is small, they might be guessing that she can’t afford to buy a lot of games.
dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Airlines are the worst example of this that I know of.
It’s not just the rich they will target.
They (including everyone) will and do use this technology along with data they harvest from you (from other parts of your online life) to make you pay as much as you can to get things you need.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Price discrimination lets airlines price first class tickets above cost so coach tickets can be priced at marginal cost.
Economy tickets aren’t prices at marginal cost. The first available economy seats are priced at a base rate. As the plane fills up, economy seat prices increase. Then the original economy passengers are bombarded with emails and texts asking them to upgrade to premium, when higher class tickets go unsold.
There’s also a secondary market for tickets exploited by resellers (Expedia, etc) that buy up tickets in advance and try to leverage corporate discounts for a profit.
But all of this ultimately making flying more confusing, more difficult, and less flexible (it’s basically impossible to cancel a ticket now), due to all the middle men playing hot potato with unsold tickets.
The “optional play” for flying is to just go to the airport and gamble on standby tickets, which require you to have far more free time than free cash. If you need to keep a schedule, this is a horrible model.
notarobot@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
That is not price discriminationprice discrimination would be you having to pay more than someone else for the same products or service. Imagine paying more than someone else for the same tickets, just because. Or maybe black people have to pay more. That is price discrimination
ThunderQueen@lemmy.world 3 days ago
That is the most ignorant thing ive read all day. Congratulations.
Darkcoffee@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
And then I see people complaining about Steam having so much of the market cornered. They 👏 don’t 👏 pull 👏 shit 👏 like 👏 this
jwiggler@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
The fact that they don’t pull this shit is the reason they have the distribution market cornered.
We have to remember that gamers are not Valve’s primary customers. Game devs are. The market you’re referring to is the market of distributors available to game devs – NOT the market of storefronts available to gamers. In the PC space, the market of distributors is cornered by Valve and it allows them to take a big chunk of each sale from the game devs.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Steam and I think Valve has done some great things for gaming on PC and for gamers in general. That doesn’t change the fact that they are another cost a game dev must pay in order for them to create their goods, in an economic sense. Valve’s got the shelf space and devs don’t have much choice but to rent it out.
atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
I think you are forgetting the other reason Valve cornered the market;
“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue… The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
Gabe Newell, CEO Valve - Speaking at the Washington Technology Industry Association’s (WTIA) Tech NW Conference.
oxysis@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
Valve’s fee is more than earned however. Steam as a storefront is highly trusted by users, it has a rock solid reputation that is hard to come by. As a distributor they take a one time fee for each copy sold, then they manage all of the costs from users downloading and downloading again for as long as the platform exists from that one time fee. Meanwhile if a developer were to do that themselves then they pay each time a user wants to download that game.
Sure the developers lose a bit more money than if they either ran their own platform or sold on another platform. But the higher up front cost to access the larger platform is a very worthwhile trade as can be seen by developers continually coming back.
_stranger_@lemmy.world 3 days ago
When steam came out with the orange box and set it up so that if you already had some of the games in the box, you could gift the other copies to people, I knew they were going to win the war.
I hope gaben lives forever, because I’m terrified of how instantly it will turn to shit when he’s not in charge anymore.
Honytawk@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
👏 yet
What do you think will happen when Gaben our Lord dies?
You think their successor will be as merciful and follow Gabens vision? Or be blinded by the huge amount of money Steam makes?
Xenny@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Both. Steam is already the market leader in its industry. You just keep doing what you’re doing and you win.
notarobot@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
I hope he and Linus torvalds both announce successors. Like a sort of "if my product fails you, this person follows my steps
burntbacon@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
Newell has supposedly said that if ever there were to be a sea change where steam would have to shut down people’s access to games they’ve purchased, he would release code to turn off the ‘check’ for whether you’ve bought the game on steam, thus allowing you to play games without the ‘DRM’ of being online with steam. I wonder if he would do the same if he thought that would be the direction things were going in the event of his death.
circuitfarmer@lemmy.world 4 days ago
This right here. So much space and energy being used to bitch about Steam that could be used for, oh, I dunno… Sony. Microsoft. Nintendo. Giant players that have held tacit monopolies for years and literally engage in anticompetitive behavior on a regular basis.
If I had room for one more conspiracy theory, I could point to a handful of companies that probably would not be above paying people to bitch about Steam…
(points up ^^^)
RisingSwell@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
I bitch about steam because it has issues. I don’t bitch about the others because they have issues severe enough I just don’t use them whereas steam is running anytime my laptop is running
Aeri@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I resent Nintendo so much because I know for a fact that if they just made a red clone of steam with Nintendo branding and put every possible Nintendo game ported to PC on it they would make so much God damn money it would cause some kind of gravitational money Singularity and destroy the world.
balance8873@lemmy.myserv.one 3 days ago
Slobbering fanbois like you are what drive me to bitch about steam. Steam is ok but the more people circle-jerk all over themselves about how amazing it is the more I hate it and them. It’s a service that lets you download an executable wrapped up in an application which feels like they took the worst possible parts of every generation of computing in the last 20 years. Its ridiculous to fanboi a downloader.
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 4 days ago
Steam doesn’t really have a market cornered? They aren’t stopping you from buying from elsewhere. They even let you add non-steam games to your library
Fredselfish@lemmy.world 4 days ago
How do I install my non steam games?
Aeri@lemmy.world 3 days ago
What do you call the business strategy where you just aren’t a huge assholes to your customers to milk maximum profit and your competition keeps shooting itself in the foot?
vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Pre 1980s capitalism beating its braindead son with a belt? Like that’s the best terminology I can think of. Maybe general wait and see versus the landmine runners IDK.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
I’ll still complain about them having the market cornered. Sure, right now they mostly only do things I agree with. If things change though we’re fucked, and there’s nothing we can do about it. If there’s competition in the market then we can choose to support whoever is doing things right (like Valve currently) and the others will be forced to follow.
Taldan@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I’m glad people use Playstation/Xbox/Epic, so Steam still has competition, but I’m also really glad I’m not using any other store
dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Long live Steam & GOG in their current moral states.
BroBot9000@lemmy.world 4 days ago
That you know of
Screen_Shatter@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Isthereanydeal.com tracks prices and histories of most PC games. You can always check there to find the best current price and compare to what is being shown. If Steam was showing me something different I would know thanks to this.
notarobot@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Steam is my favorite monopoly. They are not perfect, and probably not good either. but they are the best