Bhruic wrote on Jun 17, 2011, 10:24:
No, that's not what I said.
Yes you did, looking back is even more confusing because you in fact said both:
Second, believe it or not, the concept of the "Steam sale" is actually quite recent. It's only within the last year or so that they've really pushed the concept of having frequent sales, before that, they were much more rare.
But I don't really care to argue about such a minor point anymore, it's a waste of time.
Perhaps not, but what's the incentive for Steam to do it? Getting more people using Steam and selling more games, isn't it? Wouldn't EA want more people using Origin and to sell more games? In other words, EA is in competition for finite entertainment dollars. If people don't spend them on EA products, they will spend them on other products. So it is in EA's best interests to entice people to spend them on EA products. That is almost certain to include sales and discounts, because those are good ways to entice people to spend money.
In the short term, in the longer term they want to keep game prices as high as possible for as long as possible. Given how DVD sales seem to be faring lately I'm not sure this is a good precedent. There is no incentive when you have no competition. I see too many conflicts of interest in publishers also becoming storefronts unfortunately.
Your idea of game dollars being equal is interesting but unfortunately not all games are created equal. When it comes to desirable franchises they can have significant lifetimes well beyond when quality itself has dipped. So the idea of EA is competing with everything else is true in a sense but practically speaking they can leverage their IP in ways that other companies cannot. They aren't a 300 person developer like Valve. Publishers in general are so large that any of them having that kind of control is fairly dangerous.
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Can you disable it?
You can disable the whole Steam community stuff last time I checked but if you mean an invisible mode type thing like I mentioned then no it doesn't exist and I agree they should do something like it.