Poopfeast420

Below the graph is the full timeline, with zoom options, where you can see the prce going back to launch.

Your suggestion was to let physical gift cards only be used for games, no DLC, marketplace, or elsewhere.

That would mean you'd have to add those gift cards to a new pool of funds, separate from the "general purpose" wallet, that you charge with the digital gift cards, or by selling stuff on the marketplace.

100% there will be people who're going to be confused by this. "Why can't I buy this DLC, I have the money in my Steam Wallet?! Was I scammed?" and another support ticket is opened.

This is not the same as using different payment methods, because it's not like your VISA can only be used for certain things.

If you want to avoid this possible confusion, you can make it so, the physical gift card doesn't automatically get added to your wallet. You just use the funds you actually need during checkout. This would inevitably lead to some gift cards not getting fully used, so you got a few dollars here or there left over, which is just a massive pain. In hindsight this also has the same problem with possible confusion, when people can't buy certain items with their gift cards and open support tickets again to complain.

why do you care when it wouldn't impact you, and bring up complaints that illustrate you don't even use the system?

I don't buy physical gift cards, I either load up my wallet or pay directly for stuff. Even so, I know your suggestion was terrible.

gift cards can only be for buying games, not DLC or in-game credit

That's even worse.

You'll either have the balance on the actual gift card, not in your wallet anymore, and potentially a bunch of cards with a few bucks each lying around, that you need to keep track of.

Or you add a secondary wallet, just for physical gift cards, and people will get confused why they can't buy something, when Steam says they have the funds.

I'm pretty whatever about this change, since it doesn't impact me.

PaysafeCard is an alternative, if it's available in your region, or depending on the amount of scams involving the physical cards, Steam should just eat the cost of the additional support needed to combat this better.

You can still just play the game, nothing has changed. It's extremely easy to just ignore everything to do with the inventory on Steam, which a lot of people do.

If you don't want to give Valve and the dev money, you can also trade the cards with other people directly.

You could also recycle certain items into gems and use those to craft booster packs, to eventually get a full set completely by yourself.

Also, the only thing the trading cards are for at this point are the badges, that you can "show off" on your profile. All the other stuff (emoticons or wallpapers) can be bought directly in the Points Shop.

What?

German language version apparently didn't have them, but other languages had the symbols. No idea if there were later waves of the newsletter that were send out after they were "corrected."

Please explain, how the trading cards, that you get for free, can just ignore or even sell for a few cents, milk anything out of anyone.

Is it because Steam forces you to complete badges for all your games, otherwise their Death Squad will come to your home?

As far as I have always heard, it's about the MSRP, unless a shop has a permanent sale, which essentially also causes a lower MSRP.

Steam did change their general "mature content" filtering recently-ish I think. That's independent of tags.

In your account settings you can go to your Store preferences and enable or disable if you want "mature content", violence and gore, "some nudity", and possibly others, along with some example games for those categories.

Since I'm from Germany it stops at "some nudity", since more explicit stuff is blocked here anyway, but if you're from a more developed country you should get one or two more options.

That way you shouldn't need to rely on tags to filter out all the porn games (if that's what you want).

FH4 was heavily discounted before it was removed from stores (because of license deals), so FH5 will most likely get the same treatment, although it might take a few more years (and FH6 much later after that).

Finished my Dark Urge Baldur's Gate 3 run. The duel with Orin was surprisingly troublesome, and it took me a few tries to defeat her, but otherwise it was a pretty smooth run. Since I resisted the urge, it was mostly the same as my other "good" playthroughs, apart from the couple of additional scenes and dialogue.

For now, I'll take a couple of months break from the game, and wait a bit for the next playthroughs.

Then I tried Vampire Crawlers, the deck building dungeon crawler spin-off of Vampire Survivors. I'm not really into these genres, but gave it a shot because of the Vampire Survivors connection.

I think the way the different items, mechanics, enemies, levels, etc. got translated into a completely different kind of game is pretty neat, but the chest opening animation is seriously lacking. It's the best in Vampire Survivors, and I have it as my Steam Deck boot up video, but it's just completely missing here. A massive oversight.

Otherwise, the game is fine, the combo mechanic is fun, but it did get kinda boring and samey after about 10 hours.

Right now I'm in between games, waiting for my Steam Controller to arrive and Forza Horizon 6 to launch, so I'm just playing a bunch of Overwatch. My biggest gripe with the game is as always the matchmaking. It got better since the recent re-launch, but it's still pretty bad.

It's basically the same.

Just searching "Steam Controller," minimum price $100, item location worldwide, sending to some zip code in Los Angeles (originally it was set to Germany), I get like 400+ listings, but less than 25 of the new controllers. All the others are the old ones, those Hori licensed Steam controllers, Steam Links, 3rd party controllers, flight sim stuff, etc. (I stopped scrolling after page 4, since the new controllers stopped very quickly).

Shipping from Australia makes sense (which I also see), since there seems to have been not as big of an interest there. I saw posts mentioning how they casually grabbed one, hours after launch with no fuss there.