Steam owner Valve accused of ripping off 14m UK gamers
Steam owner Valve accused of ripping off 14m UK gamers
Legal claim alleges Steam's market dominance means consumers are paying too much for video games.
While I agree that it shouldn't be allowed to enforce price matching, I don't believe for a one second that 99% of publishers would pass what they're saving onto the customer. A big AAA title priced at £59.99 would still cost £59.99 even if Valve suddenly decided taking just 15% was enough.
Valve does have a very dominant market position, but at least the PC (whether it runs Windows or Linux) is a very open platform that doesn't discriminate between storefronts. So a publisher can always decide to not agree to Steam's terms and only release their games via another store or even release it standalone. I agree that this would likely lose them sales over releasing their game on Steam, but if it's marketed well and the storefront they chose doesn't suck, customers will still come to them.
The main reason Steam is as popular as it is, is because it's the best from a customer experience standpoint, not because they have an enforced monopoly like the storefronts on console platforms. The Epic Launcher, Uplay and Origin (or whatever they're all called now after renaming on what feels like a yearly basis) lack a lot of features in comparison (depending on the launcher that includes properly working cloud saves, hassle-free Linux compatibility, easy mod integration (Steam Workshop), sharing your screen to play local co-op games online, just to name a few).
Isn't the price matching requirement only when you're giving Steam keys as part of the purchase from the other store? If Steam is going to permanently host and distribute the games, it's only fair that the price on their store matches the other places you're selling keys
This is exactly it. Fuck all of those news articles because they all try to make out steam as the bad guy. Steam is the best of guys based on the fact that it let's you sell steam keys, which let me remind you THEY MAKE NO PRFIT ON on other platforms and all they ask is that you don't sell them dirt cheap?
VALVE PAYS FOR THE BANDWIDTH THAT DOWNLOADING THE GAME USES. Honestly the fact that they are willing to absorb all the costs while making none of the profit is absolutely mind blowing.
Valve is not the one setting the prices. The publishers/developers are. One could argue that they are increasing their prices becauses of Valve's cut, but they aren't. A Ubisoft game for example costs the same on Steam as it does on the Ubisoft store, which is obviously not taking any cuts for its own games.
Also, 30% is the industry standard. Here is a nice overview IGN made in 2019. https://oyster.ignimgs.com/wordpress/stg.ign.com/2019/09/GameRetailerCuts_infographic-1.png
Edit for the price parity argument: If the parity would have increased game prices to include Valve's cut, AAA games would have gotten 30% more expensive many years ago. But they didn't.
Ubisoft is a good example because they have withheld their games from Steam so plenty of samples to look at to see how they priced games themselves.
Have you seen the price of Square Enix games?
They need to pull their fucking heads in.
Absolutely this. The 30% split is not only standard (xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo) but it has also hasn't changed in a VERY long time. Any and all increases in price of games are entirely independent of the cut. Also the cut offers competition (such as the absolutely horrendous epic store) who can offer a smaller split (which they do) to remain an attractive option for game publishers. But do they drop the price on epic??? NO. It's the game publishers greed not the store they publish on driving up prices. And blaming steam is not just looking a gift horse into the mouth but beating it with a baseball bat.
Not again with this... Valve does not require price parity, what happens is that they allow you to generate infinite steam keys, that you can sell outside of Steam, those keys need to have price parity with Steam, so if you're selling your game on another website and include a steam key there you can't permanently sell it cheaper than on Steam (you can have temporary sales that go lower than steam, e.g. Humble Bundles).
This is the most permissible policy any of the gaming companies have about selling products on their platform, yet they always get shit for it.
This. Please more upvotes on this comment. The fact that steam let's you sell steam keys on third part sites with no profit incentive is crazy to me. Honestly valve feels like the only good company around being blamed for all the shit they don't do
Very interested in how people in the fediverse will react to this news. I know some of us have soft spot for Steam.
I don't know enough about the UK laws and regulation to pick sides as of now.
Valve has been dealing with frivolous lawsuits for stuff like this for a while now, Epic Games just made it very public. I'd put it on par with copyright trolls.
Steam very much makes that 30% worthwhile with the support and features they provide for free. They can't be forced to host games, prices are set by publishers/devs, steam takes 0% of steam key sales.
The price parity is the part that might be argued, but I doubt it will go far. I'm not seeing very good arguments for this being anti-consumer, which is the key point.
I had gifted a game while there was a sale but the person i gifted it to never got on their pc within the next month so i just got refunded and they never got the game. I complained that i still want them to have the game and they essentially just said that i need to now pay full price or suck it. They just didn't seem to understand that this was an issue at all and were just fobbing me off. I guess technically since i didn't lose money it's not the worst thing. But it's massively annoying because we were about to play that game together until we realised they never received it due to this so to me it felt very anti consumer.
I don't mind it. The Aussies gave us that two hour refund window through their courts. Valve had this kinda turn into an asset, because people felt that they had purchase protection vs say, nintendo. Where you are kinda out of luck if something isn't fun.
Consumer protections make products even better when the protections are well-crafted. (Some, like the dummy disk on bikes, maybe not so much).
I also have a soft spot for Steam and have likely bankrolled a few employees there on my own, but it's been pretty funny seeing the usual anti-corporate sentiments set aside for Steam. This case looks pretty flimsy, but watching people defend Gabe's billion dollar yacht collection with "everyone needs a hobby" gave me such cultural whiplash here on Lemmy that I might need to go to the hospital. That guy has a true "get out of jail free" card with gamers.
I have more than a soft spot for Valve. Their price recommendations over the years Turkish Lira reached the moon was stellar for the consumers here, and it wasn't just us. There are whole regions of countries that Steam has provided affordable game prices, which would otherwise simply have to resort to piracy completely.
On another side, Steam's many features like lenient refund policies, extensive yet on-point and open profile/library/workshop/community infrastructure add more than 50% of the content and quality on some games, and a complete easy of use for consumers.
Whatever one can say about their specific policies on some topics, I'm going to argue no other for-profit company has ever put this much feature on display without immediate gain from all of them. This is almost on par with many FOSS projects with such development behind them.
However, on this price-matching practice, I believe it is totally not a pro-consumer one. It is not exclusivity, which could completely bankrupt and erase all other competitors long ago if Steam went that way, but it is still somewhat meddling with blocking cheaper options for consumers.
All that said, and with another commenter mentioning that 30% price cut is standard in the industry and a developer selling a game expensive on Steam and having the possibility to sell it cheaper on another wouldn't make sense with the same cuts in place, I don't think this policy completely lacks any merit. Having unreachable presence on Steam and using it as an advertisement platform thanks to its reach while selling the game cheaper elsewhere with the same cuts, or even no-cuts in their own stores, would open a hideous scam many of the well-known companies in the industry would jump on without blinking an eye.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The owner of Steam - the largest digital distribution platform for PC games in the world - is being sued for £656m.Valve Corporation is being accused of using its market dominance to overcharge 14 million people in the UK.
Ms Shotbolt says this has 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 case is what is known as a collective action claim, which means that one person goes to court on behalf of a much larger group of people.
Ms Shotbolt - who accuses Valve of breaching UK competition law for at least six years - says she is bringing the claim "to stop this unlawful conduct and help people get back what they are owed."
The claim is backed by legal firm Milberg London LLP, which brings group action cases against large companies.
"It is the latest in a series of collective action legal cases against big tech.Other claims lodged at the Competition Appeal Tribunal have sought compensation from Facebook, Google and Sony.
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