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.

Anyone stupid enough to be paying more than $0 deserves to get rooked.

Don't buy anything from Sony, got it

I'm sure not being able to trust the price does wonders to sales.

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.

I wonder why steam is so successful

The dynamic pricing will not affect my static boycott.

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.

Not the person you asked, but for me:

• The music CD rootkit
• removing OtherOS from the PlayStation 3
• trying to push various proprietary formats like MemoryStick and MiniDisc
• DRM in ATRAC3
• etc.

Take your pick!

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.

Valve is also the only company out of these big gaming companies who do lot of Open Source (working on it and funding other projects) and care about Linux. It maybe coincidental, but these care and goals align with my personal interests. No other company in the gaming industry does that to this extend, plus its an open platform. And being a private company brings also lot of freedom to not listen to shareholders.

The only thing is, that Steam itself is not Open Source... and the uncertainty what will happen if one day Gabe will no longer control...

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?"

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?)

Intriguing....

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.

Ugh God. I remember that "Magic Gate" bullshit when the PSP launched. They started a trend with the Walkman and they're trying to get lightning to strike twice. Never could do it though. Good.

Those greedy assholes need to engineer and innovate in other areas.

you can also burn it yourself if you have a bluray burner, the software the aliexpress discs use is freely available (search for "goldhen")

this will do the trick, scroll down to the product recommendations and you might find an even cheaper listing

Preferring a different option is not a boycott of the one

Oooh awesome. I figured normal burned discs wouldn't work.

We don't have a bluray burner (only a CD/DVD drive) but have been kinda wanting to get one.

Shoot, apparently it's not open source. That's not confidence-inspiring... but then again PS3 CFWs weren't either (*sighs*)

Does that apply to PS4s running 11.something? I can't remember what OS version our PS4 is on, but it's new enough that a jailbreak only came out pretty recently. Needed a specific game disc to work.

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.

Omg their stupid ass 4x normal price proprietary memory sticks lmao

it works up to firmware 12.52, if you haven't updated for a couple of months it should be fine

Oooh lovely!! We're uh, pre-12.5 I think.

A DVD won't work, right, it's gotta be a bluray? Because if we can do this with a DVD-R and not need another reader, that'd be great.

Anyone dealing with Sony in anyway absolutely deserves everthing they get. Fuck Sony ten ways to forever.

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.

Doesn’t valve also do this for different regions?

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.

Trying to only establish proprietary media in the past, mostly ignoring open standards.

Oops I didn't fully read, you got it ♥️

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

exploits are getting fixed over time 🤷‍♂️ check out modded warfare on youtube if you want to learn more

it has to be BD, it's exploiting a vulnerability in bluray video decoding. honestly just get it from aliexpress, a BD burner is €100+, not really worth it to buy one for single use

Man people like slop games. No wonder they keep pumping them out.

The term of art is "price discovery"

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 2 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?

That's nice...

Meanwhile, I am testing piracy: one game - same price on my private torrent tracker.

Are you suggesting Ghost of Yotei is a "slop game"?

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

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

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

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

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.