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[-] Bratosch@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Speaking of God Given Rights, "we want to sell our games on Steam but not on their terms". Don't like it? Don't do it. "but they have the largest market share 😢" , because you keep selling on their platform. I don't understand how this shit is so hard to grasp.

[-] mabeledo@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

See, this is the reason why it is important to read the fucking article.

A few years later, Rosen started his own game distribution program, allowing customers to pay whatever they wanted for a collection of indie games called Humble Bundle. The program, which Rosen ran with his brother, took only a 5% cut but, he says, was still turning a profit. Rosen started looking more closely at Valve in 2018, when it implemented a tiered system that gave rate reductions to large game makers, angering indie developers who were stuck paying the higher rates. Rosen reached out to the company again, this time to see how it would react to him selling Overgrowth, another Wolfire game, at a discount on Humble Bundle’s store. “They replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere,” Rosen wrote in a May 2021 blog post (https://www.wolfire.com/blog/2021/05/Regarding-the-Valve-class-action/) explaining why Wolfire decided to sue Valve.

Emails indicate Valve employees once threatened to delist all editions of Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege “by end of day tomorrow” after they learned the publisher was marketing a separate $15 “starter pack” exclusively on its in-house Uplay store. In 2017, Kassidy Gerber, who works in business development at Valve, wrote to Warner Bros. executives that preorders for its new Middle-earth: Shadow of War game had been deleted from Steam because the price was “significantly higher than what was available at other retailers for the same version of the game.”

Honestly, I'm astonished at the near cultist behaviour I'm seeing here. This is a multibillion operation in a dominant market position, pulling the rug on publishers because of an internal policy that requires "material parity" with prices on Steam, which, given that they get 30% of the sale price, forces higher prices everywhere else where they don't take such an outrageous cut.

I really hope you folks have the same sympathy for your landlords.

[-] Bratosch@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

None of that first paragraph is in the article OP linked lmao, at least not the one I can see.

Why would Steam put your game on their site for free, giving it exposure to potential buyers, just for the buyers to turn around and buy it cheaper somewhere else? Steam only takes a cut on sold copies.

Xbox, Ubisoft, EA, Blizzard/Activision, Epic, Rockstar, all have launchers. Hell, even Amazon has got a game launcher.

Had any of them been better than, or at least as good as Steam, people would probably buy a game there if it was not listed on Steam.

[-] mabeledo@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

From my previous response: https://archive.ph/YvHxF

I understand that you refuse to read sources, but the comments you are responding to? That's a new low.

Why would Steam put your game on their site for free, giving it exposure to potential buyers, just for the buyers to turn around and buy it cheaper somewhere else?

Because it's not their fucking product.

If I go to, say, Amazon, because I want to buy a Samsung TV, and then I go to the Samsung website and find that the same TV at MSRP is cheaper, should Amazon be allowed to force Samsung to raise their prices so they cannot compete?

The answer is no. It's called abuse of market dominance and is codified in the Sherman Antitrust Act.

"But hurr durr Steam is better I love GabeN"

Who. The. Fuck. Cares. Being better doesn't mean that you get to bully your suppliers and customers. That's just insane and such a childish argument.

[-] Bratosch@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

And Steam is not their fucking platform . If Amazon where to set such a policy, well then just fucking stop selling there. It would come crumbling down on itself. You people don't seem to realize the responsibility of the sellers in keeping companies like Valve at the position their in. You can't have the cookie and eat it, which is exactly what they are pushing for with these lawsuits.

But yeah, let's kill Steam and watch EA put commercial breaks in their games, MTX just to progress in the story, subscription to even continue to have access to your games, always-online for the most basic single player games just so they can keep track of you.

this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
348 points (85.4% liked)

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