What are some marketing practices in video game industry that are not fair?

1. I have already made a thread about it, but the phrase "Great Deals up to -92%! Save money now!"

I see both Steam and GOG use it. It is not genuine. You aren't "saving" money. You are spending it. Yes, you are spending less money that you would otherwise, but you are still losing it.

2. Monitor sizes. My 21,54 inch monitor was advertised as a 22-inch one. 24 inch monitors are actually 23,5.

This is not very genuine. There is a very visible difference between 21,5 and 23,5, despite the fact it's only 2 inches. I am fine with a 21,5 due to higher pixel den That additional 0,5 of an inch may not be a game changer, but it would sure as hell be noticeable. Rounding it up is simply a dirty move.


3. Incorrect resolution descriptions. 3840/2160p resolution is often referred to as "4K". This is not very genuine. 160 times 2160 is more than 300 000 pixels. It may not seem like much, but it is when you realise people spend heaps of money on such monitors.


What are some unfair marketing practices that do come to your mind?

Unfair marketing practices like Nintendo forcing stores to stop selling Sega stuff if they want to be allowed to sell Nintendo stuff?

I think your problem is more an interpretive one, when I game is on offer it's said you are saving money because the value of the product is the same but you can purchase for less and the difference is what you "save".
Same thing with the monitor, when they advertise a monitor the 23" is the total size of the monitor but the screen is smaller, often they include that info in the description but nobody read it. :/

For resolutions it makes sense only naming the horizontal pixels if you can derive the rest from the 16:9 standard. For monitor size you don't use square inches either.

I think you forgot the big one. EPIC. Giving devs gobs of money to release there games day 1 launch in there website exclusively. Some of the said dev's were unforgiving (and i'd call a bunch of liars) for betraying people who supported them ie KS backers. Note. This hasn't affected me, its the principles that matter to me. Not sure ANY dev can justify the route they took by giving into EPIC.

I dont know about this being unfair but its more misleading. You do have to wonder why they make the screens 21.54 vs flat 22 inch?. Its really pain in ass when ur looking for a 22 inch or 24 inch monitor when many places advertise them as 21.5 or 23.5

I live in Japan lol tell me about all the shit we deal with lol

Having said that, Japan does have JP exclusive shit all the time, but that's probably more to do with funds than unfair practice.

Back when storage media capacity was sold by how many true megabytes (Hex, base 16) it actually contained. For example, if you purchased a 1 Gigabyte drive, you would actually be getting slightly more storage than expected because 1 Gigabyte is actually 1024 MB. But quite a while ago (in the distant past) it was decided that things should be rounded down (apparently for simplicity, though financial reasons could be a factor too...). So nowadays, 1 Gigabyte (for example) storage capacity is actually 1000 MB, and not 1024 MB anymore, and have effectively taken away 24 MB from every Gigabyte (for example) of storage sold. Though this affected most all storage (especially blank) media sold.

Disclaimer: This is a simplified, and condensed description (without much detail, technical or otherwise) of what happened.

HDD Prices vs sizes Called 8TB but is NOT 8TB it's only 7.27TB sick of the RIP OFF

8TB is NOT 8000 GIGS it is 8192 GIGS thus this is the way they rip people off.

We've always had this cr*p but there is a (sort of) reason for it. Back when we had CRT's, the total tube size was always larger than the visible tube you could see leaving part of the screen hidden behind the bezel. So they measured the whole tube. Then we switched to TFT's and for a while that was no longer the case where "what you saw was all there was". However, the newer "bezel-less" screens basically make the screen larger than it should be (eg, they cut 2000 x 1126 pixels for a 1920x1080 display) then disable the outer ones and treat that as a "virtual bezel". Of course they didn't hesitate to go back to measuring "total" screen size as they did with CRT's and we've gone full circle with the CRT screen size BS marketing again. To be fair 3840 is close enough to 4,096 to count as "4k". What's inconsistent is calling 1440p "2k" when 1920 (of 1080p) is exactly the same 0.9375/0.96x ratio short of 2,000/2,048 as 3840 is to 4,000/4,096 (making 1440p more "2.5k"). In any case, such marketing labels based on measuring a screen's horizontal pixels are nonsense anyway as Ultrawide's completely throw everything out. One of those scenarios where the "marketing buzzword" ends up more complicated than simply listing the pixel count / density.

Selling games in stores with discs that don't work unless you sign up to a service then download half the game.

Well this thread was unfairly marketed to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution Notice the word I put in bold. 4K never meant exactly 4000 pixels. Is there even a device out there, that has exactly 4000 horizontal pixels?

I have this crazy idea! You could... first read up on the subject matter before starting a topic about it. Not only about resolutions, but also about marketing - for example.

It should be at least 4k pixels which is the same as many other products. It isn't as if it is some vague chemical process where it might vary slightly.

Agreed. That is extremely unfair.