The future we are headed towards if we don’t start caring about privacy and where we hand out our data.
Obviously Playstation has their own data, but stuff like this is gonna start being way more obvious in other places because they can so easily buy data on you through data brokers.
Websites you visit saying they share your data? Yes they sell it and it’s directly going to have an effect on other parts of your life just like this.
So you won’t just “pay with your data”, you’ll pay with your money too in a less direct way (prices on other sites shooting up because x website sold your data to y and they know you need this product so they price gouge you).
Not only will this occur for gaming stores or web shops, it can become a thing in banking (maybe they give you a worse interest rate on a loan, etc) and worse.
Get more active, get other people active too, and teach them the importance of it
Credit scores are already how banks discriminate. That system is already in place.
True, but that won’t stop them from acquiring more data so they can squeeze more out of you.
Anything to make them more.
Maybe my examples would’ve been better for other industries, but yeah, I think this will happen everywhere if we don’t stop it.
I was going to sell my xbox for a ps5… but no way am I buying into that bullshit.
I only buy nintendo, not much better over here… PC is and always has been king, haven’t even bought the switch2 due to all the bull with not owning anything anymore with it.
My wife and I got a switch a few years ago. It was our first console either of us bought that was current and we were both blown away by the sheer cost of games. We’re too spoiled by the sales on PC, so the idea of spending more than $20-30 for a major title is just foreign to us
I get most of my gametime in on a steamdeck. And I’m sitting the SW2 out entirely. Completely underwhelming.
Yeah, I have a Playstation and wtf…
Determination to install Linux on ps increases.
Instructions too complicated. Ended up with OtherOS on PS3
The base game is $60 on the PlayStation store for me 😭
This is something travel agent websites do too.
If you’re logged out, they’ll show you a price that’s really attractive. But if you log in with an account that’s got some history, they’ll suddenly say that price is no longer available now you need to pay the higher price.
Agoda.com I’m looking at you
I’m the sort of person that likes proof before I decide to be angry about corporate gouging. So the first thing I did was to look for other sources that discuss this. Vice is reporting on this screenshot and the OG reddit post, there have been no comments from Sony. Insider Gaming is also reporting on this screenshot and OG reddit thread, in addition to discussing an earlier instance where someone reported going onto their browser to look up Astro Bot on the PlayStation Store while being signed out. It was $59.99. when signed in, it appeared as $44.99. Sony likes to call this bullshit dynamic pricing. This means that as you play, Sony is harvesting data about what games you play, how long you play the games in question, along with data in your library which gets fed into an algorithm to determine what price you should pay. This garbage is fucking reprehensible. This is the type of stuff that made me drop consoles and turn to the loving embrace of PC gaming. If I saw shit like this via my digital distributor, I would absolutely stop using them and look for other ways to legally purchase the game, or turn to piracy.
Have your wife buy it and gift it to you.
But yes, this sort of price discrimination is weird and deadly for any sort of free market.
Wow, this is pretty dystopian, but I guess it’s just the natural extension of supply and demand applied to the individual. Free market at its finest… The next step is to use your demographic data in calculating the price, like insurance companies already do.
So instead of taxing the rich we just let corporations scam extra money off them? Thanks I hate it.
It’s not just the rich that get targeted by this. The goal is to see what price each individual will tolerate. The rich may tolerate higher prices, but the end goal is closing sales that otherwise would have been missed. Because in the digital world where things like shipping expenses aren’t a thing, any sale (even heavily discounted) is better than no sale. Which means even the poor spend more money, because it’s something they wouldn’t have purchased otherwise.
And it unfairly impacts the poor, who have less disposable income to throw around, and who are more adversely impacted by surprise expenses. Because $40 isn’t a big difference for a rich person, but $20 could be the difference in whether or not a poor person is able to eat in two or three weeks (after the refund period has closed).
I learned, decades ago, that piracy was always the best option
Reminds me of the time I installed a 3d modelling program at work and decided I liked it and pirated it at home.
The work one took weeks of troubleshooting on my own with the instructions followed by email back and forth with support. And the business I worked for had a partner license the whole time. Their DRM involved a dongle in the parallel port and a license server running on the local machine.
At home, I decided one day to use it to make test files for a raytracer I was writing, found it, downloaded it, installed it, and was running it by the end of the night without any of the fancy shit they tried to add to prevent this.
That was when I learned that that pain in the ass DRM was only a pain in the ass for legitimate users and lazy/naive piraters.
I like to actually buy indie games like celeste or scarlet hollow, the devs deserve it
Been sailing recently?
What is the difference in price based on? Are they offering an extra discount due to lack of activity? Just random A/B testing? Demographics?
I remember hearing some time ago that mobile games give you progressively cheap “special deals” to make you buy anything from them, as that makes future purchases way more probable
I imagine it’s similar here - “Oh, you didn’t buy any games recently? But what if they went on sale?”
I know Pokemon Go did something like this as market research. They wanted to see what price would people buy at (in the coins you can earn without money, or buy with money).
Still yucky, so yucky. I would contact them with the screenshot and tell them you will buy it for the lower price on your account.
I would say that I won’t buy it because of this. Let them know they lost a sale.
If you give them money they’ll just keep doing it in the background.
I’m not a huge fan of pirating games, but shit like this gets me there real quick.
Im a big fan, the only way I play new games is by 🏴☠️, if its good I go and buy it on steam or gog. Most the time pirated versions run better anyway since all the DRM is removed.
