It shouldn’t be, but here’s the thing. Valve isn’t distributing games out of the goodness of their own heart. They don’t want to have to process refunds for every person who buys it and realizes they aren’t allowed to play it. That’s just a waste of time and money for them. And Sony hasn’t invested in a launcher and store of their own on PC, so they’ve got no choice but to obey whatever conditions Valve puts on the sale of their games, unless they want to pause until they get a storefront up.
To my understanding that’s not valves responsibility (i dont have a source). It wouldnt make sense for valve to be required to make those changes themselves, the publisher would be responsible for making those edits.
I could only imagine all the problems if Valve accidentally restricted/allowed certain regions and got constant sued over it.
_cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
TheBat@lemmy.world 1 week ago
that’s not valves responsibility (i dont have a source)
Hehehe
Katana314@lemmy.world 1 week ago
To try to explain this better, imagine this:
You’re browsing Steam. You find “ULTIMATE Inchworm Arena”, a strange but fun-looking online multiplayer arena. You buy it, and download it. The game then says “Welcome to Inchworm Arena! To certify yourself for online play, you must provide One MoistCoin, a cryptocurrency obtainable only in the Republic of Kongo!” None of this was clear from the Steam store page. The developer support response is less than helpful.
Would you continue protesting the developers, or would you blame Valve for presenting this obvious worthless scam game as an offering on Steam? By putting it on their store, Steam asserts some level of responsibility that the game in question is actually playable, and doesn’t contain critical bugs; like failing to start up, or having a user license agreement that its lawyers did not think through.
When this happened for Helldivers, it was Valve that restricted their access because Sony didn’t even know what they were doing on the PC store, and hadn’t thought through that players had no legal avenue to play in some countries. Valve does not want to be put through more cases of user customer support complaining to them, and wants to ensure certain behavior from their game vendors to ensure that doesn’t happen.