Submitted 2 days ago by lazycouchpotato@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
https://psprices.com/news/sony-ab-testing-prices/
Dynamic pricing for video games isn’t new. Games will charge more or less based on your location.
It’s funny how companies brazenly do this, yet there are still swaths of moron saying it’s necessary to keep the lights on.
No, dipshits. It’s necessary to maximize profit off of your stupid-asses.
Then I will continue my 20 year Sony boycott.
What was it that initially sent you down that path?
Steam and PC gaming if anything. That and changing life priorities in my 30s and 40s. GoG and epic too. Between them I have almost 1000 games I didn’t pay for. Combined with hundreds on steam from humble etc. I probably spend more time trying to decide what to play than playing it.
Not the person you asked, but for me:
Take your pick!
Yeah I’m testing out dynamic buying. If it’s too expensive I don’t buy it.
I just don’t buy things I can be getting for free anymore. All of the people selling it want to treat me like a piggybank, so I don’t treat them as humans either.
This also goes for indie devs. They still do scumbag shit like ending prices in .99 while expecting the community to show goodwill.
Fuck that.
I’ve been doing that for years 🏴☠️
I’ve been going back to all the previous generation games I didn’t play since they’re all very easy to access these days in various forms!
That’s nice…
Meanwhile, I am testing piracy: one game - same price on my private torrent tracker.
Don’t buy anything from Sony, got it
Dynamic pricing = unbridled greed
I wonder why steam is so successful
Integrity.
Valve does the least amount of scammy/scumbag bullshit, and they’re rewarded accordingly.
Companies like EA only want customers that have no self-respect, so that’s what they get.
It’s almost as though Valve provides a valuable service and respects their customers. Rare traits in the corporate world. Answering to a board of directors is a hell of a lot easier than answering to shareholders.
Enshitification hasn’t struck there…yet.
Doesn’t valve also do this for different regions?
They do but that’s regional pricing, meaning that basically if the median income of a country is lower, game prices are lower as well. According to the article, that you apparently did not read, Sony is showing different prices (up to 18% lower in some cases) to different users. I take that to mean that the geographical position of the users could be the same.
Fuck dynamic pricing, anyone even considering it should be jailed.
So tired, so tired of these ultra rich finding new and creative ways of squeezing the plebs and we just, again, let them
THEY’RE A BUSINESS AND THEY NEED TO MAKE MONEY!!!
Stop being fucking poor and serve the people richer than you.
🏴☠️ might be the answer to this conundrum
I’m not sure I follow the dynamic pricing explanation. This article shows evidence of A/B price testing with different sized discounts, but not specifically dynamic pricing. It seems to be regional at most. If I’m missing anything let me know.
Exactly what i was thinking. A/B testin is the best way to get data.
What worries me more is what they are going to do with that data and if it will lead to predatory business model or not.
It absolutely will be used in the most shitty predatory way. They’re not going to simply delete the data and most digital marketplaces are excited at the prospect of dynamic pricing.
Next up: highly personalised dynamic pricing by analyzing your bank account, payment behaviour, your age, gender, location, your app and website interaction patterns, the color of your shit, the time spend on digital media and breathing, your credit score, your biometric data, whether you are white or a terrorist, your political voting behaviour, the number of hairs you have, your likely age of death, your medical and mental health history, your probability of being captivated by addictive patterns anf gambling mechanics, and maybe even your game collection, to maximize squeezing each and every last penny of your barely or even non-existent disposable income.
testing if there is a call to boycott or people swallow it I assume
Doesn’t matter if there is boycott or not. They are letting the cat out of the bag and it’s not going back in.
This is the start of normalizing surge pricing in gaming.
the PS4 can be jailbroken with a €4 disc from aliexpress nowadays, and it has a great catalog of games. slap a 1tb external hdd on it, download games from archive.org, presto
Wait, you can get jailbreak discs from aliexpress? That might be worth looking into…
(although, how do we know if it’s got malware on it?)
you can also burn it yourself if you have a bluray burner, the software the aliexpress discs use is freely available
In some cases the ps5 can as well but only older firmwares have the full chain of exploits. That said you can run game backups and if you get an old enough firmware you can even install Linux and run steam games
true, the only issue i see is that newly released games might have higher firmware requirements. the ps4 is de-facto end-of-life, no need to put much thought into modding that
Might have to snag a used PS4 now…
probably not a bad idea :) ps3/xbox360 are also totally worth it and easy to crack, if you have one lying around or are on a budget. my xbox360 is rocking ~120 games on 1tb (including xbox classic games), more than i could ever play in a lifetime
Why disc? Been few years since I used my PS4, but I remember jailbreaking it as long as you are on the correct firmware was as simple as caching a website offline and bookmarking it to run the exploit whenever you turned on the PS4.
exploits are getting fixed over time 🤷♂️ check out modded warfare on youtube if you want to learn more
More incentive for people to go to PC and chances for Linux gaming to grow. We’ll get a Linux GOG client someday and drag EGS kicking and screaming to Linux too. Steam lets devs generate keys for free for deva to sell on other stores with no Valve cut. Bundle sites like Fanatical, Humble Bundle, Digiphile
Closed hardware platforms with closed software distribution loops are destined for enshittification
The dynamic pricing will not affect my static boycott.
I’ve always said digital games should be discounted. I saved you the manufacturing, shipping, middle man, and warehousing costs. But I got zero discount, and the digital game can just be taken from you
I’m sure not being able to trust the price does wonders to sales.
Well, the only game I was looking forward to from them was Ghost of Yotei, budt since they killed the PC port for whatever reason, i don’t even want to buy anything
They’re still going to port it to PC.
If you played first Horizon but thought the second was a boring version of the first, that’s how Ghost of Yotei was for me. Assassins Creed Valhalla too. It’s like everything is the same game.
The next game from the Returnal devs will be released soon. Now that is something that sounds exciting! Returnal was amazing! I hope the port to PC.
Man people like slop games. No wonder they keep pumping them out.
Are you suggesting Ghost of Yotei is a “slop game”?
I have no idea what you are trying to say
How do you justify “dynamic pricing” on downloadable content?
It’s nothing new. It’s been done for the past 20 years. Products are priced differently in different countries based on their economy.
You have been able to do this in Steam for decades now. You can/could use VPN along with changing your location in steam, to trick it into thinking you are in that region. You would then get that regions prices.
E.g, lots of Steam games used to be noticeably cheaper if Steam thought you were in Russia as opposed to Germany.
I don’t think this story is about that. It’s about making games more expensive based on how much they think you’ll pay.
This specific study in the article is about making games cheaper to see if that makes people more likely to spend, but you just know they’re going to also make them more expensive if this works out
So they aren’t gonna say “loads of people are downloading the same game in the same region, let’s increase the price”? Cause that’s what dynamic pricing means.
It seems as though many people aren’t reading the article, Sony was testing lower prices for the test groups, not higher. That sounds like the opposite of price gouging to me.
It’s just a test. Doesn’t mean they won’t use it the other way.
Probably just seeing how much people notice and why.
Or maybe they’re testing how many more sales they make when discounting more.
If you get the lower price only with the app etc. it’s a price increase for anyone without the app. When most of the users have the app and are locked in the prices get changed based on an algorithm and everybody pays more than before.
So it means gamers with fomo will never get to see a sale for the games they want to play right. Since Sony knows those gamers will pay the full sticker price.
“What is the closest number to $70 that people will still buy?”
PS5 will keep being a dust collector for me. Unplugged it once the ROM keys leaked. It may someday be useful as a normal PC
I should be able to use dynamic offers. Ok, today I’m offering 20% less.
So what you’re saying is never use the Playstation store for any reason whatsoever.
I went there yesterday. The enshittificatiin is out of control. Instead of being able to sift through games, it’s all a bunch of predatory loot box-ish bullshit. Looks like it’s PC master race from here on out.
This should have been an obvious outcome when digital games weren’t priced any less than their physical release.
It’s not about saving the environment with less plastic. It’s not about saving money for the customer. It’s not about making it more convenient for the customer or the developer.
It was always about more greed. More money in their pockets and more ways to fuck you over as a customer.
These are the people who are about to win the console wars once Microsoft throws in the towel with Xbox.
PC gaming hopefully about to have a third golden age soon! 🤞
Just in time for hardware to be impossible to buy.
I’d hate for them to have to put thought into design instead of sucking every resource dry for another boring AAA grind with pretty landscapes.
Being transparent about stable prices without shady experiments is the first step of trust. Years ago Steam got rid of dynamic prices during sales, where prices during sales for games would change. While not exactly the same thing as Sony does, its still good we got stable and reliable prices.
Don’t we already have a similar thing with regional pricing?
Video games (and pretty much everything else) are sold for less in countries where the local currency is “weaker”, to maximize the profits in each market. Selling Slay the Spire for ₱779.00 Philippine Peso means they get this brand new game for half the price Europeans pay for it, only difference to most other goods is that it literally is the same product.
This is justified by claiming gaming is for everyone, it would be unfair to price out entire regions simply because the average worker earns less US $ over there.
Does this not apply within countries, too? Wouldn’t it be fairer if they sold games for less in Kansas compared to New York? I get that we do not trust game publishers with this new tool, and fear they just want to get the most money out of us, but then we also need to make the same fuss about how they use the old tool to do the same thing. I for one am closer to the Japanese median income, can I pay their prices then?
No matter how dynamic a pricing model, five-finger discount always makes it free.
Anyone stupid enough to be paying more than $0 deserves to get rooked.
I agree, but the downvotes show the gaming community still has a lot of growing up to do.
Janx@piefed.social 2 days ago
It’s not “surge”, it’s not “dynamic”, it’s not “personalized” pricing… It’s price gouging. Look forward to paying more for games during peak times and months. It’s never enough for these greedy giant corporations.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I might be part of the problem. I bought a PS5 years ago, thinking GTA6 was close to being released.
Turns out no.
But what I’ve discovered is that with how the gaming industry has gone, I don’t see any need to buy games anymore.
I’m sick of games being an online focused experience, which requires subscription costs.
I’m sick of every game needing a multiple deluxe collectors editions that are the only way to play the full game, but cost $200 each and come with cheap plastic junk “collectables” to justify the cost.
“But you won’t get the super rare coin and lapel pin if you don’t get the collectors edition!”
“Thats fine. Just sell me the full game at $60.”
“The full game requires the collectors edition. But it comes with this lapen pin and rare coin!”
“How many copies of the collectors edition are there?”
“About 2 million.”
“So, not exactly rare, is it?”