Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit
Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit
Newell had requested a remote deposition in the Wolfire v. Valve case because of concerns about contracting Covid-19.
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EDIT: If it's true that Valve is also refusing to sell games that are sold for a lower price in other stores where steam keys are not being sold then I think there's definitely a case here. I didn't understand that was their policy but if so it sucks and I take back anything good I said about them being permissive. Thanks to this comment for finding the exact language in the lawsuit that alleges this.
I'd be interested to see what Wolfire's case is, if there's more to it that I don't know about I'd love to understand, but if the article is characterising their case accurately...
claiming that Valve suppresses competition in the PC gaming market through the dominance of Steam, while using it to extract "an extraordinarily high cut from nearly every sale that passes through its store."
...then I don't think this will work out because Valve hasn't engaged in monopolistic behaviour.
This is mainly because of their extremely permissive approach to game keys. The way it works is, a developer can generate as many keys as they want, give them out for free, sell them on other stores or their own site, for any discount, whatever, and Steam will honour those keys and serve up the data to all customers no questions asked. The only real stipulation for all of this is that the game must also be available for sale on the Steam storefront where a 30% cut is taken for any sale. That's it.
Whilst they might theoretically have a monopoly based on market share, as long as they continue to allow other parties to trade in their keys, they aren't suppressing competition. I think this policy is largely responsible for the existence of storefronts like Humble, Fanatical, Green Man Gaming and quite a number of others. If they changed this policy or started to enshittify things, the game distribution landscape would change overnight. The reason they haven't enshittified for so long is probably because they don't have public shareholders.
To be clear I'm against capitalism and capitalists, even the non-publicly-traded non-corporate type like Valve. I am in fact a bit embarrassed of my take on reddit about 7 or 8 years ago that they were special because they were "private and not public". Ew, I mean even if Gabe is some special perfect unicorn billionaire that would never do any wrong, when he's gone Valve will go to someone who might cave to the temptation to go public. I honestly think copyright in general should be abolished. As long as copyright exists I'd love to see better laws around digital copies that allow people to truly own and trade their copies for instance, and not just perpetually rent them. I just don't see this case achieving much.
I'm so worried about what will happen to Steam when Gabe dies. I really hope he has a successor picked out who is as ideologically stringent. Otherwise I'm going to lose a huge library.
I was under the impression that the policy required a game's price to be the same on all marketplaces, even if it's not a steam key being purchased. I.e. a $60 game on steam must sell for $60 off-platform, including on the publisher's own launcher.
I just went to double check my interpretation, but the case brief by Mason LLP's site doesn't really specify.
If it only applies to steam keys, as you say, then I agree they don't really have a case since it's Steam that must supply distribution and other services.
But, if the policy applies to independent marketplaces, then it should be obvious that it is anticompetitive. The price on every platform is driven up to compensate for Steam's 30% fees, even if that particular platform doesn't attempt to provide services equivalent to Steam.
According to a Valve quote from the complaint (p. 55), it applies to everything:
In response to one inquiry from a game publisher, in another example, Valve explained: “We basically see any selling of the game on PC, Steam key or not, as a part of the same shared PC market- so even if you weren’t using Steam keys, we’d just choose to stop selling a game if it was always running discounts of 75% off on one store but 50% off on ours. . . .”
Wow, that's some good research! I'll edit my comment about this, I don't think my glowing description of their policy should stand without this info.
Thanks, that clears it up. So yeah, I think Wolfire has a case to make, then.
Does it though? It seems like Valve is targetting the fact, that you can't run the same game on a different platform for different amounts. So if Valve gets 30%, and some other store gets less, then they ask you to not run it cheaper. I.e. you can't sell on both stores for $40, and then set a permanent -30% sale there.
What right does valve have to discriminate against devs and publishers who are selling their game on other platforms? They have to compete for their business, not punish them for having a game that is more successful on another store that gives a higher revenue cut to the dev and a lower price to the customer.
I think the reason why valve is doing this is because people might buy a game at a higher price, either on Steam or another storefront, and then complain that it was cheaper on Steam or another storefront and start demanding refunds or demand that Valve reduce the game's price on steam.
What do you do then?
If you don't address it, you're automatically seen as the asshole even if it was the developer's choice.
You can give out refunds, which makes you look like the good guy, but that also looks bad to companies like Visa or PayPal (my understanding is that large numbers of refunds tend to look bad to payment processors, even if the refund was initiated from the company and not the consumer). Granted, Valve is a big enough company that they shouldn't have issues with that kinda thing, especially since they already offer refunds, but my understanding is that it still doesn't look good to payment processors and can make them upset.
You can ask the developer to reduce the price on steam, but what if the dev says no?
You can force the dev to reduce the price, but now you're even more of an asshole.
You can lower the cost on your storefront and cover the difference yourself, but now you're potentially losing money. That, if I'm not mistaken, is actually anti-competative from a legal standpoint.
You're kinda screwed if you're trying to be the good guy.
That's not even getting into how bad it looks if it's cheaper on steam than somewhere else when you have a marketshare as large as Valve's.
So what? Who cares if it "looks bad"? They have to compete on service. They need to find out why devs want to sell on steam at a higher price.
If other platforms want to compete in ways that make prices lower for customers lower for customers, so be it.
The same right as epic games has to prevent a game from going on Steam, or anywhere else, for the first year.
They usually sign an exclusivity deal in exchange for funding the development of the game. David is alleging that steam pressured him in ways not covered by steam ToS. It's not like valve funded development of receiver.
Yes, that is problematic. Not by itself, but coupled with a large captive userbase it is. As an example:
Let's say you want to start a game marketplace, which simply runs a storefront and content distribution—you specifically don't want to run a workshop, friends network, video streaming, or peer multiplayer. Because you don't offer these other services, you keep costs down, and can charge a 5% fee instead of a 30%.
With Steam's policy, publishers may choose to:
- List on your platform at $45, and forego the userbase of Steam
- List on Steam and your platform at $60, and forego the reduced costs your platform could offer
Obviously, pricing is much more sophisticated than this. You'd have to account for change in sales volume and all. Point is, though, that publishers (and consumers!) cannot take advantage of alternative marketplaces that offer fewer services at lower cost.
The question the court has to answer is whether the userbase/market share captured by Steam causes choice (2) to be de-facto necessary for a game to succeed commercially. If so, then the policy would be the misuse of market dominance to stifle competition.
And I think Wolfire might be able to successfully argue that.
Yeah they can, they just don't have to sell on steam.
Steam runs weekly deals and daily sales all the time. I doubt they have to check with gog.
This... misses the point? Of course the can not sell on Steam. That's always an option.
The antitrust aspect of all of this is that Steam is the de-facto marketplace, consumers are stubborn and habitual and aren't as likely purchase games less-known platforms, and that a publisher opting not to sell on Steam might have a negative influence on the games success.
If that consumer inertia gives Steam an undue advantage that wouldn't be present in a properly competitive market, then it there is an antitrust case to be made, full stop. At this point, the court will decide if the advantage is significant enough to warrant any action, so there's really no need for us to argue further.
But I really don't like seeing Wolfire—which is a great pro-consumer and pro-open-source studio—having their reputation tarnished just because Lemmyites have a knee-jerk reaction to bend over and take it from Valve just because Steam is a good platform.
Can I create a shitty service that only me and my brother use, and then sue Steam cause they have more players? It's a dumb lawsuit, plain and simple
This is kind of necessary. You could open a store just selling Steam keys. You get Steam's software distribution, installed user base, networking for free and pay nothing to them. Steam is selling all of those services for a 30% cut. Since your overhead is $0, you can take just a 1% fee and still turn a profit because Valve is covering 99% of your costs.
Steam could disable keys or start charging fees for them. As long as they're being this ridiculously generous and permitting publishers to have them for free, some limitation makes sense.
I'm dubious, though. There must be a provision for promotional pricing. I've definitely bought keys for less than Steam prices.
As I said, Steam would be in their rights to enforce that pricing policy for Steam keys, because they provide distribution and platform services for that product after it sells.
But as @Rose clarified, it applies to not just Steam keys, but any game copy sold and distributed by an independent platform. Steam should not have any legitimate claim to determining the pricing within another platform.
David said in a blog post that the suit is specifically alleging price fixing tactics for other platforms that aren't key sellers, but sell the whole game. Whether that holds up in court - we will see.