What the hell are these points?
Steam forces developers to ask for higher prices?
Ah, yes, because Activision is so eager to sell Call of Duty for just $20 but big bad Steam is just forcing their hand and they have to sell it for $70. See if you look at their own store where they can set their own prices its… also $70… hmm, that’s weird. Maybe others… nope same prices across all platforms. Almost like publishers can actually freely decide on their prices.
Steam also forces customers to buy DLCs for games on their platform.
Well, how else is this going to work? I buy a game on Steam and then call up the devs to venmo them $2 and they send me a DVD in the mail? Or should I make a new account on some other website and get my DLCs seperatly from there? Most games don’t even sell you DLCs, they sell you credits so you can unlock content that’s already in the game. Often times you have to buy those credits trough the devs website and link your account to Steam. That’s already a pain it the ass.
Steam takes 30% of the cut.
True, that sound like a lot. Imagine you’re a solo Dev and you’ve been working 9 years on a game. 3 of those years you’ve essentially been working just to pay off Steam. But look at what you get for those 3 years. You get a seperate store page for your product that you can essentially design however you want. You get access to high speed distribution servers all over the world, that also allow you to effortlessly push updates out, the option for regional pricing, the industries most reliable user review system, an integrated discussion and fan art forum, third party controller support (important for people with disabilities), and a refund system. Sure 30% still sounds like a lot, but would you be able to provide all this if you would’ve self publish the game, probably not.
Steam is consistently the cheapest option to buy games on sale. And even if it isn’t the cheapest, at no point in time have I thought, man Steam has this game for $7.49 but EGS has it for $6.99, I better get it on EGS. Maybe on GoG but no where else.
It’s mind boggling to think that through inflation and some shortages almost all groceries have nearly doubled in price over the last 20 years, but a AAA game is still $60, even though the cost of making a game has skyrocketed. Imagine gas prices would’ve stayed the same over the last 20 years and people would complian that gas station sandwiches would tast like shit.
I copied my own comment from a cross post on another instance, so don’t @ me.
I thought maybe they were saying regional differences in prices were the cause of concern, but again that’s not really a basis for a lawsuit, is it?
As far as I know, regional pricing through Steam is completely controlled by the publisher/dev. It’s literally a checkbox for each region and a text field to enter an adjusted price. And Steam has made great efforts to stop regional key trading to prevent people from just buying cheaper keys from 3rd world countries and reselling them.
Literally all pricing is set by the devs and publishers. The guy you’re responding to has no idea what he’s talking about. The Steam store terms of service are public and easily available to read through. I know, I’ve done it. The only pricing requirement they have is keys sold off store can’t be significantly discounted under the store price. That’s it.
Well yeah but even if it were hypothetically something steam could control, would that really be grounds for a lawsuit?
As a “theoretical hobby game dev”: steam also provides workshop, networking and matchmaking (lobby) tools. For all the stuff you get I personally find this reasonable. If I remember correctly, mobile phone app stores take a big cut too and I can’t see how they would come close.
Edit: cloud saves, (proton), dlc handling
I think the DLC point is the one valid argument, although nontrivial to implement.
How do you think DLC works on DRM-free games works, like GOG? The game is just gonna check if you have the DLC installed, without any real DRM.
The main issue is, this is entirely possible right now for games to do, but it won’t be integrated with steam, and needs to be done by developers themselves. I don’t know how feasible it would be for Steam to realistically do something about it, but it’d definitely be nice if you could buy a game on steam, and later decide you want to buy DLC on another platform and install it onto your steam game.
I think DLCs are becoming a thing of the past in general. Usually the data for the DLC comes with the main game, you just buy a license to unlock it. I can’t remember the last time I bought a DLC and hat to download something additionally or update my game. I’m not a fan of it, but this is where we are going. This just means that wherever you bought the main game from, you will also have to buy the DLCs, since companies will never accept to share licenses between each other. This is not a Steam issue, this is a developer issue.
Well, some games that come to mind are Stellaris, RimWorld, Oxygen Not Included, and I think the upcoming Factorio expansion. And from those, I think it might be possible to buy RimWorld DLC off-steam and install it in a steam copy.
Fun fact, you can check - on steamdb, you can check depots for a game, and see if it has one for a DLC. If it does, then it is downloading extra files for it.
All that said, I wouldn’t say it’s 100% a developer issue. The way I see the accusation, Valve is very comfortable providing convenient libraries for various things, including working with DLC, that only work on their platform, making it hard to release the game elsewhere in the future.
I’m generally fine with that for a simple reason - Steam really does have great features that just work. However, if somebody forced Valve to make features like Steam Input available independent of Steam, it could be a great boon for gaming.
Some of these arguments are a bit disingenuous.
First argument is about a Steam forcing published to sell games at high costs and using a major publisher known for overcharging already as a counterpoint. Yes the publisher that charges $90 for a deluxe edition game and still includes a battle pass system and other garbage is going to overcharge anywhere. You know that the point here is clearly referring to smaller publishers who are probably being pushed to charge $60 for a game they’d rather charge less for, but Valve may want to keep game prices high across the board so as not to make the Activisions out there look absurdly high. Its price fixing.
Steam forces users to buy DLC on their platform. Your counterpoint is about Venmo’ing a dev cash and getting a DVD in return, which is just such a bullshit counterpoint. Did you suddenly forget Steam’s key system that enables you to purchase games on other sites and redeem the code on Steam? By keeping DLCs in Steam Valve can keep costs up on them at $1.99 each (talking cosmetics and micro DLCs) where another site might offer a bundle purchase of 10 for $5 or something since those DLCs may not sell anymore on older games.
Steam takes 30% of the cut. Yeah that’s a lot. You’re acting like these devs would fail if it weren’t for the good graces and will of Valve because they give them access to the number 1 platform or whatever. That’s a huge cut for small publishers. All Valve is doing is handling the transactions and taking a 1/3 of the ticket price at the door. Never mind these publishers also need to pay overhead, employees, bills, etc, something that’s made more difficult for small publishers selling games they don’t want to charge $60 for. The 30% take off the top goes right back to Steam forcing devs to keep their costs high. If devs want to pay the bills, they can’t charge what they expect to, they have to charge much more to compensate for that 30% loss. Plus this forces a cost increase on other platforms because the dev can’t charge one price on Steam and another on Epic, it would piss off people who primarily buy games on Steam.
Steam is consistently the lowest cost. That’s just patently false. Yes Steam does great sales regularly. What about Humbles $25 for a ton of game bundles? GoG? Epics constant take this free game? There’s tons of sites out there. I buy games on plenty of other sites than Steam, not because I just felt like trying something new, but because you can find better deals if you look.
Lastly you talk about inflation and how AAA games stay at $60, but they haven’t have they? What’s the last AAA game you bought that was just $60? These days it’s $60 for the base game, but you’re missing key parts of the game unless you get the $80 version, but hey you’re already spending another $20, so why not throw in an extra $10 and buy the deluxe edition which also gives you this cool item to get you ahead, plus some cosmetics, by the way there’s also a loot system + battle pass + you must purchase each season to play + a subscription cost. AAA games aren’t $60 anymore. Shit like that is exactly why something like Baulder’s Gate can come out at $60 for the FULL game and make such a fuss with other publishers because that’s how it should be.
Regardless if it’s copied from another instance I’ll reply anyway to your arguments.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Steam and have spent a ton of money on the platform, but I won’t pretend their gods gift to gamers and can do no wrong.
The uk and ubisoft government should be sued for not preserving games like the crew
Putting my tinfoil hat on here, but Sunak totally called the election because he saw the petition was gaining traction!
I hold my hand up as someone who hates the Tory scum but even I wouldn’t make a claim that bold simply because they’re too incompetent to be actively screwing over a market they simply don’t care about.
My wife used to work as a researcher in Westminster. She always laughs when she hears most conspiracy theories, as she knows first hand 90% of the people there couldn’t conspiracy their way out of a wet paper bag.
Long winded way of saying I should’ve put an “/s” on the end of my original comment.
Monopoly, noun: the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.
Imo this does not apply to Steam. They do not have an exclusive possession or control of the PC gaming market. As is proven in the rest of this thread by just about everyone, there are other online game stores/launchers besides Steam. Literally no one is forcing you to use Steam (because then it would be considered a monopoly), when Epic, GoG, Uplay, Origin, and Rockstar Launchers all exist.
Again, like it was said elsewhere in this thread, they’ve just crushed the competition so completely that it feels like they have a monopoly.
In the article
- Price parity obligation clauses: We say that Valve Corporation imposes price parity clauses that restrict and prevent game developers from offering better prices on PC-games on rival platforms, limiting consumer choice and harming competition.
This seems to be common practice, but is anti competitive. If another platform would charge 20 instead of 30 pct and the publisher would give half this discount to the customers this would be against these clauses. Good that these are looked at.
- Tying: We say that the restrictions Valve Corporation imposes, that mean the add-on content for games must also be purchased from Steam, restricts competition in the market.
And vice versa, steam dlc does not work with games on epic. Interesting case here too.
- Excessive pricing: We argue that Valve Corporation has imposed an excessive commission, of up to 30%, charged to publishers, that resulted in inflated prices on its Steam platform.
The 30% market standard seems to be under fire across the board, so if there is a solid case to be made that this is excessive, I’m glad the watchdog is trying to make it.
In all good that this is investigated, cause just paying for another yaght or house for Gabe is not nessecary.
It wouldn’t be the first time the first point has been brought up. If true it does sound pretty anti competition. But so far there’s been no proof valve is actually doing this and I’m skeptical that it’s happening at all. If it were happening I don’t think we would be getting free games on epic (at least not ones that are also sold on steam). Nor do I think we’d have games on gamepass that are also on steam. I also routinely see sales for games on Green Man Gaming, Humble Bundle, and epic that at the time at least make the games cheaper than they are on steam.
Maybe they have agreements with certain publishers to provide a lower platform fee than 30% in exchange for them not providing the games cheaper on other platforms?
Sure it has been brought up. But that’s why these investigations are good. If it’s true, slap em with a fine, if it’s not… valve can make a victory lap.
IIRC Steam has used that first clause to limit Steam keys being provided on another store at a cheaper price. I believe devs have been allowed (maybe unofficially) to sell at whatever price they want if there’s no steam key being provided.
Here we go. It’s not a monopoly because vAlVe aRe gOoD GuYs aNd eVeRyOnE ElSe iS BaD. The internet defends this company like they are the godfather of their children it’s insane.
MEGACORPS ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS!
When the competition is trying to bring in scummy, sugar-mommy approach to gaming by luring unsuspecting players with sweets, a company that has consistently proved to be rationally pro-consumer is bound to earn the right to be defended, as long as they keep their pro-consumer approach intact. Which Valve still does, while others are quite shit.
Except GOG, but I’m gonna presume GOG had higher currency conversation rates or advised rates, which made the games there 3-4 times more expensive than Steam in many 3rd world countries. Still cheaper than most other storefronts, but it was more expensive than Steam till the latest currency change.
TL;DR: Entitled parent is angry that Valve makes a profit. Claims they’re a monopoly. They aren’t.
No need to have 100% of the market to be a monopoly, just need to have enough influence that you control the market, which is their case.
It’s so crazy how Valve gets called a monopoly because of how their competition refuses to make anything of equivalent quality. It literally took the epic games store years before they had a shopping cart to check out in. Valve is the only one with good customer service, a solid refund policy, and no 3rd party exclusives in the platform. Valve is basically the only one that’s not a publically traded company, so it’s not responsible to shareholders and going through enshittification like everything else.
Its like imagine five barbers in town. One gets all the business and is rich, but he’s nothing amazing, just a reliable barber. The other four barbers are constantly using rusty razors and punch customers in the throat right before they leave. No matter what anyone tells them, they won’t stop. New razors cost money they don’t want to spend, and your hair gets cut mostly the same in the end so why bother?
So they sue the first guy for having a monopoly.
A monopoly is a monopoly is a monopoly.
Stop defending them, monopolies are never good to consumers.
By your logic they shouldn’t be broken because it’s the competitors’ fault if people don’t do business with them instead.
Well no, if your company is big enough that it doesn’t make sense to go for the competition then no matter what the competition does you are so far ahead that they’ll never catch up and you can sway the market as you please.
As a consumer, I don’t care about this. Even if Valve’s cut were lower, the prices would remain the same. I don’t get a cheaper game, the publisher just gets a higher cut, so it doesn’t directly benefit me.
Then you go after the publishers next.
It’s clear that Valve’s cut has an influence because it being a % it means that as development costs go up the price of the games need to increase exponentially to compensate for the 30% Valve gets no matter the price.
To quote myself for some numbers:
It you need to make 30$/copy to cover costs in 2015 and Steam is taking 30% you need to sell for 43$/copy, Valve is making 13$/copy.
Development costs go up by 20% over the next 10 years, you now need to make 36$/copy to cover costs, with Steam’s cut you now need to sell for 51.50$, Valve is making 15.50$/copy.
If it was 15% instead? 35.50$ and 42.50$ would be the prices.
That’s just how numbers work. Those aren’t exponential increases, they are proportional. 30% will always be 30%.
There’s no benefit to sensationalizing the math.
The profit in dollars increases exponentially as the price goes up, punch that in a graphics calculator and tell me it’s not a curve that becomes steeper.
Sounds like the claims people made saying move from physical to digital would result in cheaper prices. Then you see games when they weren’t on steam still going for $60 or $70 despite being launched on their own platform where they pay no cut. Same for games launched only on consoles by the console owners.
Do you think you would get the same buggy mess if every single publisher had 30% more budget to work with?
What actually doesn’t benefit you is the hundreds of millions being accumulated in gabbens bank account.
I’m totally cool with just downloading it from their website. Or they could send me a flash drive. Wasn’t Steam originally the cheaper, easier option instead of designing a box and writing a bunch of disks?
No, the problem steam was originally created to solve was distributing updates for pc games. Before steam getting updates meant visiting shitty dev websites or ad farms that also hosted update files and manually patching your game.
It was awful.
Do you think you would get the same buggy mess if every single publisher had 30% more budget to work with?
Yes, 1000%.
Games are buggy because developers/publishers/players don’t care. Money has nothing to do with it and if they had more money, they would just pocket it and release garbage for people like you.
Money has nothing to do with it
While I agree with everything else, I think it’s the opposite of this, money has everything to do with it. If people stopped preordering and buying day 1 every AAA game, they would rethink their strategy, but since money keeps coming the don’t need to change much.
Shareholders always want more money, i.e. as much money as is extractable from the consumer. So yes, I think companies would still invest as little as possible to make a game profitable, even if that leads to bugs.
Steam, GameStop, Toys-R-Us, Walmart… Someone always makes a profit on selling games, or any products - even digital. Steam has not reinvented the wheel here. It’s not a new concept. Are you arguing that the idea of stores should be eliminated?
In return, the game is more likely to be seen, just like placing a product in a real store where people walk by it. It also gets advertised, reviewed, has another community outlet, and Steam uses their own servers and bandwidth to distribute it.
It’s not a bad deal for the devs and publishers.
I’m mostly tired of seeing huge soft monopolies being defended. Whatever competition they have doesn’t actually compete with them. They lock people into their ecosystem just as much as Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony do.
And just like other shady companies like Walmart and Amazon, they should be regulated to death, or something. But not defended and treated like some gold furred lamb. Everytime a post pops up, dozens jump over themselves making excuses for Gaben.
Replace steam with Amazon and reread the thread and my point of view might be better understood. I don’t understand the veneration, they use and sell our data, they kill competition, they do all the bad stuff. They just have a better pr team and realized they could leverage Foss to save on OS dev costs.
We have plenty of examples of this.
No Man’s Sky came out to much fanfare, and was kind of shit. They took their massive profits (of which a significant chunk went to distributors, publishers, etc., just like back when physical copies were the norm) and used them to transform their initial offering into something that was far more like their vision than the original product.
Minecraft also followed this paradigm for a very long time.
Now, how many very successful game developers just took the money and ran? A lot? Yeah, a lot. The simple fact is not many companies are willing to spend already-earned profits for a fraction more sales.
i mean, games launched on epic arent perfect either… and devs get much more of a cut, and a bonus if its unreal engine.
FF7R for example ran poorly, stutters in directx modes due to a poor implementation of shader compilation and these bugs STILL exist in the game today last ive seen.
the developer didnt take a 30% cut for the game, being epic exclusive and being unreal means the oppisite, they got PAID and still released a buggy POS.
its a fallacy to assume if a dev had 30% more budget that a game would be bug free.
I think you severely underestimate the cost of hosting servers for ~46.000 Games, across 9 regions, in 190 countries, with 500Mbit download speeds. On top of that billions of screenshots, trillions of lines of text, customer service, development of new features and hardware, etc.
Valve has an est. revenue (not profit) of roughly $10 Billion this year. Tencent Games has an est. $85. How is Steam even remotely considered to be a monopoly in gaming?
In fact I do think that, but it’s not like I’m arguing in the interest of his bank account either; I don’t see this directly affecting me, so I don’t care.
It’s affecting you because of a loss of quality in the product you are receiving, a loss directly caused by greedy middle men you are here defending.
The amount of companies being taxed by Gaben, Microsoft and Sony is vaste and not many of them would just take the 30% and run. There’s a lot of indie and medium sized companies that are barely making it.
You can plug your ears all you want, it is affecting you and you are boot licking for pretending it isn’t. Gaben isn’t your friend even though he probably spends a lot of money trying to make you think he is.
It’s weird to me how people(are they?) here bend over backwards to defend a monopolistic drm platform like steam.
I get gamers like their games. But come on.
I think it’s because there’s no real competition and nobody wants to be buying DVDs (blu-rays?) nowadays.
Consider that the only other storefront that treats its’ users with any sort of dignity is GoG and many major publishers would rather avoid it because it has a policy of being DRM free, so you lose out on a lot of games by sticking to GoG for everything.
You’re left with Steam, Epic Games Store, and some other platforms nobody’s ever heard of. Epic Games’ policy is “we don’t need a better store interface because it doesn’t affect sales” and “there’s no need to support Linux, nobody uses it”. Steam has a good-enough UI and not only supports Linux for Linux-native games, but also integrates Proton (which Valve also develops) so you can play Windows games on Linux.
Sure Epic will take less of a cut from publishers, but I’ll have an inferior experience and probably pay the same.
