From the opinion piece:
Last year, I pointed out how many big publishers came crawlin’ back to Steam after trying their own things: EA, Activision, Microsoft. This year, for the first time ever, two Blizzard games released on Steam: Overwatch and Diablo 4.
I said pointing to the Google antitrust case and equating them is misleading, not that it’s impossible for Valve to engage in any anti-competitive behaviour.
And the reason why I said that is because they’re completely different and not even in the same stratosphere in terms of shady ongoings. Nor are they doing the same thing. The Google case has zero bearing on this one.
As for the 30% cut, that’s been deemed fine. See the Apple case and the Google case. Even in Google’s case, where Google lost, it wasn’t down to pricing.
And Valve would have an easier time justifying it too. They could point to their service being much more bandwidth intensive, and including things like friend systems, a messenger, voice chat, streaming, cloud saves, Linux compatibility layers, compatibility for controllers that the OS doesn’t natively support, matchmaking APIs, Steam overlay, custom control options for when the game doesn’t officially support it, etc.
