I find the comments in these threads unbelievable.
If pretty much any company on earth threatened a supplier over a storefront they have nothing to do with, there would be outrage. That’s blatant anticompetitiveness. It means they have the power to set pricing like a dictator because their store alone is more important than the rest.
It’s a fact. A state of the matter. It is a textbook definition of monopolism in progress.
Yet Lemmy, and every gaming forum, turn out to defend Valve?
WTF.
I mean, I’m not ditching my Steam library. Valve does many things right. But I wouldn’t be caught dead defending the greedy monopolistic practices of… any corporation abusing such a situation.
I haven’t seen a single convincing argument to justify this specific policy from Valve, either.
This is an older article. Ubisoft was (and is?) pulling some shady shit here though. What they’re doing:
Selling the base game via Steam for free (limited features, but most important stuff is there) or a frequently discounted amount for full access (think less than 10 bucks).
Selling a bonus starter pack that can be used for the Steam game for a larger amount (used to be 20? Looks like 15 now) exclusively via Ubisoft’s own platform.
So for a new player to get started, they’d get the base game for free, with Valve paying for all the costs related to the download infrastructure, etc…, and then pay Ubisoft directly for their ingame starter gear, bypassing Valve entirely. This was just an attempt by Ubisoft to skirt by Valve’s rules.
Valve is extremely lenient when it comes to this sort of stuff. But they’re not going to allow a publisher to abuse the system to essentially get free game distribution via Steam while still making a profit via this side channel. It’s basically a way to bypass the Steam key resell rule, where Steam keys may not be resold for lower prices on other platforms (but you don’t have to pay the 30% fee when you do).
To put Ubisoft’s case to the extreme, imagine a game comes out for free on Steam, but opening it opens up another storefront where you first need to pay 60 bucks to actually play the game. Does it make sense for Valve to continue offering their services here if they are blocked from making any money off of it?
What you’re describing sounds a lot like iOS’s/Google’s IAP fee cut and the controversy around it.
…And I’d still side against Valve in that case, like I did against Apple and Google.
The issue is Valve shouldn’t be in that anticompetitive position in the first place.
Ubisoft isn’t “leeching” off Steam because they want to, they have their own download and game networking infrastructure already. In that scenario, Ubisoft is only listing on Steam and trying to skirt the 30% cut because they effectively have to be on Steam.
And the only response I’ve seen to this is “well, Ubisoft just shouldn’t be on Steam if they don’t like it.”
But that’s commercial suicide now. It’s list, or die, basically.
Not contesting that the Ubisoft launcher is a gigantic pile of trash.
But that doesn’t make a pseudo monopoly okay.
It does not mean Valve should get to dictate what happens in other stores with threats of their own. A policy like that is anti consumer and should be illegal.
What? So in your head Valve has to be okay with companies using their infrastructure for everything while selling the main access elsewhere just because it’s a bad idea not to have your game in Steam?
Look, if this had been a “you can’t sell the same thing cheaper elsewhere or we delist you” kind of deal I would agree it’s using their power to dictate price. But from what that other commenter said this was the other company selling a cheap launcher on Steam and then selling in-game content for everything inside it. So try were making Valve pay the price to host the full game but only selling some content of it on their store. It’s like saying Epic launcher were to be sold on Steam (except even worse, because it’s a launcher that contains the full game thus forcing Valve to foot the bill for hosting/downloads while the other company takes the profit for the game sale).
What you’re describing sounds a lot like iOS’s/Google’s IAP fee cut and the controversy around it.
It doesn’t. Those platforms demanded that apps use their infrastructure to do any and all IAP. iOS and Google use their position to lock down the storefront on user devices, being the de facto only option to use. Valve makes no such efforts, they even deliberately opened up their devices to other stores as well as integrated the launching of those storefronts for the games that “require” them. The only thing Valve demands is that you don’t abuse their infrastructure to get free game distribution while cashing in somewhere else.
You can still do IAP ingame btw (without going through Valve), you should just offer the same on Steam directly (see shark cards in GTA for example). There’s a difference between preventing the abuse of your resources and anti-competitive behaviour.
But that’s commercial suicide now. It’s list, or die, basically.
It’s not. Sales will be lower if you ignore the largest platform, obviously, but that would be true even if Steam had a lower market share (eg 40% or whatever). But it’s not true that it becomes entirely unprofitable to publish games outside of Steam. Which btw, you are allowed to do for a lower price, provided you don’t provide a Steam key upon purchase.
I feel the need to point out, a lawsuit claim isn’t proof. I can sue you for being a goblin, for example.
They are suing, making a claim, and presenting their side of the situation as their proof. You need to keep in mind there’s a non zero chance they have omitted inconvenient facts (to an extent) and misinterpreted information to their benefit.
Anecdotally, I’ve seen many, many, many games on storefronts other than steam that have a sale price lower than steam.
Just one note - Valve don’t care whether or not Steam keys are provided - if you sell on Steam then you can’t sell anywhere else cheaper.
That’s the claim made, but Valve has stressed this isn’t the case and the policy text doesn’t support that claim either. It very explicitly mentions Steam keys.
EA often does this actually for the games they offer through the EA app. EA has their own infra so you don’t get a Steam key if you purchase it from there. As a result EA games are occasionally slightly cheaper there or go on sale a bit more often than they do on Steam, so they can lure customers to their own storefront.
Letting companies sell DLC outside of the Steam Store sounds like a bad deal for Valve but they look like a good company for publicly following through with it. If too many companies are abusing that policy, Valve is well within their rights to revise the policy and ban the behavior, taking the resulting PR hit. What they are not allowed to do is act like the good guy publicly while secretly and selectively enforcing a ban for companies that they are mad at
P.S. If Valve does ban selling DLC outside of the Steam Store, it would make Steam an unusually restrictive store. I can open up Steam and buy DLC for any game by Wise Wizard Games, associate that DLC with my online multiplayer account, then download the same game (for free) on iOS and Android, open up the new copies, log into my online play account, sync purchases, and play my newly purchased DLC from another app store. I have never heard of an App store not allowing it but most game developers do not implement it because it costs them money to code it up and they make money from people who buy the same contents multiple times.
Thats unusual for iOS/Android, as they are pretty strict about the 30% cut for in-app purchases, and the “no external stores” thing.
I can think of other cases where some external purchases (like, say, a streaming subscription) apply to the app. But if you buy that DLC in-app, Apple/Google get the cut, no question. If you buy a subscription in the app, AFAIK they get a cut too.
In my experience, Android and Apple’s enforcement is quite spotty. I wouldn’t be surprised if WWG arbitrarily got a hammer dropped on them at some point.
Valve did not have to revise their policy as it already violated their existing policy. They also don’t ban DLC sales on other stores, but just require that it is sold on Steam as well. They’re fairly lenient on it, but Ubisoft specifically was targeted because they offered the base game for free but sold a pretty substantial “starter pack” only through uPlay.
Rockstar also has in game purchases that Valve doesn’t see a dime from, but that’s allowed because those purchases can also be made through Steam. And as far as I know Rockstar is likely allowed to not even offer it there, because the base game itself is still a normal-priced game.
I think one reason is that given the stage in capitalism we’ve been living for some time now has completely fucked people’s understanding of what markets, competition, monopoly power, and so on are. Not people’s fault really. We live in this system, we observe and learn about it from what it claims about itself. We have to do extra work to have any different understanding. Most people don’t have extra time for unpaid work.
It explains a lot of commentary I see, framing it as “who the price setting is benefiting,” customer vs publisher vs dev, as if the storefront price fixing is a predestined thing already.
It’s not supposed to be that way.
But it makes sense if that’s all people see in big box chains, the App Store/Google Play, streaming services, Amazon, or wherever.
Yup. And platforms like Play/Amazon/etc. are even further away from markets than big box stores because people don’t all see the same items for sale to choose from, which is fundamental to the functioning of free markets.
BTW I’m not a fan of free markets, but for the limited set of economic use cases they serve well, at least they gotta function as such.
The thing being described is exactly how Amazon fucked the market. If someone can understand why Amazon is bad (business-wise) then they can understand why Valve needs to be held accountable. Lest they become the Amazon of vidjagames
I’m not in favor of these practices by Valve either. It seems like the group you’re describing are interpreting this as Valve wont let anyone rip off their customers so you can be sure you’re getting it at the best price there, rather than Valve wont let anyone change the narrative that you’re getting it at the best price there and should buy everything there.
Thats not even what’s happening. If what theyre saying is true, Valve is dictating prices on Steam based on third-party stores (they are very related if they are competitors and selling the same products.)
This happened after Valve discovered that Ubisoft was marketing a cheaper $15 “starter pack” exclusively through its own Uplay store. The report suggests Ubisoft was effectively given a short deadline to fix the situation or risk losing its Steam presence entirely.
Another example cited in the same report involves Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. In 2017, Valve employee Kassidy Gerber reportedly informed Warner Bros. that preorders for Middle-earth: Shadow of War had been removed from Steam. The reason given was that the Steam price was “significantly higher than what was available at other retailers for the same version of the game.” According to the report, Warner Bros. leadership quickly reached out to resolve the issue.
Valve is threatening to delist games for undercutting Steam in price.
Why is this any different than any other supplier/retail relationship? Hey you are giving a deal to another store, we want a better price. No? Okay then we won’t carry your product if you can give us a better price but don’t want to.
Explain to me why that’s a problem with Valve, and not every other business ever.
I’m assuming I’m not understanding something correctly and hoping you can explain what I’m missing
Valve is setting the shelf price. On the supplier’s own store.
To reiterate, what Valve said was “we don’t like that sticker price. Change it to match ours or we won’t carry your product.” It’s not Valve requesting “a better deal” on the supply end, it’s Valve demanding sticker price parity.
In any normal, competitive market, this would be ridiculous.
Either Valve would reduce their profit margin to match the other store’s price, or if they can’t, stop selling the good and part ways with the supplier. The game would be sold everywhere else, business as usual.
But Valve controls majority of the PC game market, hence this would be commercial suicide for Ubisoft. So they can’t.
They control the price of their supplier and all the competing storefronts.
…How is that not blatant monopolism?
And why would other companies doing that make it okay? It’s nothing close to a healthy market.
Yeah, that’s what they’re alleging. And if it turns out to be true, that’s fucked and hope they get punished for it.
However, in the article there’s two quotes and neither prove that’s what they’re doing.
The reason given was that the Steam price was “significantly higher than what was available at other retailers for the same version of the game.”
This sounds consistent with all the previous instances and with their rule of matching whatever low price others provide which is not about price fixing.
They agreed to valves terms when they listed their game. Then they aren’t following the deal, and Valve responds. I don’t see your problem. Valve takes 30%. If the game is less than they are selling it on steam else where and the deal was we will sell your game for you, but you can’t sell it cheaper elsewhere then that’s fair as I see it. “But Steam is Very good so we have to sell it there!” Is not a good argument if that’s being made
Do valve’s terms dictate they can delist your game if you sell it somewhere else for cheaper??
Even if it is, that’s fucking shitty to have in your terms lmao
As I understand it that’s the price everyone pays to use steam. Dont fucking use it if you dont like it. Why is this a problem? Because steam is too good is the only thing I’m hearing and that’s not steams fault. Everyone else has to do the same thing. Valve didn’t hide this. Also note that they didn’t in fact delist it. They merely considered it.
This is the same problem/argument I had when microtransactions in games started. Everyone jumped on board and now we have a gaming industry that because users can’t fucking say no they bitch and complain when they don’t get what they want.
Cry me a fucking river. Go sell your game everywhere else but Steam. Too fucking bad.
Also I have bought literally hundreds of games from other places, cheaper than steam. Many of them I needed steam to download the games…
Steam isnt doing anything wrong just because they are handsdown the goat of digital distribution. It’s about as anti competitive as Wayne Gretzky was at his best
The terms in question being anti competitive. Steam being very good is not an argument against them using there prominent position in the gaming sphere to do the same monopolistic shit Amazon did to enshitify shopping
“But Steam is Very good so we have to sell it there!” Is not a good argument if that’s being made.
That’s it!
That’s the argument!
It’s that Steam is so good that Ubisoft has no business choice but to accept Valve’s terms and sell it there.
It’s literally not viable to sell it cheaper on Ubisoft’s storefront, not to speak of every other gaming storefront in existence: Steam is more essential than all of them put together.
The pricing is not market driven.
If that’s not monopolistic, I don’t know what is, and if you still don’t see that I just don’t think we’re going to resolve this disagreement, because our perspectives are light years apart.
The second one with WB seems pretty reasonable as a business. If they’re gonna set the price at your store to be so much higher that nobody will buy it from you, why bother carrying it at all?
The one with Ubisoft, however, does not sound reasonable witthout knowing what, exactly, this starter pack was and how it worked. Was it a stand alone thing inside the game like some operators and skins, or was it something associated specifically with a Steam key that you are buying elsewhere? It sure does not sound like it would have a Steam key or have any specific connection to Steam except that it probably works for any version of the game, including if you have it on Steam, so it seems pretty sketch.
The problem is that Valve is even in that position in the first place.
A storefront with pricing terms a supplier can’t say no to, with no viable alternative, is anticompetitive. If it was a competitive market, Ubisoft would break the agreement and sell lower, with dynamic pricing on other stores.
Valve has every right to take action on their own terms, of course, but that’s not the issue.
valve is a game company, did so good at helping others sell their games that you people call them anticompetitive. That’s just fucking laughable and I will never understand why so many of you seem to miss that. They didn’t go out and give a different deal to anyone else. But Ubisoft broke the terms they agreed to because they wanted to use VALVES service to hawk their wares. Well they have to pay the Piper, and they don’t get to cry foul if they try to fuck over the hand that fed them.
You can’t succeed without Valve is a dumb argument.
Blizzard had no problem with battlenet until they pissed in their customers faces.
Good old games is alive and kicking
Humble bundle now has a storefront
Greenman games is doing just fine.
And if you don’t like it then just stop using it and do the hard work yourself but NOOO that’s too hard to have to figure out how to actually sell your product.
God I hope valve just shuts steam down some day and says fuck you to everyone who complains like this
I assume it is a case of monopoly abuse. There are things you are allowed to get away with as a minor player in a market because no one has to do business with you.
For example, GoG can insist that developers give them a game build without DRM since they are a minor software store and a majority of their customers know they can buy software other places.
Steam, on the other hand, is used by almost all gamers. For many gamers, it is the only game store they use. If a game is listed on the Steam front page, a large portion of the games market will learn about the game. If Steam decides not to list a game, customers may assume that the game is not out yet, regardless of the amount of advertising they see for it. The publisher would need to have a special advertising campaign saying “yes, the game is out already but you have to use this other game store to buy it.”
But if that’s the policy that built steam, it isn’t abusing their position if they have been consistent from the before times. I’m don’t know if that’s the case but I don’t recall any particular discussion about it changing and we definately would have heard about people complaining of so.
A long standing policy that built this “monopoly” simply because no one else wanted to and were happy to hand over the reigns to steam for so long, you dont get to cry foul now if they aren’t actually using this supposed monopoly to punish people.
I think 30% is a lot, but it hasn’t been problematic till some big garbage company is upset about it? Ubisoft can go eat a bag of dicks. They had every chance to do something about this a decade ago. They shit the bed. Too bad for them. Flush. Move on imho
It’s common for those “other stores” to just be the dev’s own store or a store which takes a smaller cut than Valve.
To me, anyways, it seems perfectly expected for a business to want to pass on Valve’s charges to the customer. Whether this is harmful depends on whether you focus on the player or developer, and whether the developer responds by making the game cheaper everywhere or more expensive everywhere.
There is no justification if what you describe is true. But a lot of people are willing to give Valve benefit of the doubt, assuming it is false until proven in court. Especially coming from Ubisoft of all places.
I don’t know if this is the same policy, but one thing Valve doesn’t let you do is sell Steam codes for cheap on external platforms, because that evades their platform fee while still using Steam for distribution and makes it hard for the Steam listing to compete (since it’s more expensive).
That might not apply here because I feel like Ubisoft has their own distribution infrastructure on UPlay, but it could be that they were selling the Steam version on UPlay for cheaper.
You can link your Steam and UPlay accounts so I wouldn’t rule out something like this being the case here without knowing more about the circumstances.
My understanding of the policy is that Valve requires the Steam price to be lowered to match the other vendor, not necessarily that the other vendor’s price be raised to match the price on Steam.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that they have nothing to do with other store fronts because they affect each other. If the apple farmer I work with sets up a stall across the street with prices lower than my shop, that’s going to impact my apple sales. I might look into sourcing cheaper apples or dropping the fruit entirely from my selection. Why should I be forced to stock their product?
Anticompetitive to ensure everyone sells it at the same price?
Valve are not the only company to do it either, I know razer used to but I don’t work in a retail environment anymore to know if that is still the case.
Bless you bruce, out here doing the lord’s work educating chucklehead Gaben simps on basic concepts like market power and anticompetitive practices that we somehow manage to apply to every tech monopoly except Valve
I find the comments in these threads unbelievable.
If pretty much any company on earth threatened a supplier over a storefront they have nothing to do with, there would be outrage. That’s blatant anticompetitiveness. It means they have the power to set pricing like a dictator because their store alone is more important than the rest.
It’s a fact. A state of the matter. It is a textbook definition of monopolism in progress.
Yet Lemmy, and every gaming forum, turn out to defend Valve?
WTF.
I mean, I’m not ditching my Steam library. Valve does many things right. But I wouldn’t be caught dead defending the greedy monopolistic practices of… any corporation abusing such a situation.
I haven’t seen a single convincing argument to justify this specific policy from Valve, either.
This is an older article. Ubisoft was (and is?) pulling some shady shit here though. What they’re doing:
So for a new player to get started, they’d get the base game for free, with Valve paying for all the costs related to the download infrastructure, etc…, and then pay Ubisoft directly for their ingame starter gear, bypassing Valve entirely. This was just an attempt by Ubisoft to skirt by Valve’s rules.
Valve is extremely lenient when it comes to this sort of stuff. But they’re not going to allow a publisher to abuse the system to essentially get free game distribution via Steam while still making a profit via this side channel. It’s basically a way to bypass the Steam key resell rule, where Steam keys may not be resold for lower prices on other platforms (but you don’t have to pay the 30% fee when you do).
To put Ubisoft’s case to the extreme, imagine a game comes out for free on Steam, but opening it opens up another storefront where you first need to pay 60 bucks to actually play the game. Does it make sense for Valve to continue offering their services here if they are blocked from making any money off of it?
What you’re describing sounds a lot like iOS’s/Google’s IAP fee cut and the controversy around it.
…And I’d still side against Valve in that case, like I did against Apple and Google.
The issue is Valve shouldn’t be in that anticompetitive position in the first place.
Ubisoft isn’t “leeching” off Steam because they want to, they have their own download and game networking infrastructure already. In that scenario, Ubisoft is only listing on Steam and trying to skirt the 30% cut because they effectively have to be on Steam.
And the only response I’ve seen to this is “well, Ubisoft just shouldn’t be on Steam if they don’t like it.”
But that’s commercial suicide now. It’s list, or die, basically.
They didn’t have to be on Steam. They could have put in the effort to make their storefront worth going to instead of being an awful pile of trash.
Not contesting that the Ubisoft launcher is a gigantic pile of trash.
But that doesn’t make a pseudo monopoly okay.
It does not mean Valve should get to dictate what happens in other stores with threats of their own. A policy like that is anti consumer and should be illegal.
What? So in your head Valve has to be okay with companies using their infrastructure for everything while selling the main access elsewhere just because it’s a bad idea not to have your game in Steam?
Look, if this had been a “you can’t sell the same thing cheaper elsewhere or we delist you” kind of deal I would agree it’s using their power to dictate price. But from what that other commenter said this was the other company selling a cheap launcher on Steam and then selling in-game content for everything inside it. So try were making Valve pay the price to host the full game but only selling some content of it on their store. It’s like saying Epic launcher were to be sold on Steam (except even worse, because it’s a launcher that contains the full game thus forcing Valve to foot the bill for hosting/downloads while the other company takes the profit for the game sale).
It doesn’t. Those platforms demanded that apps use their infrastructure to do any and all IAP. iOS and Google use their position to lock down the storefront on user devices, being the de facto only option to use. Valve makes no such efforts, they even deliberately opened up their devices to other stores as well as integrated the launching of those storefronts for the games that “require” them. The only thing Valve demands is that you don’t abuse their infrastructure to get free game distribution while cashing in somewhere else.
You can still do IAP ingame btw (without going through Valve), you should just offer the same on Steam directly (see shark cards in GTA for example). There’s a difference between preventing the abuse of your resources and anti-competitive behaviour.
It’s not. Sales will be lower if you ignore the largest platform, obviously, but that would be true even if Steam had a lower market share (eg 40% or whatever). But it’s not true that it becomes entirely unprofitable to publish games outside of Steam. Which btw, you are allowed to do for a lower price, provided you don’t provide a Steam key upon purchase.
Just one note - Valve don’t care whether or not Steam keys are provided - if you sell on Steam then you can’t sell anywhere else cheaper.
That’s the whole basis of the lawsuit Wolfire Games brought against them.
Valve are just saying that you can’t treat their customers as second class citizens when it comes to pricing.
I feel the need to point out, a lawsuit claim isn’t proof. I can sue you for being a goblin, for example.
They are suing, making a claim, and presenting their side of the situation as their proof. You need to keep in mind there’s a non zero chance they have omitted inconvenient facts (to an extent) and misinterpreted information to their benefit.
Anecdotally, I’ve seen many, many, many games on storefronts other than steam that have a sale price lower than steam.
That’s the claim made, but Valve has stressed this isn’t the case and the policy text doesn’t support that claim either. It very explicitly mentions Steam keys.
EA often does this actually for the games they offer through the EA app. EA has their own infra so you don’t get a Steam key if you purchase it from there. As a result EA games are occasionally slightly cheaper there or go on sale a bit more often than they do on Steam, so they can lure customers to their own storefront.
Letting companies sell DLC outside of the Steam Store sounds like a bad deal for Valve but they look like a good company for publicly following through with it. If too many companies are abusing that policy, Valve is well within their rights to revise the policy and ban the behavior, taking the resulting PR hit. What they are not allowed to do is act like the good guy publicly while secretly and selectively enforcing a ban for companies that they are mad at
P.S. If Valve does ban selling DLC outside of the Steam Store, it would make Steam an unusually restrictive store. I can open up Steam and buy DLC for any game by Wise Wizard Games, associate that DLC with my online multiplayer account, then download the same game (for free) on iOS and Android, open up the new copies, log into my online play account, sync purchases, and play my newly purchased DLC from another app store. I have never heard of an App store not allowing it but most game developers do not implement it because it costs them money to code it up and they make money from people who buy the same contents multiple times.
Thats unusual for iOS/Android, as they are pretty strict about the 30% cut for in-app purchases, and the “no external stores” thing.
I can think of other cases where some external purchases (like, say, a streaming subscription) apply to the app. But if you buy that DLC in-app, Apple/Google get the cut, no question. If you buy a subscription in the app, AFAIK they get a cut too.
In my experience, Android and Apple’s enforcement is quite spotty. I wouldn’t be surprised if WWG arbitrarily got a hammer dropped on them at some point.
Valve did not have to revise their policy as it already violated their existing policy. They also don’t ban DLC sales on other stores, but just require that it is sold on Steam as well. They’re fairly lenient on it, but Ubisoft specifically was targeted because they offered the base game for free but sold a pretty substantial “starter pack” only through uPlay.
Rockstar also has in game purchases that Valve doesn’t see a dime from, but that’s allowed because those purchases can also be made through Steam. And as far as I know Rockstar is likely allowed to not even offer it there, because the base game itself is still a normal-priced game.
I think one reason is that given the stage in capitalism we’ve been living for some time now has completely fucked people’s understanding of what markets, competition, monopoly power, and so on are. Not people’s fault really. We live in this system, we observe and learn about it from what it claims about itself. We have to do extra work to have any different understanding. Most people don’t have extra time for unpaid work.
…That makes some sense.
It explains a lot of commentary I see, framing it as “who the price setting is benefiting,” customer vs publisher vs dev, as if the storefront price fixing is a predestined thing already.
It’s not supposed to be that way.
But it makes sense if that’s all people see in big box chains, the App Store/Google Play, streaming services, Amazon, or wherever.
Yup. And platforms like Play/Amazon/etc. are even further away from markets than big box stores because people don’t all see the same items for sale to choose from, which is fundamental to the functioning of free markets.
BTW I’m not a fan of free markets, but for the limited set of economic use cases they serve well, at least they gotta function as such.
The thing being described is exactly how Amazon fucked the market. If someone can understand why Amazon is bad (business-wise) then they can understand why Valve needs to be held accountable. Lest they become the Amazon of vidjagames
I’m not in favor of these practices by Valve either. It seems like the group you’re describing are interpreting this as Valve wont let anyone rip off their customers so you can be sure you’re getting it at the best price there, rather than Valve wont let anyone change the narrative that you’re getting it at the best price there and should buy everything there.
Why complicate it?
It’s simply “Valve is dictating prices on unrelated stores.”
That’s the fact. It’s a lot harder to get around that than contemplating motivations.
Thats not even what’s happening. If what theyre saying is true, Valve is dictating prices on Steam based on third-party stores (they are very related if they are competitors and selling the same products.)
Don’t spin the narrative.
Valve is threatening to delist games for undercutting Steam in price.
That is the allegation.
Why is this any different than any other supplier/retail relationship? Hey you are giving a deal to another store, we want a better price. No? Okay then we won’t carry your product if you can give us a better price but don’t want to.
Explain to me why that’s a problem with Valve, and not every other business ever.
I’m assuming I’m not understanding something correctly and hoping you can explain what I’m missing
Valve is setting the shelf price. On the supplier’s own store.
To reiterate, what Valve said was “we don’t like that sticker price. Change it to match ours or we won’t carry your product.” It’s not Valve requesting “a better deal” on the supply end, it’s Valve demanding sticker price parity.
In any normal, competitive market, this would be ridiculous.
Either Valve would reduce their profit margin to match the other store’s price, or if they can’t, stop selling the good and part ways with the supplier. The game would be sold everywhere else, business as usual.
But Valve controls majority of the PC game market, hence this would be commercial suicide for Ubisoft. So they can’t.
They control the price of their supplier and all the competing storefronts.
…How is that not blatant monopolism?
And why would other companies doing that make it okay? It’s nothing close to a healthy market.
Yeah, that’s what they’re alleging. And if it turns out to be true, that’s fucked and hope they get punished for it.
However, in the article there’s two quotes and neither prove that’s what they’re doing.
This sounds consistent with all the previous instances and with their rule of matching whatever low price others provide which is not about price fixing.
They agreed to valves terms when they listed their game. Then they aren’t following the deal, and Valve responds. I don’t see your problem. Valve takes 30%. If the game is less than they are selling it on steam else where and the deal was we will sell your game for you, but you can’t sell it cheaper elsewhere then that’s fair as I see it. “But Steam is Very good so we have to sell it there!” Is not a good argument if that’s being made
Do valve’s terms dictate they can delist your game if you sell it somewhere else for cheaper?? Even if it is, that’s fucking shitty to have in your terms lmao
As I understand it that’s the price everyone pays to use steam. Dont fucking use it if you dont like it. Why is this a problem? Because steam is too good is the only thing I’m hearing and that’s not steams fault. Everyone else has to do the same thing. Valve didn’t hide this. Also note that they didn’t in fact delist it. They merely considered it.
This is the same problem/argument I had when microtransactions in games started. Everyone jumped on board and now we have a gaming industry that because users can’t fucking say no they bitch and complain when they don’t get what they want.
Cry me a fucking river. Go sell your game everywhere else but Steam. Too fucking bad.
Also I have bought literally hundreds of games from other places, cheaper than steam. Many of them I needed steam to download the games…
Steam isnt doing anything wrong just because they are handsdown the goat of digital distribution. It’s about as anti competitive as Wayne Gretzky was at his best
Didn’t even read all of it. Dumbest take ever. I wouldn’t support anti consumer behaviour but you do you.
The terms in question being anti competitive. Steam being very good is not an argument against them using there prominent position in the gaming sphere to do the same monopolistic shit Amazon did to enshitify shopping
That’s it!
That’s the argument!
It’s that Steam is so good that Ubisoft has no business choice but to accept Valve’s terms and sell it there.
It’s literally not viable to sell it cheaper on Ubisoft’s storefront, not to speak of every other gaming storefront in existence: Steam is more essential than all of them put together.
The pricing is not market driven.
If that’s not monopolistic, I don’t know what is, and if you still don’t see that I just don’t think we’re going to resolve this disagreement, because our perspectives are light years apart.
Then Ubisoft is a failed company if they can’t make a product that people want to buy. I have 0 empathy for them.
If by “products” you mean games, Ubisoft games are selling just fine on Steam.
It’s not a function of the product, in this case. But the storefront.
The second one with WB seems pretty reasonable as a business. If they’re gonna set the price at your store to be so much higher that nobody will buy it from you, why bother carrying it at all?
The one with Ubisoft, however, does not sound reasonable witthout knowing what, exactly, this starter pack was and how it worked. Was it a stand alone thing inside the game like some operators and skins, or was it something associated specifically with a Steam key that you are buying elsewhere? It sure does not sound like it would have a Steam key or have any specific connection to Steam except that it probably works for any version of the game, including if you have it on Steam, so it seems pretty sketch.
But if Ubisoft agreed to the terms then I don’t understand the problem with Valve taking action
The problem is that Valve is even in that position in the first place.
A storefront with pricing terms a supplier can’t say no to, with no viable alternative, is anticompetitive. If it was a competitive market, Ubisoft would break the agreement and sell lower, with dynamic pricing on other stores.
Valve has every right to take action on their own terms, of course, but that’s not the issue.
valve is a game company, did so good at helping others sell their games that you people call them anticompetitive. That’s just fucking laughable and I will never understand why so many of you seem to miss that. They didn’t go out and give a different deal to anyone else. But Ubisoft broke the terms they agreed to because they wanted to use VALVES service to hawk their wares. Well they have to pay the Piper, and they don’t get to cry foul if they try to fuck over the hand that fed them.
You can’t succeed without Valve is a dumb argument.
Blizzard had no problem with battlenet until they pissed in their customers faces.
Good old games is alive and kicking
Humble bundle now has a storefront
Greenman games is doing just fine.
And if you don’t like it then just stop using it and do the hard work yourself but NOOO that’s too hard to have to figure out how to actually sell your product.
God I hope valve just shuts steam down some day and says fuck you to everyone who complains like this
I assume it is a case of monopoly abuse. There are things you are allowed to get away with as a minor player in a market because no one has to do business with you.
For example, GoG can insist that developers give them a game build without DRM since they are a minor software store and a majority of their customers know they can buy software other places.
Steam, on the other hand, is used by almost all gamers. For many gamers, it is the only game store they use. If a game is listed on the Steam front page, a large portion of the games market will learn about the game. If Steam decides not to list a game, customers may assume that the game is not out yet, regardless of the amount of advertising they see for it. The publisher would need to have a special advertising campaign saying “yes, the game is out already but you have to use this other game store to buy it.”
But if that’s the policy that built steam, it isn’t abusing their position if they have been consistent from the before times. I’m don’t know if that’s the case but I don’t recall any particular discussion about it changing and we definately would have heard about people complaining of so.
A long standing policy that built this “monopoly” simply because no one else wanted to and were happy to hand over the reigns to steam for so long, you dont get to cry foul now if they aren’t actually using this supposed monopoly to punish people.
I think 30% is a lot, but it hasn’t been problematic till some big garbage company is upset about it? Ubisoft can go eat a bag of dicks. They had every chance to do something about this a decade ago. They shit the bed. Too bad for them. Flush. Move on imho
It’s common for those “other stores” to just be the dev’s own store or a store which takes a smaller cut than Valve.
To me, anyways, it seems perfectly expected for a business to want to pass on Valve’s charges to the customer. Whether this is harmful depends on whether you focus on the player or developer, and whether the developer responds by making the game cheaper everywhere or more expensive everywhere.
There is no justification if what you describe is true. But a lot of people are willing to give Valve benefit of the doubt, assuming it is false until proven in court. Especially coming from Ubisoft of all places.
I don’t know if this is the same policy, but one thing Valve doesn’t let you do is sell Steam codes for cheap on external platforms, because that evades their platform fee while still using Steam for distribution and makes it hard for the Steam listing to compete (since it’s more expensive).
That might not apply here because I feel like Ubisoft has their own distribution infrastructure on UPlay, but it could be that they were selling the Steam version on UPlay for cheaper.
It is not.
Valve controlling Steam keys is perfectly reasonable. In fact they’re used to be pretty lenient with those.
Controlling independent storefronts is not. Which Uplay absolutely is.
You can link your Steam and UPlay accounts so I wouldn’t rule out something like this being the case here without knowing more about the circumstances.
My understanding of the policy is that Valve requires the Steam price to be lowered to match the other vendor, not necessarily that the other vendor’s price be raised to match the price on Steam.
I don’t think it’s fair to say that they have nothing to do with other store fronts because they affect each other. If the apple farmer I work with sets up a stall across the street with prices lower than my shop, that’s going to impact my apple sales. I might look into sourcing cheaper apples or dropping the fruit entirely from my selection. Why should I be forced to stock their product?
if you’ve had any personal experience with ubishit you’d know why
i’m not going to waste my limited time and energy caring about ubi
Anticompetitive to ensure everyone sells it at the same price?
Valve are not the only company to do it either, I know razer used to but I don’t work in a retail environment anymore to know if that is still the case.
Yes, goddamnit! Haven’t you ever heard of “price-fixing?”
It would only be price fixing if they said all games must be £60
RRP and RPM isn’t price fixing.
Bless you bruce, out here doing the lord’s work educating chucklehead Gaben simps on basic concepts like market power and anticompetitive practices that we somehow manage to apply to every tech monopoly except Valve