Yeah, the price parity thing seems to be a big misconception here especially. The price parity guideline comes from Valve’s page for Steam keys. Valve gets a 0% cut when keys are sold on third-party sites, yet they still use Valve’s infrastructure, so it makes sense for Valve to not want you to price them to have all your key sales go third-party.

As far as I can tell, Valve has zero interest in how you sell copies of a game that don’t use Steam keys.

Also something I noticed per their guidelines:

It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.

As a frequent user of IsThereAnyDeal, I can tell you it’s more common than not for a game’s historical low price to not be on Steam, so Valve is definitely not strictly enforcing this. With this and the lack of legalese on the page and letting developers/publishers determine what “similar” and “comparable” are on their own terms, I’m not seeing anything Valve should be doing differently here.

I never called it reasonable. I just don’t think it’s especially egregious. Honestly, I would price the value of Valve’s contribution (which is definitely not zero) at maybe 15% to 20%, but that’s just a gut feeling.

I’m not saying the standard doesn’t suck, just taking issue with the implication that anyone using it is uniquely bad to do so.

But yeah, you’re right that getting me to admit Steam (overall) sucks would be nigh impossible. I genuinely don’t believe it does, so there’s nothing to admit. Maybe you could convince me to lie about it though? Lol.

I do admit there’s a few places it sucks, the gambling stuff being the biggest, but their positives eclipse those for me. I also acknowledge I’m in a privileged position being able to enjoy Valve’s efforts in VR, Linux compatibility, etc. directly and that I might have different opinions if I was on the outside looking in. I imagine that’s not quite the admission you want though.

30% is the industry standard though, and Valve’s contributions of distribution and discovery infrastructure, its audience, and expanding hardware initiatives are not nothing. If you’re not pricing a game to give yourself a healthy margin within the 70% or your development model doesn’t make that viable, that’s really on you.

The Ventoy thing reminds me of my minimalist setup:

• My car keyfob.
• My apartment key (on an extra keyring so it dangles lower to use immediately when I grab the whole set by the keyfob).
• My mailbox key.
• My work key.
• Minimal 256 GB flash drive partitioned into 100 GB for Ventoy and 150 GB for random personal files. This is my favorite minimalist shape for flash drives by far.

I have done geocaching and I’ve got a Steam Deck, so I may be borrowing the pen and adapter ideas, though I’ll probably keep the adapter with the Deck.

As someone who always backs in (unless it’s a diagonal or pull-through spot) and a math person, I’m ashamed to say I never thought of the geometry of it, so thanks for the additional reason to add to my arsenal.

I can add it to “ready to leave quickly in an emergency,” “practicing delayed gratification,” “backup camera guidelines make centering easier,” “constant trunk access,” and the biggest real reason, “I have a bad habit of leaving for obligations at the last possible minute and need to plan ahead.”