$843 million lawsuit against Valve already has its own website: "The Steam Claim" accuses the biggest store in PC gaming of "overcharging" players
$843 million lawsuit against Valve already has its own website: "The Steam Claim" accuses the biggest store in PC gaming of "overcharging" players
The lawsuit is said to represent 14 million UK gamers
Every time I see a post with this specific claim, targeted at Valve, i just can't help but laugh.
Yes. They take a cut.
Yes. Everyone else takes the same cut, so you're biased, if you don't understand this.
Yes. They are an undisputed leader in the market, but no, that's not called a monopoly.
The difference is that Valve, while taking this cut, and being as big as they are, are consistently investing that money into improvement of the platform, AND also paying people to directly contribute to OSS, that affects everyone else in the market too.
Not to even mention the regular, very considerable discounts, practically platform-wide. Show me a time when Nintendo have done the same. A 10 year old copy of MK8 is still 50$
This isn't even a bogus claim, but just a waste of everyone's time
Wait, you're telling me that reinvesting in the business instead of increasing dividends and executive pay increases profits in the long term?
Preposterous!
You misspelled prosperity.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/29/22808199/cd-projekt-gog-losses-restructuring-earnings-2021
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a bogus claim. Steam is by far the most compettitive of the bunch
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
Except steam doesnt abuse their monopoly.
If they did, Epic wouldn't be allowed to use Fortnite and CCP blood money to bribe games to their shit store.
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.
It's just an unfortunate reality.
One leads to the other.
I bought Skyrim for $9.
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.
What's their claim? With the ridiculous number of sales I've always found steam to be cheap.
I literally just bought 3 games for $30 this morning.
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)
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.
in fact Steam requires developers to price the same if am not mistaken.
That practice is the whole point of the lawsuit. The lawsuit claims they're Anti-Competitive because of that.
And it doesn't sound too far fetched imo. They're stiffling other platforms by this.
But then, Sony and Epic and Microsoft have to pay as well because of exclusive deals.
This case might be good for customers .
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.
https://lemmy.world/comment/10610894
The issues at hand:
- 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.