“Charges 30% fee” “That’s too high! You’re ripping us off”
“Charges 10% fee” “That’s too low! No other platforms could hope to compete against you with that!”
This is nothing but people bitching about nothing for the price gouging. I will give merit to the anti competitive nature if game makers aren’t allowed to have their games listed for less at other stores. As far as add on game packages locking you in goes…that might be a technical minefield to ensure compatibility.
Conspiracy theory here…
Maybe this is an initiative by competing platforms? Epic? Ubisoft?
Stir some shit, hope to get valve in legal issues so that they’re legally forced to become less competitive and therefore creating a chance for these other platforms?
Of course it is.
All those large online action/claim sites are commercial in underlying nature. When you saw all the small farmers protest in Germany it was primarily driven as an action by about 5 large farming conglomerates because they are the ones getting ~85% of the grant money that was being cut. The whole point of the cut was to not funnel money that was supposed to go to small farmers to large megacorps after all. Who in turn instrumentalized the small farmers to protest it.
Probably what’s going on here, too. You can bet somewhere deep deep down, this is something Tim Sweeney cooked up.
Yes, if Valve limited the price games could have in other stores that would be anti-competitive, but that’s not the case. Their price parity clause is just for selling steam keys.
Then the entire lawsuit hope is pretty much bs.
This lawsuit being funded by a Epic Games shell company would not be surprising in the least. They have done so much and stooped so low to try to not have to actually do work and create a good platform.
How can this be? All the games I buy on Steam are cheaper than on other platforms. Where are these cheaper games?
I think that is the main point of the lawsuit, if developers sell their game on Steam they can’t sell it cheaper somewhere else. If Value gets 30% the developer has to raise the price a bit to compensate and they have to raise it everywhere. Outside of sales I don’t think most games that are not on Steam are much cheaper elsewhere, so not sure how this plays out.
So don’t sell the game on Steam? Either the huge boost in visibility is worth a 30% cut or it’s not.
If you have a point to make about why Valves is not abusing it’s monopoly position make it. Otherwise no one wants to hear your dumb ‘but the free market is always right’ statement.
As far as I know, this only applies to Steam keys: developers are allowed to generate Steam keys for free to sell on their website (Valve does not get 30% of these sales either) with the restriction being they cannot be cheaper than the price on Steam
I don’t think there’s ever actually been any proof that Valve disallows selling games for cheaper elsewhere as long as you’re not selling those freely generated Steam keys
Proof? What would proof look like?
Do you expect companies to just leak contracts they signed while under NDA?
Not the companies. But some anonymous whistleblower? Sure
Like the anonymous whistleblower who went to a lawyer and triggered this lawsuit?
This suit seems to just be vaguely, “30% is too high”, along with requiring that DLC for a game bought on Steam also be bought on Steam, it was the Wolfire case back in 2021 that alleged they’re not allowed to sell their game for cheaper on other platforms
According to Shotbolt, the developer and digital distribution company is “shutting out” all competition in the PC gaming market as it “forces” game publishers to sign off on price parity obligations - supposedly preventing them from going on to offer lower prices on other platforms.
The one example I can think of is the Remnant games, at least for Remnant 2 on release it was cheaper on Epic Store than on Steam, by like 10 USD if I recall correctly
This lawsuit build on a false premise. Steam doesnt have a price parity clause for other stores. What this lawsuit alleges applies to Steam keys that the developer generates through Steam. If the developer lists those keys for sale at a price lower than what the game is listed for on Steam, then the price of the Steam Store purchase price must match it, so that people visiting the store page on Steam get the same discount. It doesn’t matter if you list your game on GOG and discount it there.
Its literally helping players.
Seems like that’d be hard to track with so many stores selling steam keys just looking at isthereanydeals.
Weird thing is it is the publishers themselves that are able to set the price so they are choosing not to put the game on sale same as it is elsewhere. Probably to not devalue the price of their game like the Nintendo strategy when it comes to certain storefronts.
Probably operates closer to corporate software licensing deals, i.e. “we might not catch you but if we do it’s over”
Tim Sweeney, is this you?
Sue Meta or Google instead geez
I’ll reiterate here that I think it would be funny to see steam actually lowering their cut to 20-10% or something and the mass migrations of developers from other competing stores to steam, and finally making the other store even more insignificant. That’s what they want isn’t it? And even more funny when after the changes are applied there is no difference in price because after all, publishers get more money for free, why should they lower their profit? If anything, when the policy is reversed/back to when it was, we will only see an increase in game price lol.
The thing is when people put games on Steam they account for the fee that they take. So in a sort of way the lawsuit is right, Valve are effectively causing players to get overcharged for games.
But if I put the same game on both Steam and GoG And make the gog one 20% cheaper, I still get more sales on the Steam page. If I only have it on GOG people actually complain even when you point out that it’s cheaper that way.
So Valve are causing players to get overcharged but players are forcing publishers to put their games on Steam. So players are causing players to get overcharged, so what can you do?
Alright, I don’t have the data nor time to research it now. But just try to check the pricing on EGS when a game was exclusive there AND after the exclusive deals run out AND the game is then sold on steam. Did the price increase? Or if that feels flawed (which I get it, maybe the dev has no intensive to change the price), try to get the average cost of those exclusive AAA games from other stores and compare it with average AAA games on steam. See how different it is.
My favorite recent example:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1493640/Banishers_Ghosts_of_New_Eden/ (50 EUR)
https://www.playstation.com/de-de/games/banishers-ghosts-of-new-eden/ (60 EUR)
PS5 game on sale did cost 2 EUR less than the regular price on Steam. I don’t think Steam overcharges me. It’s not like the game is cheaper somewhere else on PC either: https://store.epicgames.com/de/p/banishers-ghosts-of-new-eden-f9e3f2?lang=de (50 EUR)
What a load of rubbish.
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yay billion dollar lawyer paycheck
In 2022 the median household income in the USA was $74 580, that means 50% of households had less than $74 580 in income.
A person that has at least a billion in wealth (like Gabe Newell) owns at least the equivalent of 13 409 times the median income.
I would love to illustrate it by copy pasting $74580 13409 times, but it creates a comment too long Lemmy.
If we go by net worth instead?
https://www.fool.com/research/average-net-worth-americans/
5190 US medians, 25 615 US medians for people under 35 (the crowd on this platform).
No one deserves that kind of wealth and anything that’s done to prevent it is a good thing.
Your point is valid but this kind of lawsuit isn’t really the way to go about the change you’re describing
Suing them because they’re making too much profit isn’t the way to go to make it so they’re prevented from making too much profit in the future…
Eh…
Ok
yes you’re right this is a lawsuit about too much profit and it will directly set a precedent where companies aren’t allowed to have too much profit.
Pretty smart, as a leftist maybe I’ll sue every corporation for being privately owned, this is a whole new avenue for systemic change. You opened my eyes
Wealth is not money.
That’s why I included both numbers, but if you know how to deal with your finances, at some point wealth is pretty much the same as money.
You have confused the two numbers. Again, what is NOT money.
Check my comment
I talk about wealth then I talk about income, compare both, then I compare wealth to net worth (which is how you measure wealth)
If you have enough wealth, it’s used to get money as your wealth is used as collateral, you don’t need to be rich to do that, you just need to own stuff that is paid for. I know people who only own a house that isn’t worth a fortune, the got a mortgage on it when the rates were down to 1% to invest it at a higher interest rate, their not rich, they just have wealth that can be used as collateral to get money.
I saw some stats the other day that if you remove the top 1000 incomes in the united states the average drops to around 35k. So that average of 75k is bullshit.
Median != Average.
The median is an average. But it isn’t the mean, which is presumably what the other comment was using.
How is Lemmy so anti corporate, but bends over backwards to defend steam as an immaculate corporation. I love steam, and 90% of my game purchases or from their store. 5% are from stores that let me redeem steam keys.
I think their market position should have some scrutiny.
A few reasons:
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I feel like any other major company with Steam’s marketshare would be far less consumer friendly than steam.
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Steam funnels a lot of money into Linux, and Linux is very popular on Lemmy. If you use Linux, you are benefiting from Steam’s success.
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Steam is just nice to use, and has good deals. It’s nice to have my games in one place, and I don’t know if any other storefront with as many nice user benefiting features as steam.
I agree with all these things. But I dont understand the hail corporate mentality of being upset or knee jerk defending steam. I’m curious to see where the suit goes and evaluate if I should consider joining a class action suit as I learn more.
I think theres also the secondary unstated factor some of us have, that being that Steam is working as a solid buffer against more malignant groups. The fact that Steam is for a lack of a better term incorruptible is frankly very useful, especially with groups like the Saudis and China investing a lot of money and influence into gaming recently. Better a flawed but ultimately decent corporation than whatever the fuck the Saudis or China would replace it with.
Its more we’re defending against Steams competition and dont want to see them gain any ground (Except itch and GoG, they’re cool)
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Mainly because Steam actually provides a really good quality service. Most corporations over time charge more while getting worse on quality. People can sell their games for cheaper on Epic which only has a 12% fee, but Epic’s service is much worse.
Yup. If Steam wasn’t around I’d have the joy of choosing between Epic, Origin, GOG (actually not bad but no official Linux client can be annoying), or GFWL (which would probably still be around in this situation)
They’re not immaculate. They used to outright deny people the right to refund their games, but they turned that around after a massive lawsuit from a government agency. Good change! I support that. But they’re not behaving in an anti-competitive manner. What, are they supposed to intentionally make themselves worse in the hopes that other stores pop up? That’s not how any of this works.
Lemmy is not a monolith.
Obviously. I’m Lemmy and against that. But there are dominant pov’s on Lemmy that saturate threads and are reflected in up votes and down votes
We’ll let their position have some scrutiny when the PC marketplace has some actual decent competition, I’d rather not shoot the PC gaming sphere in the foot just because Lemmy hates corporations.
I won’t say no to cheaper games. The 30% cut was settled upon in the days where physical copies were the norm and Steam was still under heavy development. Given how established Steam and digital distribution in general is, it’s not really fair to developers to dedicate almost a third of the price of the game to a hosting platform. Yes, exposure is important, but that’s a service provided passively due to the fact of being the largest platform. Reducing Steam’s cut hurts no one except maybe Gabe’s ability to buy another yacht (and even then, not likely). Even if customers don’t see lower prices if Steam were to reduce their cut, it’d be great to see the actual developers getting more money from the games they put all the effort into making.
They being the largest platform because the consumer wanted their service, not out of obligation. Epic provides cheaper cut for the developer and is steadily building up their library. But why don’t users flock there? Heck, they even have some actual exclusive titles there. EA and Ubisoft too got their own store, and they too got a few exclusive title. So why does steam is still being chosen? Maybe there is other value provided besides hosting, like, idk, remote play? Controller remap? Family sharing? Opening linux gaming market? Social feature? Forum? Modding?
Momentum. Steam was among the first on the scene and provided the best experience. Thankfully Steam has kept the momentum going instead of enshittification (thanks to being a privately held company), but almost a third of the price of the game is still ridiculous if you consider the effort that goes into making a game vs maintaining a mature platform.
Its not momentum, its that the competition is garbage
I mean, did the competitor even make an announcement to have at least feature parity with steam? Last time I heard, GOG doesn’t have regional pricing, Epic is not supporting linux just because, and EA/Ubisoft is just a glorified ad
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Somehow production costs increased exactly as much as valve’s cut got reduced. Crazy, ain’t it?
The end of my post is where I address this. Publishers have the option to use their bigger cut to reduce prices, but even if they don’t, money is moving closer to the people actually making the games possible instead of a platform provider. There are also a lot of indie developers. It’s not just all greedy publishers.
