What a pointless claim. Developers get charged, not the end user. You pay the same price as elsewhere, in fact Steam requires developers to price the same if am not mistaken. Besides what’s the charge? People are willing to pay more for product they enjoy? If that’s the precedent then Apple will go bankrupt day after this lawsuit is won.
How is it anti-competitive. No one is forcing developers to publish on Steam. It would be one thing to have a monopoly like Apple does and no other way to install. But they don’t. Developers definitely have a choice whether to publish on Steam or not. Cost of publishing might be high, but that’s no different than self-publishing and spending money on advertising. It’s just operational cost.
I would much rather see this level of dedication aimed at an evil corporation. Save pestering the good guys for WAAAAAY later - like, after we’ve fixed everything else.
I mean… No? I have a lot of games and I find a lot that are worth playing in that list, but I’ve not even played half… And even if I had I don’t exactly have a spreadsheet of what I liked and what I didn’t
Price parity obligation clauses: We say that Valve Corporation imposes price parity clauses that restrict and prevent game developers from offering better prices on PC-games on rival platforms, limiting consumer choice and harming competition.
This seems to be common practice, but is anti competitive. If another platform would charge 20 instead of 30 pct and the publisher would give half this discount to the customers this would be against these clauses. Good that these are looked at.
Tying: We say that the restrictions Valve Corporation imposes, that mean the add-on content for games must also be purchased from Steam, restricts competition in the market.
And vice versa, steam dlc does not work with games on epic. Interesting case here too.
Excessive pricing: We argue that Valve Corporation has imposed an excessive commission, of up to 30%, charged to publishers, that resulted in inflated prices on its Steam platform.
The 30% market standard seems to be under fire across the board, so if there is a solid case to be made that this is excessive, I’m glad the watchdog is trying to make it.
In all good that this is investigated, cause just paying for another yaght or house for Gabe is not nessecary.
The part about another platform charging less and they passing the savings on to the consumer… Yea I’ll believe it when I see it. All these “pro consumer” arguments are usually just a masked way to keep more profits.
Now, a middleman keeping 30% or even 20% seems high to me all over so it will be interesting to see it play out.
The part about dlc purchased from competitors being incompatible is definitely anti consumer and should be challenged.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I’m plenty sceptical about the whole ordeal. I just argue mega corps should be audited when there is even a wiff of impropriety.
And I don’t understand the rabid defence of a corp like valve. Just look at the downvotes and the users defending valve. As if it’s their sports team.
And even sports teams move to another city if the money there is better.
All of these same points can be made about microsoft, sony, nintendo. I agree that all these things could change and be better for the consumer but they should have gone after the mega corporation who lock content not only behind a platform but also a special computer you have to buy.
To be fair, on point 2 it’s not really a Valve issue as much as it is a problem with platforms/ecosystems as a whole. If Apple and Google can’t even handshake to make messages on their OSes more compatible, then what about their competing app stores? Where they aren’t incentivized to be cross-compatible with something like in-app purchases (I know that in some cases purchases carry over to other platforms, but usually it’s because of a 3rd party account that keeps track of the premium currency or whatever for that game specifically or a network of games. It’s not something done at a platform level). Same would apply to Steam and Epic.
And specifically with Steam and Epic cross-compatibility with DLCs, barring other storefronts for the moment like GOG, etc., I don’t have trust in Epic doing so in good faith. If I’m not mistaken, Tim Sweeney made a huge stink on Twitter a long time ago about not having access to Steamworks. If anything, I feel like Epic would want this to happen just so they can piggyback on Steam’s work with little effort on their part (relatively speaking) to create an actually feature rich storefront.
Unless something unprecedented happens like the EU making Steamworks an open-standard somehow or some other system be in place, then I doubt point 2 would ever happen or be a substantial argument for the suit.
I’m sorry but do you hear yourself? A multi billion dollar company is not incentivised? To what? Follow the law? Tying is not allowed… The fact it’s hard should not be a factor. It’s also not as if they have not had some time to fix this issue already. But as you write, there is no profit in it (following the law).
But this is the essence. It is not profitable to follow some laws, and if a company chooses to not follow it. They have been told by their lawyers this is a potential liability many times. Then you bring down the hammer.
Oh my mistake, when I read it I thought it was “of course you buy DLC on Steam, where else would you get it” rather than interpreting it as a hard rule they have. Oops.
Still I think my point still stands in terms of tying existing in a more substantial way. I’m not against tying because that’s a good practice. I got burned by Muse Dash not syncing DLC between Steam and other platforms.
Also some quick thoughts, but I assume this tying rule is to prevent DLC duplication? Like, you get a DLC from some place and get the same one on Steam. And to my knowledge, War Thunder skirts around the issue of DLC tying by having a webstore and that’s a pretty big game, though I’m not sure they necessarily count as DLC…
I wrote this at 5 am, so sorry if I don’t manage to bring my point across properly.
Well the question is indeed why can’t I buy my DLC on epic if I purchased the game on steam. If the price on epic is better at the moment I want to buy. The answer is because these things are tied to the purchase on the platform.
Indeed some publishers work around this by having their own back end/ launcher etc. but then still have you ever seen anyplace it is possible to buy the game on steam and then buy dlc on epic or GOG? I can’t think of any. Only option then it buy directly from the publishers launcher.
And the fact this is hard to solve… it is going on for over a decade and hundreds of millions of profits where made by publishers, valve and other storefronts.
I really wanted to see the effect of valve lowering their cut. It would be pretty funny IMHO since currently people are always talking about valve competition, especially Epic taking lower cuts. If valve started taking lower cut and developers flocked from Epic to valve, wouldn’t it be epic? (Pun fully intentional)
Every time I see a post with this specific claim, targeted at Valve, i just can’t help but laugh.
Yes. They take a cut.
Yes. Everyone else takes the same cut, so you’re biased, if you don’t understand this.
Yes. They are an undisputed leader in the market, but no, that’s not called a monopoly.
The difference is that Valve, while taking this cut, and being as big as they are, are consistently investing that money into improvement of the platform, AND also paying people to directly contribute to OSS, that affects everyone else in the market too.
Not to even mention the regular, very considerable discounts, practically platform-wide. Show me a time when Nintendo have done the same. A 10 year old copy of MK8 is still 50$
This isn’t even a bogus claim, but just a waste of everyone’s time
And paying yachts for Gaben, you forgot to mention the money also goes to doing that.
Get that in your head people, if someone can sell you stuff and it makes them a billionaire then you got overcharged, you can find all kinds of excuses to defend them, they’re still making more a day in interests with 1 billion invested than the median income over four years.
What he does with his money is none of my concern. Unlike the vast majority of other CEOs in his market cap tier, he’s actually paid fairly, compared to an average worker at Valve
I highly doubt that most people, given the opportunity, would not live like a billionaire. If someone builds a company like Valve, they’re going to live very well. That doesn’t say as much about the person as it does about the economic system.
I think gaben has retained his popularity because you just never hear about him. He doesn’t go around publicly doing evil shit so he’s got the benefit of the doubt. Not that I disagree with your general point about billionaires…
Because you’ve been conditioned to undervalue your money. If they can make a billionaire out of someone it’s because money is being hoarded instead of being distributed as it should.
If you are going to point out that Valve is a capitalist company, I’d say you are picking on one of the rare ones that return more value than many others in the whole capitalist world economy. Gabe having a yatch is an indecent use of wealth? Yeah, no person needs or deserves a yatch while we have famine and wage slaving in the world.
If you believe the company that has the best pro-consumer practices in the industry (maybe tied with GOG thanks to their no-DRM policy) should be the first to take the responsibility to be the one that is even more altruistic, I’d say you are asking for destabilization of an already decent company to give way to the literal vultures waiting for it to die so they can have their fat shares for their shareholders.
They’re not decent if the boss can afford six yachts, they’re ripping you off while acting nice and you think you had a deal because of their nice smile.
What everyone is debating with you is that you are wrong in picking your target while your base claim of enabling someone, anyone at all, to be a billionaire is correct.
You are wrong in picking Valve or Gaben as exploitative wealthy scum, because Valve is the closest thing to something that is not exploitative corporation, while Gaben as the head and sole person having the final say in which direction to go and which not to go, has been the best guardian of unexploitative gaming entertainment. If you think I’m making these up, please search around to see if you can find the equivalent of these features in any of the meaningfully-accessible companies: Family sharing, Proton, Steam Friends, Steam Network, Steam Workshop, Steam Community Hub.
Steam Family sharing: The current version enables players to have access to the games in other’s libraries as long as those accounts are not having access at the same time. The upcoming version allows for access to other’s games as long as there are enough copies in the sharing pool. In the age others in the entertainment industry is cracking down accessibility with ever increasing prices, like Netflix’ oppression on password sharing or even having access to your own account on multiple devices, please don’t tell me this Family sharing improvements by Valve isn’t extremely pro-consumer.
Proton: Provides an almost silver bullet, or an easily configurable base template, for gaming on Linux. You can be a Windows or Mac user all you want and never give a thought to Linux, but you can’t argue not letting Windows have monopoly over PC gaming by enabling access to gaming on free OS isn’t a completely pro-consumer endeavour. It is also open source, so they are not even gatekeeping their own work on this.
Friends and Network: While having no-DRM copies from GOG is great and all, having your games connect to your friend’s games, or forming completely random lobbies in seconds, with just a couple clicks requires some always-present middleman. Your no-DRM copies can stay with you till eternity, but you’ll have to configure your own methods of connection to your friends outside your local network.
Workshop: Mods hosting for games that support it, and easy installation with 1 click. Yes, there are still free alternatives like Nexus, but they show you ads to meet their hosting needs, so in that sense they are as free as Valve sparing budget from their 30% cut from game sales to Workshop.
Community Hub: A catalogue of all game-related stuff, from guides to memes, troubleshooting threads to feedback, promotion space for developers to knowledge database for players. Open to the whole world wide web and not restricted to account walls or pay walls.
Now, I agree that even providing these services with the best quality-and-features-per-buck option out there, there shouldn’t be billionaires while there are starvation and wage slaving ones life this prominent in the world. While these issues persist, having yatches to one person’s or a few people’s name is an indecent behaviour that should not be allowed in a working social contract. However, when you look at the rest of the companies in the same industry, or even other industries, there are way worse offenders of this wealth inequality that don’t even come close to Valve in providing the same quality-and-features-per-buck value, while having billionaires and actually striving to make them more wealthy instead of providing more for the customers and workers.
Case in point: You are not even looking a gift horse in the mouth; you are beating your most hard working horse for eating a hearty meal, claiming you are right in that amount of meal is not needed to survive, all the while letting the rest of your slacking horses raid your pantry without batting an eye. Pressure the others to provide better services per buck, also at a self-sustaining rate so as to not be deprived of it a year later, first.
I’m picking at Valve because this is a fucking discussion about Valve, why would I talk about Microsoft or Apple or Tesla or Shell in a discussion about Valve, please tell me.
And what you don’t understand is that this whole affair about “Valve taking 30% cut is overcharging” is bogus. Valve and whole others can sell fully-fledged carrots at $1M each, with Valve adding better packaging and better preservation while doing discounts regularly, all the while Epic can sell a malnourished and cut-out one at $500k each and give away a stale and cut-out one for free regularly.
Both are expensive if their base prices can be discounted by electing smaller margin of profits. (That is another topic as Steam is doing jackload of live-service that can’t be served as an offline service, without any form of subscription or recurring payments.) Even so, picking on the one that offers a sustainable price plan and fully-fledged product with extra benefits just because it is pricey for your wallet while all others in the market do a poorer job at the same prices or price-per-value is just grabbing your pitchfork because someone else started a riot against your cordial and caring overseer while the world around you is rife with jackals who’d like to be your king.
Go bug Gaben to spend more of his personal wealth gained through Valve’s distributed earnings on betterment of the product they serve rather than on the yatches. Don’t go around asking just Valve to get less cushion for experimentation, being generous in return, lax bout worker load and project development, etc., while they are the sole company doing that. Better yet, push your governments to install blanket resolutions against exorbitant wealth accumulations or uneven wealth distributions so that both better product development is prioritized and all employees are rewarded fairly if any single one is to be rewarded.
Anyway, I’m changing the discussion to be about how Stephen Hawking’s name is on Epstein’s list. Lets talk about this, I don’t care whether there are more concerning people named on that list or whether Hawking is unique for his contributions in some fields. Hell, I am not even interested in if the discussion is worthwhile through the factuality of the claim or the scope of the claim because why, this is a discussion about Stephen Hawking being on Epstein’s list now.
They’re still overcharging if their owner could make himself a billionaire out of it and you’re here defending them while you’re overpaying for games that should be much cheaper.
You’ll never be one of them, you’ll never be close to be one of them, the rich can get fucked, none of them are just or moral, none of their businesses are just or moral, the sooner we burn them down the better.
Edit: Fucking lol, someone from Turkey defending an American billionaire and his company. Average income in your country is going down, it’s under 3k€ and you’re here defending a fucking billionaire? Wow, you’ve got your priorities straight mate! People from your country have no purchasing power and you’re against people trying to make it so people get more for their money? Are you for real?
They may be overcharging, they are most likely overcharging if it can make a billionaire among them. Is it anti-consumer? In the context of current capitalist economy and comparable, even rival companies present? And if you have reading comprehension, you’ll notice that there is a paragraph in all of my comments to you mentioning Gaben’s yatches being obscene and shouldn’t be. Anyway, skip to the part below, ending it there:
I never had a dream of becoming a billionaire, or dreaming about those yatches. Or being aspired to and been jealous of through riches. As you have noted, I’m from Turkey and we don’t have the fucking American Dream here, dude. But what we had is: Cheapest gaming PC game purchases thanks to Steam for all the goddamn years. Even when we had quite a competitive economy before our glorious economist-god-emperor Tayyip fucked our economy, we were able to buy your 60€ all-stores-including-own-store triple-A games for like 5€-10€. Indie games? Man you won:t believe it, but cents. Now you make the calculations about how much Steam exploited us.
Anyway, I, too, can enjoy this criticism-deflection game, so here goes my response to your personal background digging: Go suck Tim Swiney’s epic child-addiction-exploitating-Fortnite-whatever-the-fuck-ever-is-exclusive-dick after you find solace that you supported grinding down the best gaming store that is practicing the most pro-customer policies reliably in a stable and self-sustaining capacity over more than a decade and a half.
They’re still overcharging if their owner could make himself a billionaire out of it and you’re here defending them while you’re overpaying for games that should be much cheaper.
Games in PC began to be cheap thanks to Valve, no one offered the huge discounts like they did in the past. I pirated everything for years but I stopped thanks to valve’s prices. No one became even close to what they offered, and they have become what they are right now with good practices and good services. They could slash their cut in half and still be profitable? Probably, but they are not an NGO.
If there is nothing wrong then the investigation will show this. But the claims argue that they use their undisputed market dominance (your words) to do stuff that is anti competitive.
The fact there are alternatives does not matter if the dominant player abuses their position to stiffle competition.
A prosecutor has to make their case, Valve gets to rebuke the claims.
I’d say, welcome investigation into large corporations. There should be more. The fact that mega corps like the Petro industry where and still are not properly monitored is bad for everyone. A corporation is not a human being, and it’s feelings cannot be hurt, but it can do a lot of bad things.
If it turns out there is Merrit to the claims, it is good for everyone. Why the urge to defend a multi billion dollar company? I’m not saying everyone should dust off the pitchforks either. Let the law do its thing.
Steam will not be better than it is now. I have been using it for years and not much has changed. There is no reason for it to improve for the consumers when it’s the top dog.
For sure there is something to be said for not “moving fast and breaking stuff”
I think the incremental improvements have been good on steam. They move slow, but there is development. I especially liked when they added the additional user tags.
That said, if Valve does indeed use their dominance to stiffle competition it needs to stop, regardless of the other things.
Interestingly enough GOG takes 30% and has had periods they struggled.
The storefront saw a slight increase in revenue but a net loss of around $1.14 million in the last financial quarter. Overall, it’s lost about $2.21 million over the past three quarters compared to a $1.37 million profit over the same period in 2020. CD Projekt didn’t immediately reply to questions about how its new strategy might translate into changes to GOG’s features or catalog.
One staff member tied the earlier layoffs to increased competition in PC gaming storefronts, which has driven major platforms to lower the commission they take from developers.
Funny thing is lower cut is likely to benefit steam more by killing off the competition for good with the economies of scale they have on their side compared to competitors which themselves are running at a loss and not clear if the cut is sustainable in the long run to justify running.
Used /r/gamedeals and isthereanydeals a long time so not even sure how effective the price clauses are when I’ve gotten so many deals for games on my preferred platform for a lower price.
Me2… I mostly buy outside steam. But that is not the issue at hand. If a dominant company is thought to abuse their position, it should be investigated.
And over the last years several indie devs have said there are some narly contract clauses.
Do to stuff that is anti competitive (your words)? What the fuck? Pleas point out the “stuff” that they are doing because this article is accusing them of charging too high a cut on game revenue. Which is NOT the case. Anyone that has half a braincell can do a Google search and see that their cut is perfectly inline with Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo. They are NOT abusing they market dominance since this same hcut has been in place for basically forever. Someone looked at the 30% and just now said “hey that sounds kinda high” when it has been the norm for decades.
Also please for the love of God do some research. This has already been battled in court and the case got dropped because of fucking course steam isn’t being anti competitive. A godamm legal company thought they could make some money if they got a ton of people to sign up to a class action and somehow manage to convince the judge with numbers. But it’s utterly bullshit and beating a gift horse around the head. Steam let’s you sell their steamkeys on your website which they make 0 cut on. And all they ask is that you sell it at the same price as on steam? I don’t think anyone realized how good of a deal that is please for the love of God look at any other game platform and if you can so much as find a clause that lets you sell their keys on any other platform I will be VERY impressed.
TLDR: Stuff is not exact enough of a reason to hate on steam
Yeah, I don’t think they realise Steam is itself a product to pay for. Sure, someone could come up with a free game manager, but that’s only a part of Steam’s services. There’s all the licencing, marketing, communities, features, connecting to other platforms, a console mode, remote play, ongoing security, support for external titles, the workshop, great refund policies, all this stuff and Valve doesn’t ask for a sub, pays all the staff involved, and stays on top of it all with premium quality.
No shit they take some off the top. How else could the Steam we love and know exist if they didn’t?
The irony of this lawsuit trying to ruin things gamers cherish.
The cut they take is just one of the claims they have against Valve. Some of the other ones which another comment mentioned seem like fair arguments against Valve. The whole forcing pricing parity so game devs can’t offer the games for cheaper somewhere else and DLC from other platforms isn’t compatible with the Steam game and vice versa. And again you can say other platforms are doing that and worse too but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also go after Valve for it. Just cause they’re a private company and because of that aren’t as profit driven as other companies doesn’t mean they still are gonna do things like this to increase their profits and maintain their majority market share on PC games.
I see what Vicky is attempting to do. But there’s nothing stopping publishers from going over to the Epic Games Store for example and selling their content there. Valve does nothing to suppress competition (it can’t really either), the competition is just bad.
Exactly. Epic’s complaint is that steam has such a large user base that they can get away with the percentage they charge, but nothing is stopping people from having every game selling storefront at the same time. Steam doesn’t do crappy stuff like exclusive deals with other companies to draw people in.
Now I only used Epic for a couple years, but I don’t remember them doing sales. They did the free stuff which was mostly shovel ware crap, and their games stayed full price. I get games regularly at a discount on steam, which is a better deal as a user.
Epic is just whining that their terrible approach isn’t as good as steam’s.
They can and had done it before, see the link at the bottom of the article. Basically, game devs are forced to sell the game at the same retail price in all platforms regardless of the commission cut of the platform according to Steam license. BUT as a customer, usually other platforms are more expensive, so mileage may vary. I like Steam a lot and support it whenever I can but if there is evidence of wrongdoing I would change my mind, however, the complaint from the article smells strongly to cashgrab.
Do they? As a long time user of /r/gamedeals and isthereanydeals that is focused on game sales I’ve got tons of games cheaper than they were being sold directly through steam. Humble monthly being one of the best with sometimes price of like 8 game bundles being less than the cost of the cheapest price a single game went on sale.
The price parity thing exclusively is for Steam key distribution. If you’re going to distribute a steam license key via another platform, it must be priced the same as it is on Steam itself.
Nothing in that says they can’t publish on multiple platforms independently and charge different prices on them, as long as the other platform isn’t selling you a game you can unlock on your Steam library. It would have to unlock on, say, Epic’s store library.
You also have sites like Humble Bundle that either get a special pass from Valve (I mean, isn’t that a charity organization?) or the violation of distributing steam keys at different prices isn’t enforced.
Valve does nothing to suppress competition (it can’t really either)
They at least used to have a rule that publishers can’t sell cheaper on other platforms (outside of timed sales that is), meaning that consumers can’t get a better price on other storefronts even when those platforms would take a smaller cut. That was very much suppressing the competition as them taking smaller cuts can’t transfer into cheaper prices if the publisher also wanted to sell on Steam.
My understanding is that valve says publishers can’t sell their games steam keys cheaper on other platforms but can charge whatever they want if steam is not the one providing the download. Network infrastructure isn’t free and if steam is the one actually facilitating the download they get to take their share.
I’m not too familiar with the details but there is this excerpt from a blog post by Wolfire Games from 2021 where they say this wasn’t the case. Haven’t checked it’s validity or if it’s relevant information to this case, but it is something
When new video game stores were opening that charged much lower commissions than Valve, I decided that I would provide my game “Overgrowth” at a lower price to take advantage of the lower commission rates. I intended to write a blog post about the results.
But when I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM.
There’s a thread somewhere else on lemmy about this from a couple of days ago, I think the conclusion was that this was a law firm going for a cash grab and the claims were pretty flimsy, they’re going after Sony too.
I am not a fan of the title the article uses. It seems more about Steam abusing their near monopoly in a way that hurts publishers. The overcharging aspect seems more like a byproduct
I mean abuse in the way where they are taking advantage of their position in the market.
There are several online game retailers publishers can utilize and being profitable is always going to be part of their business model. Epic would do it in their own way no matter what Steam did.
Even Humble Bundle isn’t perfect. You can read this article for more information but they trialed removing the slider that decides where your money goes in 2021 and even now the Default Donation and Extra to Charity options still only give the charity a small percentage.
Steam, for its faults, is where it is because it is the best application to do what it does.
Yes others exist, and they’re all vastly inferior.
I’m not denying that. As a consumer I like a lot of what Steam does. I am a big fan of what they’ve done for the Linux gaming community for example. I am saying because they are so dominant in the market they can do things like keep their commissions high and push publishers to sign price parity obligations.
I imagine a lot of publishers feel like if they don’t have a choice but to list their games on Steam. The alternative would greatly limit their reach.
My initial point was Steam isn’t directly overcharging players like the title of the article implies. I feel like the title should have been about the cause and not the effect.
Add comment