Only one I can think of is the paid mods fiasco. Maybe some more minor ones with TF2 and / or Dota? They made all hats in TF2 craftable which would've wrecked the economy. They quickly undid this.The comment section of the blog is going about as well as I expected. How often, historically, has Valve ever undone a change like this to their policies? If they get enough push back, think they'd reconsider?
If they were smart, they would let publishers generate a small number of keys, but not enough to really sell outside of Steam. If they were power mad, they would kill it entirely.The final stop would be severely restricting the ability of publishers/developes to generate unlimited keys for free, thus killing pretty much every third party stores out there.
The comment section of the blog is going about as well as I expected. How often, historically, has Valve ever undone a change like this to their policies? If they get enough push back, think they'd reconsider?
.Clearly to hit sites like Kinguin trying to sell GTA V through gifting for $30
No one asked for Bad Rats too.No one asked for this.
I think most ModBot giveaways are Steam keys rather than gift links. Maybe Stumpokapow has actual stats on that, but just looking at my ModBot loot stash, there's only one gift link I've ever received in a win. We can still use ModBot, though, 100%.
I like this idea. It's clear what their motive is here and your solution would still discourage the 3rd party sites that are the big issue here. It would be nice if they could have approached it a little less severe like this first, tried it, and then moved to their current approach instead of just cutting the head off right from the start.Thinking about it a little bit more, a more "consumer-friendly" approach to this would be to restrict gifting to people that have been on your friends list for X amount of time (i.e. two weeks or something).
Anyone buying gray-market gifts isn't going to become friends with a seller for two weeks just to buy a game. Even if they did, it'd make it much easier to track who the gray-market accounts are, as they'd basically have a revolving door of friends (i.e. something no normal user would have). Not to mention you'd have users immediately unfriending the seller account after a successful trade. Both are likely fairly uncommon things that an algorithm could search for, and gift-trade-ban the seller accounts that match the criteria.
You'd still be able to keep gifts for later. You'd still be able to buy DLC to redeem later. You'd still be able to giveaway gifts. It'd just make it much more difficult to operate a gray-market gift selling site. Basically, give it a kind of trading/market restriction.
Jumping straight to this seems a bit rash. I get why they're doing it, but it's a pretty aggressive change.
Prices of games. The first one reflects a game that follows the suggested conversions by Valve. The second one reflects publishers going batshit crazy and making games more expensive on poorer countries.Sorry, could you explain those charts? I'm a little confused on what it is showing exactly.
Sorry, could you explain those charts? I'm a little confused on what it is showing exactly.
Yep. This is a shitty change imo.That's shitty. Completely kills being able to get removed games from traders in the future. Valve keeps fixing problems that aren't really problems and making Steam worse.
Declined gifts being an automatic refund is nice.
I don't know who is going to schedule a gift far off in advance when most people wait for sales to gift games though.
No more Modbot giveaways though.
Wait, with old gift system you can buy a gift and share for any country? Even with regional prices differences via email?
I used to buy four or five copies of games during Steam sales so that I could give them to friends on random occasions later. I am too frugal (thrifty? cheap?) to do this kind of thing at full price, but sales rarely coincide with said random occasions, so this just basically means I'm not gifting things anymore.
I'm a little sad about this, but I guess it'll save me money.
If your country is region-free like US, then yes. It's the only way for us to get games that are region locked in our countries.
But it doesn't work the other way around, as games in our region are locked within. So gifting outside is not possible.
WTF, that's one of thw worst policy changes ever.
What if the game is on sale, and mi friend's birthday is a month later? Does that mean that I cannot wait for the perfect moment? That's bullshit.
Scheduling Gifts Is Even More Straightforward
Go ahead and buy a gift months in advance and have it delivered to a friend on time, every time.
For example in Turkey 209 TL is 1/7 th of basic income of most workers. A teacher for another example earns 3000 TL. Think in American dollars, basic worker salary 420 dollars a month and a teacher earns 900 dollars a month. And most of the people earns between this two and higher earners are considered "somewhat wealthly" in the eyes of the public. Now think about this, can you buy new full AAA games if you were to earn this kind of money most of your life ? Also consider basic necessities of life such as bills for electricity, gas , water etc. , rent prices -in cities they are most of the time starts about 600-700 TL- ...
That's shitty. Completely kills being able to get removed games from traders in the future. Valve keeps fixing problems that aren't really problems and making Steam worse.
What a stupid thing for valve to do. They are making steam worst instead of better with decisions like this.
Except it won't do anything to either of those?this is amazing
inconvenient for regular consumers but it will deal deep blows to all those sketchy fucking key reselling sites and to the people propping up garbage shovelware for cards for steam cents for steam wallet and then using it to buy keys en masse and sell