Are you joking? I’ve saved thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, by waiting for Steam Sales and buying games at a reasonable price for me(I’m poor) rather than paying $60 a game. Nobody else does this(When was the last time Nintendo put Mario Kart on sale?)
The statement “Steam overcharges gamers” is self-defeating and hilarious.
No. It's easier to go after the "good guys" than the bad guys because they're easier to beat. They won't use all kinds of slimy, underhanded tactics to fuck you over.
Edit: I don't approve of the lawsuit against valve, but that's the way of the world. Scummy companies and people have many tools they can use to drag you down to their level.
"Charges 30% fee"
"That's too high! You're ripping us off"
"Charges 10% fee"
"That's too low! No other platforms could hope to compete against you with that!"
This is nothing but people bitching about nothing for the price gouging. I will give merit to the anti competitive nature if game makers aren't allowed to have their games listed for less at other stores. As far as add on game packages locking you in goes....that might be a technical minefield to ensure compatibility.
Maybe this is an initiative by competing platforms? Epic? Ubisoft?
Stir some shit, hope to get valve in legal issues so that they're legally forced to become less competitive and therefore creating a chance for these other platforms?
All those large online action/claim sites are commercial in underlying nature. When you saw all the small farmers protest in Germany it was primarily driven as an action by about 5 large farming conglomerates because they are the ones getting ~85% of the grant money that was being cut. The whole point of the cut was to not funnel money that was supposed to go to small farmers to large megacorps after all. Who in turn instrumentalized the small farmers to protest it.
Probably what's going on here, too. You can bet somewhere deep deep down, this is something Tim Sweeney cooked up.
This lawsuit build on a false premise. Steam doesnt have a price parity clause for other stores. What this lawsuit alleges applies to Steam keys that the developer generates through Steam. If the developer lists those keys for sale at a price lower than what the game is listed for on Steam, then the price of the Steam Store purchase price must match it, so that people visiting the store page on Steam get the same discount. It doesn't matter if you list your game on GOG and discount it there.
I think that is the main point of the lawsuit, if developers sell their game on Steam they can't sell it cheaper somewhere else. If Value gets 30% the developer has to raise the price a bit to compensate and they have to raise it everywhere. Outside of sales I don't think most games that are not on Steam are much cheaper elsewhere, so not sure how this plays out.
As far as I know, this only applies to Steam keys: developers are allowed to generate Steam keys for free to sell on their website (Valve does not get 30% of these sales either) with the restriction being they cannot be cheaper than the price on Steam
I don't think there's ever actually been any proof that Valve disallows selling games for cheaper elsewhere as long as you're not selling those freely generated Steam keys
I'll reiterate here that I think it would be funny to see steam actually lowering their cut to 20-10% or something and the mass migrations of developers from other competing stores to steam, and finally making the other store even more insignificant. That's what they want isn't it? And even more funny when after the changes are applied there is no difference in price because after all, publishers get more money for free, why should they lower their profit? If anything, when the policy is reversed/back to when it was, we will only see an increase in game price lol.
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