That lawsuit against Steam’s 30% cut of game sales is now a class action, meaning many other developers could benefit
That lawsuit against Steam’s 30% cut of game sales is now a class action, meaning many other developers could benefit
A game developer's gruelling legal case against Valve's allegedly anti-competitive practices has reached an important milestone.
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My extremely Baby's First Monopoly take is that whatever your feelings about specific aspects of Steam's service, or Valve in general, no individual company should exert this much power over the fortunes and overall culture of an artform. As such, I welcome efforts such as Wolfire's to challenge Valve and Steam, even if I may not agree with the detail of the suit in question.
What a stupid take. Valve isn't doing anything anti competitive, they just provide an objectively better service which is why everyone uses it. Anyone can put their game up on Steam, Gog, Epic, Uplay, and Origin at the same time. Valve doesn't own the space, and tbh we're probably getting the best deal we can get with them being the top dog, cuz you know Microsoft and the like would never treat us that well.
The closest thing I can think of wrt competitive rules is their price parity rule, where if you sell your steam keys (note that. not epic or uplay, just steam.) yourself, the price can't be noticeably lower (or a sale can't happen) without a comparable discount/sale on Steam within a reasonable timeframe.
The closest thing I can think of wrt competitive rules is their price parity rule, where if you sell your steam keys (note that. not epic or uplay, just steam.) yourself, the price can't be noticeably lower (or a sale can't happen) without a comparable discount/sale on Steam within a reasonable timeframe.
That's pretty anti-competitive, unless I'm misunderstanding it.
If Epic takes a smaller cut, a developer might be willing to sell it at a lower price than on Steam. But if Steam says that the sale on Steam needs to be the same, then that means the developer can't put out the same sale on Steam (since Steam takes a bigger cut).
So instead, they'd have to make the sale price equal to the price they'd be willing to accept after taking Steam's cut into consideration...which would be higher than the price they'd be willing to sell for on Epic.
That's bad for developers AND consumers.
it's only applicable if you sell steam keys.
They say that for legal reasons, but their actions are different. If you look at the actual Wolfire complaint, they say they were pressured regardless of steam keys.
I would absolutely agree if it were limited to steam keys, but it's not. Steam can deprioritize your game in more ways than one. Even just not putting your AAA quality $60 game in the featured games list is a big deal.
If you all just give them a pass, they'll keep doing this. If they get criticism for it, they'll likely sweep it under the rug and pretend it was just the Steam key thing the whole time. In the second case, you should expect to see games beginning to sell on Epic (or on their own site) at a lower price than on Steam. There's a reason you don't see this now, and it's not because of steam keys.
I haven't seen anybody else except the litigants included in the class action make these claims. Nobody seems to be able to substantiate them. I'm actively following this because I want to know if it's true. I'd welcome any proof someone can provide that these claims have been elsewhere substantiated.
yeah it's because the publishers have higher margins on epic sales that way.
like, yeah, we want this market to be fair, and if what the wolfire guys say is true then it's a problem. but remember, they started this suit when they ran a competing store! wolfire started humble bundle! and humble's main thing is keys! and i don't know how many other devs are affected by this, but wolfire is driving it and nobody else seems to talk about it.
We should be seeing lower All-Time-Lows off of Steam than on Steam then, right?
Do we regularly see that?
i mean, i guess? i know gog regularly host sales when steam doesn't, but i'm not actively price matching. hell, gog even used to give away games for free if you already had them on steam.
Just because they're not on sale at the same time doesn't mean Steam doesn't get the same sale price.
And if GOGs sales aren't going lower than Steam's sale prices, then that'd be evidence in favour of what I'm saying.
...but that's what the clause is about? if you sell steam keys, you can't have a sale if the game is not also cheaper than normal on steam at that time.
gog doesn't sell keys, so it doesn't affect them.
Then let's look at Epic, who also doesn't sell Steam keys, but takes a much lower cut.
Does Epic regularly have lower All-Time-Lows than Steam?
Do you actually know the answer yourself? Just say what you want to say, back it up with data, and PROVE YOUR FUCKING POINT ALREADY. Or keep playing smug coy games and pretend like the downvotes mean you won or something.
well, do they?
if they did, that would be weird, right? lower cut plus lower price equals no benefit for the dev. lower cut plus same price would mean more money.
Edit:
i can't help but notice that you stop responding every time you get asked to back up your claims. i'm assuming this is because you've gone to find hard numbers?
They actually do in some regions! But I couldn't see anyone talking about it about any North American currency.
i can't help but notice that you stop responding every time you get asked to back up your claims
Nah, it was because I stopped using Lemmy for the day...lol
I track prices with isthereanydeal.com and yeah pretty often a new historical low is set by a Steam key reseller like Fanatical. It's usually only by a few bucks (like maybe $5 max, though still not a bad discount if the previous price was like $25).
Of course if I buy the game, I stop caring about its price so maybe the same sale happens directly on Steam sometime after. I'm not sure on that so ymmv.
Interesting, thanks for sharing!
I'm curious if the same thing happens on the Epic store. I'd seen some people discussing Epic being a lot cheaper in certain currencies, but not in North America anywhere.
You are misunderstanding it, and it’s been explained to you so many times that I feel I have to imply that you are misunderstanding it on purpose
It's specifically Steam keys, even says so in the quote. If they sell it on Epic for a lower price and it doesn't come with a Steam key then there are no restrictions on the price.
So we should be seeing lower All-Time-Lows on Epic than on Steam, right?
Do we?
Why would we? Companies want to make money. Epic taking a smaller cut isn't a consumer benefit.
Lower prices can "unlock" more customers/sales
If they did then surely folks would have had lower normal prices on Epic and we'd hear them talking it up, either then or now, but overwhelmingly they don't, because publishers don't actually view uplay, epic, steam, etc. as different beasts.
Its just one more spot to throw their game on and make money. Epic just lets them make a little more off the same sale.
It does (allegedly) happen in non-NA regions though. I wonder if there's something there.
isthereanydeal lets you check by regions, along with historically. IIRC the only place they don't check is Amazon because of nastygrams from their lawyers (IMO to keep black friday scams alive but that's a whole other discussion.)