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Gabe Newell ordered to make in-person deposition for Valve v. Wolfire Games lawsuit
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this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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They have a monopoly but that's because they're just the best service. It's not just that they were the first, they're just consistently the best. Everybody who has spun up another ancillary launcher and DRM service has always made an inferior product to Valve's.
Epic games bribes you with free games, launched without a functioning cart, and hoovers your data.
EA has gone through Origin and the EA app, both of which are awful; Origin being the butt of jokes for years and the EA app being an unstable piece of garbage that logs you out every day with "a particularly annoying bug".
Ubisoft. Self explanatory.
I could keep going on, but Valve earned their position in the market. Could they reduce the cut and still exist with a good profit? Absolutely, but that's the only thing I'd really want them to change - treat the devs a bit more fairly.
It doesn't matter. The suit is alleging that valve threatened to ban games if they were cheaper on other stores. Thats monopolistic price manipulation, and it's illegal. Valve even pro.ises not to do this in its terms of service - their price parity policy is only supposed to apply to steam keys. That would be fair, because otherwise they couldn't give out keys in the first place. But you can't force devs to list games at the same price and then decide on the cut you will take if you are a monopoly. They will have to prove Valve violated its ToS.
That is only true specifically for Steam keys and is a very important distinction. You can't sell your game cheaper with your free Steam keys on another store cheaper than Steam without giving Steam customers the same discount within a 'reasonable amount of time'.
Publishers/Developers are free to undercut Steam with non-Steam keys on other stores.
From their policy:
In his blog, David claimed that steam reps were threatening to pull his game if he listed lower on other stores.
But did he have proof to back up the claims? Or did he make the claim with no evidence?
I have no idea. We will see in court right?
Feel like that is never actually enforced with my frequent use of isthereanydeals to check current and historical pricing before buying a game.
https://isthereanydeal.com/game/riskofrainreturns/info/
If that's what they actually did then they deserve to have legal repercussions.
Right. Valve is claiming they didn't, and that they only demand price parity for steam keys. So it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Honestly, I am not sure what game valve would play to do this. Devs could just make a red and green version of their game to sell on different platforms and price them differently. Meanwhile, to customers, a games price is a games price and developer publisher and distributor are always incentivized to find the highest price a customer is willing to pay through game theory. The market has definitely proven that customers don't care about what percentage of the cut goes to devs. So there is no incentive for anyone to post a game at a lower price than what a customer is wiling to pay on steam as long as steam retains the highest volume. Telling devs to not price the way they want seems very counter productive to being a good retailer, so who knows.
Have they actually done any banning or such? I have seen Phantom Liberty on sale repeatedly since it launch on GOG, but haven't seen it once on Steam.
Games like Risk of Rain Returns is selling cheaper than it's ever been on Steam. I use isthereanydeals often to check current and historical pricing before buying a game.
https://isthereanydeal.com/game/riskofrainreturns/info/
You have to remember that allot of these sales are from key retailers that will do stuff like buy keys wholesale. I'm not completely sure how that market works honestly, but that generates a lot of sales.
The case is really going to depend on David proving that Valve engaged in the alleged behavior. Games go on sale all the time, so there is a difference between a game being temporarily cheaper on one site because of a sale or key resell market demand, and valve using their influence to fix prices.
Isn't that what sale is with it being sporadic? Retail price is for people who can't wait for sales and need it now.
Not sure how retail price would be used. Permanent price drops are rare for pretty every purchasable good out there beyond digital games with companies saying something is X% off leading to more purchasing with consumers thinking they are getting a deal.
Publishers I believe are also the ones with power to fill the market with Steam keys to then have it priced however they want and including them in bundles that are sometimes less than the price of just the game alone during a sale. Some publishers opt to not make steam keys available at all.
As consumer it's just unusual to see accusations of price fixing, since I can so easily get steam keys for cheaper. And only times I usually go buy direct from Steam these days is if a company doesn't offer steam keys, so the only way to buy a steam copy is through steam. And prices for games feel like they've been so cheap that it's the one thing I have no complaints about.
What devs would like to do is push gamers to buy their games on platforms where they get a higher revenue cut. The logic is that 15 dollar game could be 12 dollars on GoG and a dev makes the same amount of money. The issue with this approach is the game theory doesn't work out for the customer - if a customer is willing to buy a game on steam for more money, than the dev has no reason to offer it on another store for less money when they actually have a higher cut of the revenue, and a higher incentive to price higher. There are non-price reasons a customer would like to buy on steam. Cloud syncing, integrity verification, easy steam deck client, and most importantly parity with the rest of their library. So it is very favorable to Valve as long as its the preferred place to buy games.
The issue is that while it is fair for steam to compete on service, it definitely is unfair for them to try to dictate to devs and publishers where they can sell their games and how they price them, especially if it isn't a part of their ToS. You don't get a steam key from GoG, and you aren't using Steam's servers. If Devs get more of the revenue, AND they were theoretically able to achieve more volume on GoG, why would you ever sell your game on steam and give up more revenue? Steam has to compete - which they claim they do, and David is alleging they don't in their suit.
The suit isn't about key reselling.
It will be interesting to watch the suit unfold. David is claiming that Valve de-facto forces the pricing through the threat of de-listing on steam. So he will need to prove it. We don't see many games sell below steam price, but I do think that there is kind of an incentive for devs to have one consistent price across all retailers. At the end of the day, there is a price customers are willing to pay for a given game, and you don't want to lower it on the platform that give you a higher cut of revenue. It's why it would kind of be silly for Valve to engage in this price fixing behavior, but there are plenty of instances where for-profit companies and employees do silly (and illegal) things, so we will see as this case plays out.
The only way steam falls off is if another store beats them on volume, which also means provides a better customer experience than steam. It's a really tall order - how do you get people to move to your game libary management sytem? The only real way is to have an exclusive game that players can't get on steam. That is the core of EGS - the place where you play fortnite. EGS actually makes a lot of sense as long as epic making the hottest game on earth. Half Life 2 was essentially why Valve was able to launch Steam. The issue is that Fortnite is on the decline and EGS just loses money. I don't know how you make enough money to outdo Valve in the near term.
I wonder what would be said if isthereanydeals is pulled up as evidence, and shows games listed cheaper than steam on other stores. Pretty much reason a majority of my Steam games have been bought outside of the Steam stores, since I'm able to consistently get the games cheaper with better earlier discounts.
Is it listed retail price that is being talked about as opposed to sale price?
I don’t really know how I feel about steam or valve. I’m kind of nervous about how dominant they are… like it would really suck if they suddenly disappeared or started acting more maliciously. I get why people like the promises from GOG and stuff. But that said… Valve and Steam do so much good stuff and I really respect all of the Linux work they’ve done. I don’t really trust them long term, but they seem to currently be in the position where open platforms benefit them and they’re leaning into that… and that’s actually really cool.
Honestly, the fact that the steam deck isn’t locked down and you can install games from other sources, or even blow away the operating system and put windows on it is kind of incredible and I’m really glad they’ve done things like that. I’m not sure how relevant it would be to these lawsuits, but I feel like the lack of a walled garden gives them a significant brownie point for me. I hope they keep doing awesome stuff like this and don’t completely squander any good will I have towards them.
Regardless, I hope small developers can get a better cut on steam in the future… 30% seems pretty steep. It’s probably worth it for the value that steam adds, but I could see it being juuuust enough that some small game developers can’t quite eek out a living on a niche game.
We just need to find gamers that match gaben for organ donors and keep him alive forever.
Steam has a pretty sustainable business model but If steam goes evil, their first step will be going public, until then they can continue making long term decisions. Them going public will be a long enough run way for me to move off the platform at least.
What worries me is gamepass, which is definitely trying to trap users right now, eating steams lunch. They will definitely become complete shit, that's their whole business model.
I mean, the launcher part of the argument hardly matters anyway. Launchers aren't required to sell games. Its the storefront that matters, but in terms of having an online software store, Valve isn't even that dominant. Even limitting it to just selling games on Windows, while yes, Steam is the go-to, Microsoft (or prehaps more significantly Mojang), Riot games, Blizzard, and Roblox are all massive games that have their own stores (and launchers for that matter). There are also numerous other smaller games with their own pages, and more generalized storefronts that don't require the use of Valve's storefront or launcher such as Itch.io, Humble (they don't just sell Steam Keys), and GOG.
Even before Origin, EA offered online sales with their EA Downloader app and it was a freaking nightmare. Terrible speeds, and you could only download a game so many times, and any purchases didn't transfer to Origin.
they literally don’t have a monopoly since they have lots of competitors: epic, ubisoft, ea…
Any way to limit this?
Or games built with their libraries (which probably includes all games from the Epic store).
Fair enough
EA is worse with data collection imo. Or at least just as bad.
Steam has always done a little bit of it, particularly their hardware surveys, but even then it's never felt so creepy when they do it.
Steam's hardware survey gathers a narrow set of hardware info, shows you what it finds, and asks permission before sending. It is completely ~~transparent~~ forthcoming and optional. That is not hoovering up your data.
Yeah, the one thing I would say is that you can never be 100% certain what data is being gathered by closed source software, especially if there is an encrypted communication channel. Saying that though, Valve are decently trustworthy.
Agreed; I would much prefer games and their storefronts to be open-source.
Of what we have today, though, most of Steam's competitors are far worse in this area.
Special nod to GOG, which lets you download games with a web browser. (Does Itch do this, too?)
And what gives about hardware.
The personal data is the scary stuff.
The payment history, the invested money, browsing history, mouse movement tracking, other programs installed on the pc and so on.
At least the hardware survey is voluntary.
on windows, you can disable the epic games service in the services tab of task manager. it wont stop all the snoop but will limited epic games reach.
I run a bat file on start up to kill a number of services. EA Games and Rockstar games also does this.
Nope.
Well that sucks
You can leave “share email with (company that owns game you’re buying)” unchecked at checkout
Games on Epic are by default DRM free but game companies can turn DRM on, unfortunately it doesn’t tell you prior to buying the game if you can play it without the launcher or not
Edit: people can correct me instead of downvoting but you should also look at using heroic games launcher. I’m not sure but it should help hide your data
I don't mind their market position. I do mind them taking an entire third of revenue, straight off the top. That's bullshit enough when console manufacturers do it - and they claim that's to subsidize the hardware platform that they built and control.
They offer a hell of a lot more per dollar for their 30% (which isn't actually 30%, and increases your sales volume by way more than enough to make up the difference) than Epic does for their cut.
"Increases sales" just underlines that they have a monopoly.
No shit you sell more by dealing with a monopoly. They're the biggest store. That's what happens when you're a monopoly.
And I don't remember saying one word about Epic.
No, it doesn't. It means that they add massive value and more people buy more games as a direct result of the value that they add. Valve has done more to grow the PC gaming space than anyone else and there isn't anything close.
They could take 50% and they would still offer by far the best value out there with nothing else close. Their cut is extremely generous to developers.
Epic is the only one offering a meaningfully different cut from anyone else, and they're doing it by being absolute dogshit at everything connected to their store in any way.
Don't forget itch.io for its "pay what you want model" which is also the same from the developer side.
"They could take more and still control the market" is a confession, not a counterargument.
And it directly contradicts saying they need that much money, in order to... "provide value." An aggressive hand-wave that ignores how Sony and Microsoft take the same cut for platforms they own and control completely.
This 30% off-the-top is a de facto standard that's basically just left over from when Nintendo had 90% market share and had to physically manufacture cartridges months in advance. I don't care what Valve says they're providing - they did not do half as much per game as the people who made the fucking game. They don't deserve a third of their money.
They could take more and still deserve it.
What they "need" is irrelevant. They deserve every penny.
If valve never existed, the best case companies would make way less than half as much on PC gaming, and a meaningful proportion would literally make nothing because distributing software for revenue is extremely difficult for a normal person or small team to do. Anyone paying 30% is getting a bargain, because distributing the same volume by themselves would cost more than that in labor and other costs.
The entire PC gaming market exists because Valve created it.
I got a binder full of PC CD-ROMs that says "bullshit."
Valve has contributed to the PC gaming market. But they got there by shoving their middleman service into a game everyone bought anyway, at a store, because Steam did not exist. It sucked. It sucks a lot less now, in part because they take an entire fucking third of every sale, and if you think all those sales could only possibly happen by taking that much money from them, you're not even listening to yourself.
Oh nooo you brought in more context to respond to my argument, how dareee yooouuu
Epic fucking up isn't relevant.
Valve making as much from Microsoft Windows / your-own-PC games as Sony makes from Sony-branded Sony-made Sony Playstation hardware is a damning reflection of an industry-wide problem.
Do you believe it’s free to host downloads, support matchmaking services, and the near endless other services steam provides? Or did considering why other online gaming retail platforms (besides GOG we love GOG) suck major ass just skip your mind?
Free being the only other option.
An entire third, or zero. Other numbers don't exist. Valve obviously needs every cent they take, to do the bare minimum you smugly rub in my face, as though I've never even heard of their service. All that value just goes right back to the game-makers! Aaand all the hardware research and development they do for themselves but nevermind that.
And I guess GOG is a clear counterexample of your own point but uhhhhhh smokebomb!
So what is your actual point here? Because you've said fuck-all to make a point.
Valve's cut should be less than a third.
Do you need a diagram?
You know they're not hurting. They enjoy immense profit, at the expense of people who still make games. All excuses are tired nonsense. The cut isn't why Epic sucks. It's not why GOG has less market share. Steam barged its way into relevance on the back of Half-Life 2, and was the first digital game store anyone bothered to use.
They'll have a de-facto monopoly next year because they had a de-facto monopoly last year. That's all it takes. That's the entire fucking reason we have laws about monopolies. They can do whatever the hell they want to publishers, and there's fuck-all consumers can do about it.