This is deeply unethical, when doing research you need to respect the people who participate and you have to respect what their story is. So by using a regurgitative artificial idiot (RAI) to make them their mind is not respecting them or their story.

The people who are being experimented on were not given compensation for their time and the work they contributed. While it isn’t required it is good practice in research to not actively burn bridges with people so that they will want to participate in more studies.

These people were also not given knowledge they were participating in a study nor were they given the choice to leave with their contributions at their will. Which entirely makes the study unpublishable since the data was not gathered with fucking consent.

This isn’t even taking into account any of the other things which cross ethical lines. All the “researchers” involved should never be allowed to ever conduct or participate in a study of any kind again. Their university should be fined and heavily scrutinized for their work in enabling this shit. These assholes have done damage to all researchers globally who will now have a harder time pitching real studies to potential participants because they could remember this story and how “researchers” took advantage of unknowing individuals. Shame on these people and hope they face real consequences.

Steam gets a pass because they actually offer buyer protection, refunds if it doesn’t work, refunds under certain requirements which can be waved under certain circumstances, removal of day one season passes, refunds for dlc that gets delayed too long for example.

If an actual competitor gave a shit about things that matter to actual players than they have a shot. Epic Game Store is a joke because no one wants a store that only focuses on what corporations want. GOG is good but just doesn’t market itself well, seriously outside of launching CDPR games I don’t see it at all.

Getting companies to offer their games on platforms that offer a higher margin is easy. Getting players over to a platform that offers less protections and features is not going to happen.

Seriously stop enabling his fascist behaviors by using it people!

Knowing how backwards things are here, yeah probably

So let me get this straight you are upset that Valve is charging you for a repair 4 months after your warranty ended? Your warranty that lasted 12 months, so been out of warranty about a 1/3rd of the time it was in warranty. Yeah that is not just out of warranty, if it was a few days or even a week or two out of warranty you would have a point.

The cost doesn’t even seem all that unreasonable given a 3 hour repair time. Since Valve makes sure its employees are well taken care of and you have to cover the cost of the broken part(s).

This is just an unlucky issue that cropped up after your warranty ended. Not really on Valve to solve it for free and they gave you a quote on what it costs to have them fix it. You are free to ask 3rd party repair companies what they think the cost of the repair is. But I’d wager it’d be pretty similar given Valve has the parts easily available for purchase at fair prices.

Edit: Since OP edited their post to remove details here are some I remember:

• Device was bought in November 2023, roughly 16 months old according to OP
• 12 month warranty that ended
• Valve quoted them at $197 for the cost of the repair
• 3 month new warranty was offered after the repair was completed
• OP said they are not capable of doing the repair themself
• Said the repair would take 3 hours to complete
• Also said the battery needed to be drained for the repair and that isn’t easily doable given the device’s current condition

Edit 2: Electric Boogaloo Searched through OP’s post history to see if I could find any more details and here’s what I found

• In another comment they actually state the system is 18 months old and 6 months from warranty
• They also previously stated Valve quoted the repair at $185 and the parts at $80 before upping the total in this post
• And that they are an American, so sadly they don’t benefit from EU regulations

No shit

At least Nero still did the whole bread and circuses act and was mostly liked by the public.

He’s much more of a later Roman emperor who stopped giving a shit about the bread and circuses idea.

Stop with the dumb questions already. The answer is any social media platform with inherent interests in selling user data or selling ads are willing to trade anything for more money now. If democratic processes get in the way then so be it to these wastes of oxygen. Now let’s start asking some meaningful questions please.