"Valve is being sued in the UK for $843 million for 'overcharging 14 million PC gamers and abusing its dominant position' with Steam"
"Valve is being sued in the UK for $843 million for 'overcharging 14 million PC gamers and abusing its dominant position' with Steam"
More legal headaches for Valve.
Being the most favorable game market does not mean "there is no competition". It's just the competition is doing it wrong so everyone flocks to what they like or have stuck with.
Aren’t games on steam consistently cheaper than console?
Yes, and are also not typically locked behind a second monthly subscription paywall just to go online and play
Epic funding it?
Funny how only time we get consumer protection is when two corps are fighting over turf lol
My thoughts exactly. Sounds like some corporate lobbying to try and break into Steam's market.
To reference a Gaben quote out of context, these other companies have a service issue.
"Abusing their dominant position" feels a bit far... the competition is just 💩 IMO. Just the fact that EGS practically gives out games for free, and still struggle to penetrate the market, should tell you all you need to know.
Steam provides discussion boards, workshop (mods), cloud saves, a whole console (deck), frequent games sales, achievements, best-in-class refund policy, regional CDNs for faster game downloads, and the list goes on. They even still support the Steam Link box which was discontinued several years ago.
They pretty much go above and beyond the current offerings of any other gaming platform, and have outlasted failed ones like Games For Windows. In the rare case that they do go out of business, there are steam emulators to run your games as long as they do not implement any additional DRM.
It says Valve "forces" game publishers to sign up to so-called price parity obligations, preventing titles being sold at cheaper prices on rival platforms.
EGS exclusives are worse, locking a whole other platform out for an entire year. With Steam's agreement surely you could just run the sale on both platforms at the same time? Anyway, Amazon is well known for doing this, why not take them to court instead?
enabled Steam to charge an "excessive commission of up to 30%", making UK consumers pay too much for purchasing PC games and add-on content.
The 30% fee is a bit high, but looking at everything that it pays for, and the contributions to open source, I don't think it's too bad. Publishers are also the ones choosing to price their games high, and to create as many DLCs as possible to increase recurring revenue. The ones who want lower fees already sell on EGS IMO...
Refund policy alone they win. Who else can you take a game back to and just say 'shit fucking sucks yo'
Even going against their own policy and still refunding after the elapsed time has been met
GOG. 30 days, no questions.
Most devs probably don't want to sell DRM-free, so unlikely to get mainstream, but a good option when available.
I do think the 30% commission is high. But the problem I see now is, even if the gov't gets involved and mandates their rev share be lower, game publishers will absolutely not lower their prices to coincide with that. Corps know people are already used to paying pretty exorbitant prices, so they'd happily have the government mandate they make more profit while valve makes less without having to do any work whatsoever.
From my understanding 30% was the industry standard rate for some time.
Still is to my understanding. I saw someone else point out in a different thread that if they were taking less of a margin, they would still be blamed for anti competitive behaviour for it, as other sites may not be able to support taking less of a percentage. The whole thing smells odd.
Microsoft and Epic take less because they have less. Both their ecosystems are shit. They are also trying to get into the market, once they own a decent share of it they are hiking that right back up. Gaben is smart leaving it how it always has been, while continuously improving the platform.
People don't like the 30%, but they are still choosing steam because it's the better platform. Epic and co are the ones who make things exclusive and try to corner the market.
The article points to a "similar case with sony", but it's not similar really. Sony has exclusives too.
This entire article is shit and there's no victim here, except Microsoft and Epic maybe. This is a class action lawsuit nobody asked for.
Microsoft and Epic asked for it. That's why it's here. Some lawyer is getting rich off of this, and I bet they are in bed with either of those two.
I'd argue Steam is probably the among the most competitive digital marketplaces. No games are sold above their MSRP, there are frequent deals that drastically cut the prices, and the UI is clear & comprehensive.
And the people who were overcharged will get how much of the settlement? $2?
Who is doing the suing ?
"The lawsuit, filed on behalf of children's digital rights campaigner Vicki Shotbolt by law firm Milberg London (via the BBC),"