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.
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026
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I should be able to use dynamic offers. Ok, today I'm offering 20% less.
Yeah I’m testing out dynamic buying. If it’s too expensive I don’t buy it.
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!
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! 🤞
Dynamic pricing = unbridled greed
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
The former part has been a thing for hundreds of years.
But yeah I suppose they would use it to change the price dynamically on a constant basis based on demand.
Though I'm not sure that's even legal to this extent in EU. It's a product for purchase. Not a stock. But you're right. It does sound bad.
That's nice...
Meanwhile, I am testing piracy: one game - same price on my private torrent tracker.
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 be the answer to this conundrum
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
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
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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.
The term of art is "price discovery"
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?"
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.
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...
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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!
I'm still pissed about the rootkit scandal. That was 21 years ago now, and I haven't spent a penny on Sony products since.
Trying to only establish proprietary media in the past, mostly ignoring open standards.
Oops I didn't fully read, you got it ♥️
Omg their stupid ass 4x normal price proprietary memory sticks lmao
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Don't buy anything from Sony, got it
I wonder why steam is so successful
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.
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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
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
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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?
The dynamic pricing will not affect my static boycott.
I'm sure not being able to trust the price does wonders to sales.
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