You could very well be right, I haven’t read the full suit or done a lot of research on it, so I’m just going off the scraps I’ve read. I did check out isthereanydeal to look at price differences between Steam and Epic on some major titles, and all of them had even pricing. I don’t have a huge sample size, so if you want to look for some that have different prices, I’d be interested to see how much difference there is, and if, say, the lowest price on Epic has had a Steam sale after it where the game was priced higher on Steam.

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.

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

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.

Okay, I hope this discussion has left you with at least some thoughts of your own regarding how you speak about voting.

The same thoughts I came in with, that education is needed now more than ever.

In today’s climate where our civil rights are being eroded, it matters what people say and how they say it.

Which makes me wonder how you can be so smarmy with every sentence that you type. Your people skills leave much to be desired.

. No one wants to parrot old disenfranchisement dog whistles from ya know, the times when they denied black people the right to vote because they lacked an education.

Ahh, we’re back to twisting my words. I’ll repeat them, so we can ensure that the context lives on: “I’m not saying that we should take away the right to vote from the uneducated. I’m saying we should put more focus into education.”

You know, for posterity, since your brand of journalism leans into the yellow end of the spectrum.

And saying “basic education should be a requirement to vote,” is LITERALLY a dog whistle from then.

It certainly is. Good thing I didn’t say it. I said that we should make sure that we are educating people along with their rights. Giving people rights and hoping they know what to do with them is how we ended up with Trump in office.

That’s like saying gay people should wear a pink triangle and then acting confused when I take issue with that specific verbiage and idea.

Oh, let me see which logical fallacy this falls into. I’m thinking either Red Herring or Equivocation.

Please consider how propaganda affects all of us and we all may pick up problematic speech from time to time because we live in a dystopia.

You seem to be the one drawing false equivocation and shielding yourself behind an unrelated argument because you know that you have no ground to stand on. But, please, tell me how I’m anti-LGBTQ+, again. I’m sure the second time you say it, it will come true.

People who engage in problematic rhetoric also deserve a basic education in things like civil rights and hate speech right? Otherwise it’s dangerous.

Well, at least you seem to have a grasp on the lesson I am trying to teach you.

Lol, such a random stray out of no where. Also ableism agaiiiiin why

Is this red herring, again? I can’t be sure, but I think you either don’t understand what I said, or you don’t understand ableism. Either way, that ain’t me, chief.

I really miss ~2016 Late Stage Capitalism on Reddit and I was hoping Lemmy would have some of those same people. I miss them.

No one is stopping you from making a triumphant return to the cesspool you crawled out of. You can ride a donkey in while they fan you with palm fronds.

So, there now. I’ve responded to every insipid argument you’ve made, and nothing you’ve said can be taken out of context. You are not the person you seem to think you are. You manipulate and twist words to serve your own ends, and people like you are the reason we have a lot of the issues we do. I’m gonna go ahead and block you now, so feel free to have the last word, I won’t try to stop you.

This is fascism.

Anything can be fascism when taken completely out of meaning. Maybe if you completed the quote you’d have a little bit of context for the argument. I’m done with this discussion, it seems you are more than willing to twist my words to give artistic license to what you want me to say than to actually read what I wrote. Take it easy, stranger. Hope you are able to make thoughts and prayers work out for a better world, because that seems to be all you are capable of.

A gun is not what we are talking about. We are talking about the right to vote.

We are talking about rights. I was using gun rights as an example, because like guns, if you don’t know how to vote, you’ll end up hurting yourself or others. Education is key. Everyone has the right to vote, but the ability to cast that vote should come with a caveat. You should know how to vote, and how your vote works. Ignoring the system and willfully playing dumb means that I don’t want your vote to count alongside mine. I’m not saying that people should be educated to vote like me, but that there is a baseline level of education that should be a requirement to vote. And before you get your undies twisted, I’m not saying that we should take away the right to vote from the uneducated. I’m saying we should put more focus into education.

The majority of Americans don’t or can’t vote

As you told me I was off topic with guns, I’ll say you are off topic here. We aren’t talking about non-voters. We are talking about voting 3rd party.

As far as misinformation- that’s a huge topic and would require we regulate advertising and media.

No, it doesn’t. That’s the lazy answer. That’s the defeatist answer. It requires, say it with me, education. We have such a shit education system in this country that if we had to teach children how to breathe, the infant mortality rate would be at pre-industrial levels. We keep funelling money into special interests, corporate control, and foriegn wars that we have left several generations behind when it comes to education. If we focused on ensuring the education of our children, a lot of our issues would be solved within 50 years. It is the single greatest failing of this once-great country. “Why educate, when we can tell them how to act and outsource critical thinking?”

That is what I’m saying. I’m not trying to take away anyone’s rights. I’m not trying to tell anyone what to do. I’m saying that if we invested in our youth the way we invest in war, we’d be waving to cancer in the rear view mirror of our generational ship bound for Alpha Centauri. Instead I have a bunch of rich cunts with more money than god spending my life measuring their dicks.

Totally fine to discuss but it doesn’t supersedes the literal civil right to vote. Or to run for office.

By that logic, the right to own a gun supersedes the need to be educated on how they work. “Here’s a loaded 9mm, Timmy. I’m sure you can figure the rest out.”

I do not agree with the messaging or the idea that people should be forced into thinking and voting like me.

And I’m not saying that anyone should be forced to vote any one way. Vote however you want, but being educated on how it works is just as important as the act itself. If every voter were educated on the system and understood how it worked, then we wouldn’t have third party candidates. Actually, strike that, we would have them. We wouldn’t have this first past the post bullshit we do now, and third party candidates would have a chance at being elected if they represent the will of the majority.

Untl we have that, though, people should understand that voting doesn’t work how they want it to, it works how it works. If you want to feed your family by fishing with cheetos, go for it, but don’t tell everyone else that if we all fish with cheetos suddenly fish will take the bait. The nature of the beast is that we vote in a two party system, and we will until we change it at a fundamental level. The fact that we have people saying that third party voting is a viable option tells me that there is a lot of misinformation and a strong lack of education in our voting populace.

Roughly half of the States in the US have a higher population than the entirety of New Zealand. That is a much larger population to deal with, and the politics don’t apply the same way. It isn’t linear, it’s logarithmic. The more people there are, the more exponentially difficult it is to manage. The Urban area of my city has about half of the Population of New Zealand, and my city has third party representation on the local level. Please, keep your condescension to yourself.

I’m not sure you could be more milquetoast if you tried. Sure, it’s important that everyone has the right to vote. It is equally as important that everyone understand that unless they vote one of two ways, their vote is essentially going to waste at best, and going against their best interests at worse. A vote for a third party candidate is a vote cast against your closest aligned Democrat or Republican candidate. A vote not cast for them is cast against them. That’s just the way the system works. It sucks. I hate it. I want to change it, but wishful thinking isn’t fixing the problem, and until its fixed, voting third party is a net loss for the voter. That’s the shitty reality of it. People that tell you to vote third party are either idiots, or malicious, and no one should be listening to either of those groups when it comes to voting for the future of the country. Work on changing the system first, then cast the vote you want to cast.

That’s a Pac-lapse.

I vote that he is replaced with a robot that cracks eggs into a cold pan at a rate of 1 egg every 10 minutes.

The Communist Party, yes. The air-quote Communists on Lemmy are just as happy to tell you to vote third party as anyone else.

No, it’s sarcasm, and I was laying it on thick.

And I couldn’t be more happy for you.

No! Come on, everyone! Third party candidates are what’s best for the country. We aren’t doing this to dilute the vote, we just want to have our voices heard. Sure, everything we are saying is being said by the main two parties, but we also smoke a lot of weed. So, come on, guys, just vote for the Green Party.