Blindspots and unintentional elitism among SG users

I agree and bump

There are 231,357,155 active users
Hard to call them active, when 2/3 of this have 1-2 games and last time online few years ago, also many people have bots for cards, duplicated accounts, accounts for reselling game like bought one game (for examle football manager) playing a month and sell it to get some muns back. Trash accounts in general. Also when you se avarange 11 games per account and in sg avarange is dunno 200? I think SG users is worth waaay more than mere 0.5%

Just because we're vocal about an opinion doesn't mean we're elitist though; that's a correlation fallacy. Sure, we represent a fairly small, fairly hardcore demographic, but we also represent a fairly good selection of people who do trading also, and, let me just say, this is objectively a stupid decision. The benefits (fighting... fraud? I guess? I mean, people can still just gift games directly and charge back, so it doesn't stop scammers, and having a gift in inventory for a month, uh, actually does) are outweighed by the fact that this doesn't actually solve anything; people will just trade in keys instead of gifts and Steam will lose sales for basically no gain, since people are more likely to go to, say, the Humble Store than have to be at the whim of current prices on Steam. We might assume all users agree with us (which is inaccurate) but it doesn't mean that we're wrong or elitist necessarily.

Yeah, sure, whatever. xD Keep buying games from steam at an unfair price, while we'll just buy them from key sites and key traders. They didn't implement this rule to help us or anyone else. All the rules that they have changed, mostly in the name of "safety", have been changed in order to give them more profit. It's a business and their purpose is to gain more and more money - and I understand this. But they're trying to make an unfriendly environment with really expensive games. In the future, they'll probably try to do something against keys, since they're cheaper. Steam is wrong and you're wrong too. You may not see it because you don't want to see it. They're helping "exploiters" this way, because people will turn into grey markets and piracy.

I'm a tear in the ocean, I don't care, but this tear will spend its money somewhere else ¯\(ツ)/¯

Go suck corporate phallus.

Steam itself is a game - and i sure as hell don't care whether everyone plays it or not, as long its fun for me. So much for elitism.
3--- btw. who else would voice their personal "concern", if not the ones making use of steams previous state

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How is thinking that one represents average consumer behavior indicative of elitism? This very much sounds like the opposite to me

As someone who does all the trading through IG trades, I don't mind this change at all. People just need to buy the games for themselves instead of hoard them to trade later, makes perfect sense to me. Existing gifts are unaffected afaik, so all's good :)

Just because I say my opinion on a change because it influences me or the sites I use, it does not mean I think I'm something better. It's not elitism to say my opinion.

I have to admit that after just reading the topic title I thought this was about something else entirely.

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I probably purchased no more than 3 games on Steam in the last 2 years... with all the stores out there, chances are Steam price is almost never the best option, even on a sale.

First of all, it's a negative change for us, since we are affected by it. Doesn't care if Valve wants to limit us or just don't know how to solve their issues by other ways and hurts us accidentally.
Will Valve get bankrupt by a few Steamgifters spending their money somewhere else? Nope, and that's good, since probably noone wants their bankruptcy.

We are all exploiting Steam's system. And, in turn, the fact of our exploitation creates a market for people catering to our exploitations. So, you get Devs creating trash for card farmers, etc.

Exploitation? By buying cheaply? By eventually selling more expensive? By having personal preferences? That's the free market. Manufacturers and merchants of physical goods have to deal with it, too.
Sorry, but you're defending a nearly monopoly here that dictates prices.

Steam's main business is from mainstream gamers.

Care to elaborate what a 'mainstream gamer' is?

That argument was never about this site only specifically. It is about sites as TremorGames or dispenser.tf. Large-scale trade/gift operations that lived on an underlying economy built around Steam.
Valve is actually trying to hurt G2A and their ilk, only they fail to realise this will drive those dumb flocks straight towards G2A who only used Steam before but heard from their schoolmates on how great G2A is—people who never learnt that Steam sales have been terrible for years and they could get Steam games at other stores as well, so they used these sites which grew big on simple word of mouth.

How is having a discussion about the way a change affect us in a way ( Negative or Positive , Depending on PoV ) being Elitist in any way tho ?
You just pick some comments that you didnt like and interpreted them in a way that suits your own opinion on the matter tbh .

Just cause some people feel like they are affected in a negative way doesnt make them elitists in a way , it makes them having an opinion .
Yeah ofc there are the ones who are like OMG this will kill steam etc , but thats mostly the ones trying to be edgy and looking for attention or to try starting a discussion from a different prospective .

To be fair i highly doubt i will be buying much from steam in the terms of stuff for giveaways , its far to inconvenient now ... i will just get the stuff from a re-seller

Ofc there ware several comments that ware crindgeworthy in the main topic on the matter , but other then that it was pretty reasonable discussion .

It does not just hurt SG though, it hurts everyone who likes to store games for future use in their inventory. Games to be handed out as gifts later on, games that you want to have a few extra copies of in case you want to play multiplayer with your friends at some point in the future (the later is a big point for me, it makes it so much easier to convince people to play a particular game when you can just hand them a copy of the game).

Yes, there's a reason why Valve made the change. But that does not make me happy about it, as it directly impacts the way I play games in a very negative way.

And what exactly makes you think that only SG wants/needs the ability to buy gifts? You make no sense. :P

Only this will barely make a dent, if any, to grey markets and scamming besides a handful of dispensers. Gifts were the safest option(besides chargebacks which are still pretty doable) and thus the most expensive of options on grey markets. Thus most of the "off the books" market is revolving around keys.
What this change serves is prohibiting people to buy from other people within the same Region Lock that have different pricing. To quote another user that replied to me in another thread for some examples:

Venezuela is SA locked, but US priced. Ukraine is CIS-RUS locked, but US priced. Sweden (?) is in EU but cheaper than Hungary for example... so the system already was a hot fucking mess, while essentially CIS is catered to THE russian and SA to THE brazilian and others got the lock but not the discounts.

So yeah, this has nothing to do with Valve wearing their flashy, spandex suits and fighting crime, it has to do with their loss of revenue due to a completely fucked up system they themselves implemented and now trying to salvage it by implementing a far more consumer-unfriendly one.

I tend to agree, hoarding thousands of garbage games without ever playing them isn't normal behaviour for a steam user, and it has little to no bearing on Steam's profits when compared to the year's big releases.

active users =/= active purchasers

i'm not trying to say that we are a significant source of that "active purchasers" either though really, but it's still something they didn't even take into consideration. they want to thwart traders and resellers which is what i am all for, but they killed the entire generosity system of just pure gifting to a total stranger from their own store. it works out just fine for people who don't purchase steam store sales for other random people, but it totally destroys it for others.

they could of come up with some middle grounds.. like expiring steam gifts that automatically refund to the original purchaser if they are not redeemed within a set timeframe, or something that gives genuine gifters a chance to gift to random people. but they crippled it instead.

While I need to recognize that valve's profits are probably not going to be affected too much (I'm sure they went over the numbers multiple times) it still is an anti consumer move and it just damages their image in the eyes of many users, I don't think that making a small dent on grey markets was worth alienating the trading and gifting community.

This is one of those weird statements where OP wants to stand up and say something, but doesn't really comment on the actual issue at hand.

The benefit of this move for Valve has no bearing on our "privilege" to scrutinize it.

Valve could have done a better job introducing limited gifting without having to disrupt the status quo spontaneously.

Finnally someone got it, for a world wheres theres more people like you