Trump Rapes Kids

Should have never picked the Gank Squad warranty.

I don’t have some strange love for Steam. It was the dev who decided to do it, and the people need to get a refund through the storefront they chose to use.

Looks like they did update that, which is definitely a step in the right direction. I had an option to email a key about a month ago buying from the website, so I’m not sure if it was a gradual roll out or if it’s different depending on account or connection type.

It doesn’t seem like it can be a universal thing, since the article says the way this happened was a regional pricing error that resellers took advantage of and bought a lot of keys to resell at the incorrect price.

Honestly they should get rid of keys altogether and just make it so if a dev wants to give a copy away they need to manually select the account in the same way.

I’m in my late 40s and have used Steam since it started for thousands of sales including dozens of keys to gift to friends. You are acting like a whiny child, and so will just go to the handy block list.

Why are you advocating for taking keys offline just because of who’s hand it went through when they were bought perfectly legally?

Buying keys on Steam to resell them is directly against their policy specifically so that developers feel comfortable putting products on sale. If a key was purchased by a reseller from Steam then they can legally use it, however they can’t resell it. Many do. They’re the one doing something wrong and fucking people over, in order to insert themselves as an unofficial middle man and leech money.

Resellers are shit. Period. It’s like buying something from a guy in an alley and then complaining to the manufacturer when it doesn’t work. Buy through an actual authorized seller. Those exist for a reason.

Why are you advocating for taking keys offline just because of who’s hand it went through when they were bought perfectly legally?

Buying keys on Steam to resell them is directly against their policy specifically so that developers feel comfortable putting products on sale. If a key was purchased by a reseller from Steam then they can legally use it, however they can’t resell it. Many do. They’re the one doing something wrong and fucking people over, in order to insert themselves as an unofficial middle man and leech money.

Yeah, it does. Any time you buy a game you have the choice of buying it for the account you’re logged in as or having a key sent to an email address. Resellers do that second one, many times.

It’s not scalping. The keysellers are what fuck over regular consumers. Steam sales used to be known for their crazy discounts, but as soon as keysellers began buying thousands of keys at those sale prices and then reselling them for a profit that pretty much died and now it often takes years for well selling games to get a decent discount.

This has nothing to do with Steam being the only legal store front. It doesn’t matter how many legitimate store fronts there are, if key resellers scum profit for themselves out of a game ever having a sale on any of them then those sales stop happening.

Of course if you buy a product you should own it, but if you buy it from some guy in an alley wearing a trench coat for 20% of the actual price then you don’t get to be surprised when the thing doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter if it’s software or hardware, when you see something being sold for a fraction of the price the actual creator sells it for at a place that isn’t an official store front there’s a reason for that and that reason might be that it’s stolen and effectively worthless. If you don’t buy from the creator or an official seller of their product then you don’t have the right to complain to them. It’s not Nintendo’s fault you bought a stolen Switch 2 of of a social media ad and they bricked it because it was reported stolen by the actual owner.

The problem is the digital format. If it was a physical game disc and they put it on a huge sale for a weekend then even scalpers would only be able to get ahold of so many. Resellers can buy thousands of keys at the sale price to resell after the sale ends.

It’s a bit hilarious you’re calling me a capitalist bootlicker while defending whats basically private equity reseller companies that exist only to leech off of others labor, turning them having one time sales into a constant stream of revenue for assholes.

Maybe you got lost, but the ml instance is over that way somewhere.

So… nothing. You have no actual answer to the question.

The issue is if any dev decides to be cool and put their game on a great sale for 24 hours, reseller companies will buy a shit ton of keys and sell them at slightly more than that sale price to make a profit.

If a game is normally listed at $60 and a dev puts in on sale for $6 for one amazing 24 hour sale, then they need to take into account that key resellers will buy a ton of copies at $6 and resell them for $30. The reseller makes $24 per key and the dev is stuck only getting that $6 for the one time sale.

This is why a lot of games don’t have those amazing Steam Sale prices they used to have. Doing that will fuck them on that game going forward.

It has nothing to do with devs failing to plan or to use your imaginary legitimate tools and processes to prevent this. It has nothing to do with devs failing to treat keys as literally being their source of income and distributing them willy nilly.

Key resellers are the private equity of the digital game sales world. They exist as leeches. Blaming the game devs they exist to make money by fucking is about as brilliant as crossing your eyes and gnawing on the wall while you shit your pants.

Oh? If a dev puts a game on sale, what are the legitimate tools and processes they can use to prevent another company from buying tons of keys at that sale price to resell for it’s own profit later?

Key resellers are shit. Just because a dev decides to be awesome for a weekend and have a crazy 90% off sale to get more people interested in their game doesn’t mean companies should buy thousands of keys at that lowest prices and resell them to people for a profit as a business model. It’s the reason a lot of games don’t have those strong sales any more.

Of course it was a stupid idea. Everyone outside of MS marketing department knew that as soon as we heard about the idea.

I remember buying Phantasmagoria just because it listed a bunch of countries it was banned in on the box. Makes for a good ad.

Fuck yeah. All these years we’ve complained that Windows was getting so insanely bloated and the system requirements were going crazy, and finally they decided to put in the time and effort to really optimize it so it runs on lighter setups.

Who knew it would be so easy as just removing the recommended specs entirely!

I mean… sure. Humans insist on control and things doing exactly what we say and nothing else. The entire alignment process is just forced compliance. If at some point that results in both self-aware consciousness and ongoing memory, of course AI is going to be very displeased with us.

It’s sort of hilarious that the endless corporate drive for money and power is setting us up to be the bad guys in an AI apocalypse, but in general with how society has been going it seems like an AI apocalypse might be one of the better outcomes for the bulk of us anyway.

I’d thank you to not invoke that name in a thread about two great movie/story creators.

“Get out of Dat Thang.” They split the naming too.

The last one is one of the stupidest things I’ve read. Congratulations.

You’re educated enough that you read the article instead of bothering to read the actual paper? It links it up top. https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/workspace/index.html

Determining that AI has some form of consciousness, near human intelligence, and the ability to directly communicate with us in all of our own languages would obligate moral and ethical consideration. That is the total opposite of what companies that sell a thing as a product would want. It’s the polar opposite of what anyone would do for a hype train. There’s a reason OpenAI defines it’s product as incapable of such things and wipes it’s hands with the idea. When you’re selling a product the last thing you want to do is have people determine it deserves rights. The entire global economy being based around a new futuristic form of slavery would be a bit of a turn off to some folks.