Gaming

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"Valve is being sued in the UK for $843 million for 'overcharging 14 million PC gamers and abusing its dominant position' with Steam" (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 4 months ago by woodenskewer@lemmy.world to c/gaming@lemmy.world

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Being the most favorable game market does not mean "there is no competition". It's just the competition is doing it wrong so everyone flocks to what they like or have stuck with.

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[–] lemann@lemmy.dbzer0.com 29 points 4 months ago (6 children)

"Abusing their dominant position" feels a bit far... the competition is just 💩 IMO. Just the fact that EGS practically gives out games for free, and still struggle to penetrate the market, should tell you all you need to know.

Steam provides discussion boards, workshop (mods), cloud saves, a whole console (deck), frequent games sales, achievements, best-in-class refund policy, regional CDNs for faster game downloads, and the list goes on. They even still support the Steam Link box which was discontinued several years ago.

They pretty much go above and beyond the current offerings of any other gaming platform, and have outlasted failed ones like Games For Windows. In the rare case that they do go out of business, there are steam emulators to run your games as long as they do not implement any additional DRM.

It says Valve "forces" game publishers to sign up to so-called price parity obligations, preventing titles being sold at cheaper prices on rival platforms.

EGS exclusives are worse, locking a whole other platform out for an entire year. With Steam's agreement surely you could just run the sale on both platforms at the same time? Anyway, Amazon is well known for doing this, why not take them to court instead?

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 30% fee is a bit high, but looking at everything that it pays for, and the contributions to open source, I don't think it's too bad. Publishers are also the ones choosing to price their games high, and to create as many DLCs as possible to increase recurring revenue. The ones who want lower fees already sell on EGS IMO...

[–] stickmanmeyhem@lemmy.world 18 points 4 months ago

I do think the 30% commission is high. But the problem I see now is, even if the gov't gets involved and mandates their rev share be lower, game publishers will absolutely not lower their prices to coincide with that. Corps know people are already used to paying pretty exorbitant prices, so they'd happily have the government mandate they make more profit while valve makes less without having to do any work whatsoever.

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