$843 million lawsuit against Valve already has its own website: "The Steam Claim" accuses the biggest store in PC gaming of "overcharging" players
$843 million lawsuit against Valve already has its own website: "The Steam Claim" accuses the biggest store in PC gaming of "overcharging" players
The lawsuit is said to represent 14 million UK gamers
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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.
Totally agree, steam is one the big players that stills offers a quality service both for consumers and for developers
Maybe this lawsuit is founded by this dodgy lawyer group on behalf of a competitor under the table, who is pissed at exactly the fact steam sales are too generous and others cannot compete
Would said competitor be the one who successfully trained their users to only look at their store once a week for a free game or two then close the store again? 😉
I recently got my first current-gen game console a couple of years ago (Nintendo switch) and was floored at how expensive all of the games are and how meager the sales are. PC gaming is shockingly cheap when you get down to it
FYI go walk your local target from time to time. They'll sometimes have random sales on the big switch games with no online listing of the sale. I got the last pokemon game 6 months or so late for $20 off
Nintendo doesn't reward super patient gaming though like other consoles where I didnt pay more than over $20 for any PS4 first party exclusives. It is actually on the weird side where sometimes physical prices actually go up with Nintendo seeming to be more conservative about number of physical copies they make to keep prices high compared to Sony where brick and motor stores look to offload physical inventory. So leads to used market for Nintendo games going crazy compared to downward trend of other consoles.
Oh that's good to know! Too bad my nearest target is 20 miles away and a very annoying drive over a poorly designed arterial road
Sales of physical copies of games is where consoles truly shine. It's not as great as a few years ago (getting surplus steelbook games for like $10 sometimes), but you can still regularly pick up AAA games that are a handful of months old for $20 or sometimes less.
Check sites like dekudeals and psprices (steamDB is great too for making sure you're not being over charged on Steam).
It's just being a savvy consumer.
But yeah, when it comes to Nintendo hardware, the only reason to have it imo is the first party games, and those will never go on sale so you might as well just pony up. You can do the voucher thing and save $10 on each if you get two games (dunno if that's still a thing).
I remember a couple of years ago when my little brother saved up for a switch for like a year, and then didn't have any money left for games because of the prices.
Right?! Having moved off of consoles entirely this generation, I’ve hoovered up amazing games during the countless Steam sales at prices CEX can’t even beat.
I hope this gets thrown out as hogwash.
Playstation and Xbox regularly put games on sale. And their base prices almost always go down over time. I assume Steam is more steep discounts. But you can absolutely get by without paying full price on consoles if you wait.
You can usually snag items for 75% or more off about 1-2 years after launch on Steam (and by extension all other PC game sales platforms) and it's consistent enough that you can count on it (and I do!). I've never seen discounts go that deep on consoles, at least not for games I actually play.
Also GOG will just decide at random that a game is infact 1 dollar for no reason.
Nintendo doesn't tho
Epic also does this
You're poor but have possibly spent hundreds of thousands on games?
No, I’ve saved hundreds of thousands. Between Steam sales and Humble Bundle, always being a patient gamer, I’ve amassed over 300 games id like to play but haven’t spent more than $500 on Steam over my entire life. I’m poor but $500 over a couple years I can do.
For comparison, at $60 a game, that would buy me 8 console or Nintendo games at full price plus a little DLC.
It’s the best price, bar none.
You've saved hundreds or thousands, but you've not saved hundreds of thousands.
Is that in American dollars?
If those 300 games were even US $70 each which is exceedingly generous, you'd only scratch $21,000 as the cost of everything. Unless Steam was literally giving you $180,000+ for using their store, you've not saved hundreds of thousands.
Unless you're referring to hundreds of thousands of pennies.
It's possible they have more games in their library as they did say 300+ games they want to play, but yeah the numbers they gave don't add up to hundreds of thousands. Unless they were taking phrases like "a $700 Demon Souls machine" very literally.
My mistake, I thought you'd literally saved thousands from sales pricing
Different guy but I've got over 2,700 games on Steam thanks to sales... So I've probably saved at least one thousand... Maybe not two, unless we count not buying for Star Citizen as a savings!
Which is totally reasonable, but 100x that raises an eyebrow
yen
They get a 30% cut and make enough money that Gaben is a billionaire so yeah, games prices could be much cheaper.
I mean literally everything could be cheaper. Welcome to a capitalist society.
Wow, you're starting to get it, maybe we should start doing something about it instead of defending those who profit, right?
the solution to that is taxes, not suing successful business one at a time.
Or breaking them or nationalization so profit goes to everyone instead of a single guy.
And you want to start with Valve, which is one of the smaller game companies and is one of the few players not guilty of buying up their competition, instead of Sony, Microsoft, other Big Tech players, media conglomerates like Disney, ISPs like Comcast or AT&T, or meat distributors who are price fixing algorithmicly?
Who said I want to start with them?
Why even buy games period? Why risk giving money to any of them since things that become popular risk making the people selling them to become wealthy? Not like indies are immune to it looking at Minecraft becoming too popular that too many people wanted to buy it making one person then a corporation wealthy, so why not just not buy period to prevent the issue from even becoming a possibility?
The best solution is prevention. Don't buy anything.
Who said I do?
You don't buy games?
Not on Steam and not in ways that enrich billionaires. If devs don't make their game available another way then too bad, they chose to deal with the devil, I don't have to encourage them, won't keep me from playing their games through other means or by getting them through giveaways.
Average sh.itjust.works IQ be like
bruh, don't lump me with this idiot.
Oh will you look at that, an hypocrite
Yeah bud Steam having decent game sales is literally like a corrupt government contract boss gets a pay rise at a corpo dumping sewage into rivers and polluting drinking water and making people sick.
Stop defending a billionaire and his company, you'll never be one of them, all billionaires need to go, none of them became one by being moral, if it was any other company you would be talking about guillotines.
Pretty freaking high to realize that you must be an idiot to defend the people who are the opposite end of the food chain.
What would be the solution here that could drive the prices down? Limit profit levels per company?
I feel like it's not even capitalism itself being the problem alone, but also the entry cost for all these services. Building a competitor to Steam is pretty much equal to building a competitor to Youtube which means it's almost impossible due to the running costs of the service AND you would have to be somehow wildly better as in not gather as much money from your customers. It would be lovely to see some resolution to these problems without going full communism first.
Nothing really. Publishers already all want to go up to 70 base price, and most bigger games already effectively cost 100-200 between pre-orders, deluxe editions and mtx (I don't know the designed price point, but years ago I was talking to the team of an in-dev game who planned for 110 being spent on average per buyer for their game).
Break it down, it clearly has too much power over the gaming sector. Impose a maximum share for distributors because clearly 30% is way more than they actually need.
Okay, but who gets to decide what's the maximum profit margin allowed? How would it be determined so that it wouldn't also prevent new competition from growing up because that 30% is the only thing that allows the companies to make some money from their service and use that money to develop said service.
Base it on market share and revenues.
If there was no method by which people could ever profit from a system like Steam, why bother building it?
There's a difference between making profit and becoming one of the richest person in the world, in the second case it means you clearly made too much profit by selling for a higher price than required.
Let's play ball here too. So by definition there's always going to be a richest person in the world - let it be with a difference of 100 dollars to the median or a billion dollars or 100 billion dollars. Who gets to decide who is the richest person and by what means? Clearly it shouldn't be a business person so would it be a politician, a dictator, a president or who? And how should we restrict entrepreneurs getting there without destroying every company and therefore making everyone unemployed because there's no incentive to run a business anymore? How would we balance risks with gains if we are not allowed to make a profit?
You're definitely right that you picked apart their argument because ackshually there will always be a richest person. But clearly the sentiment is that someone shouldn't get excessive wealth past their threshold.
How do we define excessive wealth and how do we limit it? Well there are lots and lots of proposals I would suggest reading up on some (you can Google that question to get 10 op eds that suggest 20 different solutions). I wouldn't mind defining it as a certain percentage higher than the median wealth of the country. It would be funny to give Gabe Newell a "you won capitalism" trophy and taking excess wealth he gains.
As for motivation. It's a much murkier subject than you imply. In an economy where the state takes every penny of a successful business's wealth, yeah it makes sense that there's no motivation to make a successful business. But if one could still get rich off of running a business (just not god-tier level wealth) I'm sure there would be plenty of motivation. And hell, if we give them prestige like we do now there's tons of people who do what they do just for the fame with no profit. There's tons of evidence that people aren't purely motivated by the infinite profit of business people all over the world work their asses off in jobs they enjoy or respect that will never pay them Gabe Newell bucks.
A richest person will always exist, there's no reason why that richest person couldn't have 500k in their bank account while the median is at 250k though.
The fact you're setting an arbitrary limit of cash in a bank account shows how little you've thought about this. Rich people have money in the bank, sure, but the vast amount of their wealth is in stocks, property, and other assets. Also, assuming rich people have one bank account they keep all their money in is foolish. You have to spread your cash around to multiple accounts and even banks in order to not exceed the amount the government is willing to insure.
I dumbed it down to the level of the people who are defending billionaires. No one should be allowed to have multiple millions or billions in wealth while people are starving even in rich countries.
Ah yes, the old "I was only pretending to be dumb" excuse.
1.5 million is not a lot of money when you're talking about the richest person.
The 1 was a typo and in a perfect world where wealth is distributed equally, 500k would be a whole lot.
Heck, even today in rich countries, 500k in savings is an anomaly. 78% of US citizens live paycheck to paycheck, having 10k in saving is something they can't fathom, 500k is a whole fucking lot.
They absolutely could. If only there was any serious competition and not just some quick cash grabbers like EA and others. As long as Steam is providing most value to users (=players) without even restricting competition like other tech companies do in other areas (cough Apple), they are able to take the 30% cut without a complaint.
The only reason EA and others aren't serious competition is because of their lack of effort.
Every time the topic comes up, PC gamers don't bother with their services because they're shoddily written and slow. The complaint of "They don't have millions of games on there to amass in one library" is a minority one.
Exactly. Why should they succeed if they don't even try to win the competition?
Streaming platforms for TV series and movies went into the direction of every large movie company running their own streaming platform and only limiting their own content to their own platform which lead into a bad customer experience when you just wanted to see the latest Disney or HBO or whatever thing. I think it's a good thing EA and others didn't succeed doing the same in gaming industry and only limiting their games to their own stores even though they did try really hard. That's not even competition, it's just being greedy.
A true competitor to Steam would try to sell and serve games of their own and also made by others. I guess Epic tries to do that in a sense but they also lack the actual effort of making a good product and instead tries to win some market share by just throwing lots of money at it. I know it's hard to build an actually good software product (because I work in the industry) but I also know it's not impossible. Somehow the companies that have the means to compete just aren't able to get their shit together and for some reason that's the reason why we shouldn't like Valve either?
I mean, if Epic actually did what shills like @Kecessa@sh.itjust.works promote - that is, reflect lower cuts in a cheaper price to consumers, then we would all be flabbergasted how big their market percentage is.
But they're not doing that, that's the thing. Because Tim Sweeney does not want storefronts to take a smaller cut. Quite the opposite. His problem is that the cut is only 30%, and worse, does not go into his pockets!
But there is always an excuse. Epic tried that. Companies complained.
Their sales used to give you a reusable $10 off coupon. That didn't change the amount the companies got when someone bought their game. It only changed how much they paid. When one of the Witcher games had that coupon applied to it, the developer got pissed off and changed the price of the game so that it was a cent or two below the threshold to activate the coupon, and then fans of the dev were excusing it claiming that they couldn't let the price be lower because it would 'devalue' the game.
if a game was $30 on Steam and $25 on Epic (as a regular price), or some other service, you'd undoubtedly hear the same rhetoric.
Epic's cut is 12% not 30%. They also waive the 5% royalty fee over $1 million for sales on the Epic Store if you use Unreal. Epic doesn't control the prices. Devs set the prices. They leave the price the same on Epic so that they can actually get a little more for each sale.
What the should do on a $60 game though is to set the price at like $56 on Epic, it would encourage people to save a couple bucks there, while still getting them more than steam after the cuts.
"without a complaint"
Eh... You realize what this discussion is based on?
I do, and I feel like the real intent is something completely different here than what is said out loud.
E: So Epic Games Store is actually giving out games for free and they still can't gain traction because their platform sucks so bad otherwise. My guess is someone just wants to try and get a tough competitor driven out of one country so that they could bring their own, worse, service there instead and take the market share without actually competing.
Epic isn't involved in that lawsuit so I don't know why you're them into the conversation.
If a company charges X$ for a product and the CEO ends up being able to own six yacht I fucking hope someone will wake up and say "Hold on buddy, you're clearly ripping people off."
What's crazy is that if the lawsuit was against Apple or a grocery chain you guys would all be cheering, but you made yourselves believe that Steam was a good guy when all they do is make sure they get more money from more people, they don't do shit for free.
I brought Epic just as an example of an actual competitor actually trying to compete against Steam, sorry if I I was a bit unclear about that.
So lots of entrepreneurs get rich when they make a product that solves people's problems in one way or another and it sells with a profit - let it be a small profit or a large profit. The thing with capitalism is, if you make your profit too large, eventually a competitor will come and provide an equal or better product with slightly smaller profit or they figured out a way to make the product cheaper and still maintain the same profit margin with a lower price gaining a market share.
The problem with Apple, other large tech companies or some grocery chains in some parts of world (this is the case where I live actually) is that they are not allowing a healthy competition in the first place. If a competitor appears on the market, they will buy them before gaining too much traction, or if that's not possible, they will do everything they can in their power to drive them out of the market by lobbying politicians, or if they control some valuable aspect of the market, restrict access to said market.
Valve hasn't practiced any of those shady tactics as far as I know of and that's why people actually think of them as one of the "good guys" even if it is somewhat unhealthy. You shouldn't try to beat down the people playing with a friendly rule set of capitalism because they are the ones driving the competition forward.
Valve has enough of the market that they don't need to do that because they're the default option, just like Microsoft doesn't need to fear macOS or Linux or anyone that would try to jump in the game and create a new OS (hell, they even had up finance Apple in order to create competition). They don't practice these shady tactics (although that's disputable and they're getting sued for it) because they don't have to to win, they can just wait it out and let potential competitors ruin themselves. Even if someone came and offered everything Steam offers and more, people wouldn't switch because their games are already on Steam. Just like people who are used to Windows and have bought programs compatible with it won't abandon everything and start over with another OS.
So "too big to fail" or something?
I don't know if you lived through the Internet Explorer era, but that was exactly the same situation in browsers back in the day. Internet Explorer was preinstalled in every Windows computer, so in pretty much every computer, and it was deemed as "unbeatable" because people were too lazy to install anything else. In retrospective, it didn't take too long for Google Chrome to beat IE market share and nowadays pretty much the whole world uses Chrome and nothing else. Now, with IE, EU had to step in and force Microsoft to present their users a dialog to choose their browser in a fresh Windows installation which did have a role in that market share change. With Steam there isn't a need for that, because every user has to go and explicitly install Steam client to their computer before using it. Same goes with Chrome.
Although, vendor lock really is a real issue, and I do agree with you that if one has thousands of euros/dollars worth of games in their Steam account, it's purely convenient to keep on buying their next games on Steam as well. What I don't agree with is, that if there was a new competitor that was better in every way imaginable and they were able to sell the games on their platform for, let's say, -5% constantly, people wouldn't start using their service. You have to remember, that there is also a constant stream of new gamers (young people) that haven't even created a Steam account, and nothing is preventing them from choosing another service for their first game purchase. It's just that there isn't a real alternative to Steam currently.
I don't know if you lived through the Internet Explorer era
You know this person didn't live through that era. They're waaaay too young for that.
An alternative that allows you to add friends, instant message them in-game whenever, that also hosts social hubs for each of its thousands of games; where people can post guides, fanart, videos, and discussions?
As evidenced by games costing less on stores where the cut is lower!
Oh... wait...
That is addressed by the lawyer:
According to Shotbolt, the developer and digital distribution company is "shutting out" all competition in the PC gaming market as it "forces" game publishers to sign off on price parity obligations - supposedly preventing them from going on to offer lower prices on other platforms.
But I thought those are only for steam keys? That's always been what devs found out when trying to vary their prices on storefronts: Sell the game standalone, Valve sleeps. Sell a steam key or use the steam backend, real shit.
Epic is good at making it sound like it applies to sales in general though, while technically not being wrong from how they word it: You do sign a price parity obligation, yes. And it does prevent you from offering lower prices on other stores. For, well, steam keys. But they're not mentioning that last part as that makes it sound like Epic just sells stuff for the same end-user price because they can.
I've seen some comments agreeing with you and others citing examples of individual developers being told not to sell at lower prices. Don't know if the prosecutor is citing those cases or they're just a chancer who hasn't done their research properly.
They're also the prosecutor, they can word it like that if they so desire. It's on the opposing attorney to correct them.
And possibly demand sanctions if they can convince the bar that it was willful omission of details.
Why would they lower their price if the same game needs to be sold for more on another platform in order to see a RoI?
But it doesn't need to be sold for more? As evidenced by not being sold for more despite the cut Valve takes? If that were an issue the games would cost say 70 on Steam but 60 elsewhere?
It needs to be sold for 70 on Steam in order to bring in the revenue per copy they need for their RoI, why would they go and sell for less elsewhere if Steam with their 30% share sets the bar? People won't feel ripped off, the price is the same, what they don't realize is that the only reason the price is that high in the first place is that Valve gets 21$ from each sale! The company needs 49$/copy in their pockets, if the distributor's share had always been 15% instead of 30% we would be buying games for 58$ instead of 70$ right now.
I find it absolutely wild that you seem to think Steam's 30% cut is the sole reason AAA games cost $70. Have you ever looked into how much it costs to sell a game at a retail store? From what I've seen Steam takes roughly the same cut as most retailers do and then the publisher still has to produce the physical copies and distribute them. They would make the same amount on Steam if and only if they printed, burned, packaged, and distributed their physical copies for free, not to mention the promotional materials they're sending out to retailers.
Everything I'm seeing indicates that compared to a physical copy (which is given for a majority of AAA games) a major publisher would earn far more money per copy on Steam than at GameStop, Target, Walmart, or any other retailer where they're charging the same $70 price at. But Steam is the real problem that's hurting their RoI, apparently.
I'll agree I think Steam's cut is high and they could earn a lot of favor by turning it down a bit, but your argument seeming to insinuate that their 30% cut is the sole reason games cost $70 is absolutely wild to me.
This discussion is about Steam, they have control over the market, all distributors are in the wrong and take too high of a cut, I'll talk about the other distributors when we have a discussion about them.
So companies made due with the same cut from retailers for decades, Steam comes along and offers the same cut with none of the other expenses associated with those retailers (thereby giving them a better RoI than the same retailers they made due with for decades) and suddenly Steam is the reason games are so expensive.
For all of your talk that Steam's awful cut sets the bar for the price or else they won't make their RoI on games sold there, you suddenly don't seem to care very much about the very many retailers these AAA publishers still regularly sell through that cost them a significantly larger percentage per game sold than Steam does.
Oh, is it other retailers the article is talking about? No, it's not.
Oh is that because Steam exists in isolation and can't be compared to any other platform? If so, tell me what about Steam makes it an apples to oranges comparison with Epic, GOG, Origin, and Battle.Net? If they're up for discussion then why is it that physical game distribution isn't allowed to be talked about? If an average consumer is only really concerned about getting the game then why are some forms of getting their game not allowed for discussion? Why should retailers be exempt from this discussion?
You also didn't seem to mind slashing their cut percentage in half, but how can we know that's a feasible percentage if we're not allowed to talk about other distributors and see if they're able to make 15% work? If we're not considering other distributors at all then who's to say if 30% is unreasonable? Should it be increased or decreased and by how much?
Suppose we were instead talking about Nintendo selling games for too much, how would we decide it's too much if we couldn't compare it to other studios, distributors, or platforms that demonstrate they can still run a business and charge less?
Face it, talk about and comparison to any other distributor or distribution method is fully relevant and required if you want to have any meaningful discussion. You just don't seem to want to discuss retailers because they're hurting your weak argument.
In a world where Sony and Embracer are running around saying we need to be paying $70+ for games (while tipping the devs and buying micro transactions like a good like wallet)... You're mad at the storefront?
Yeah, go into Walmart and demand they take less of a cut so... The publisher can take more from the devs?
Gabe is rich because he spearheaded a good service (which I'll admit I thought was a scam back when I was forced to make an account way back when I had dial up) but... 30% is standard. For the price of games? Be mad at Embracer. Be mad at EA. You're free to not like or use Steam but they let the publishers set the price. Their cut is a drop in the bucket. The whole 'cut' debate is just EGS propaganda.
...(which I'll admit I thought was a scam back when I was forced to make an account way back when I had dial up)...
Oh man, I cursed Valve and Steam back then. It effectively made LAN parties of the time impossible since you could no longer share media and needed Internet access to play. Back then, only business had the "fast" Internets while everyone else had 56k baud modems. Hard to do much when your max download speed for the entire connection was 5kb/s.
saying we need to be paying $70+ for games
On which Steam gets $21 or more so in reality they need to sell games for $50.
Epic with a lower cut has the same game prices. Additionally Valve lowered their cut ahead of a launch of Epic Games Store
They lowered the cut for people who didn't need it. Massive publishers selling tons of games. Arguably indie games that only sell a few copies need a larger cut than EA on their latest blockbuster.
There isn't much in the way of scale here. Their bandwidth isn't monitored on a per game basis, and if that was a factor in the cost they'd be basing the cut on the size of your game. Some 1 gb indie game pays the same cut or larger than a 100gb mammoth from EA. Valve is also way more strict with that indie game in getting itself published than they are with the EA game as well.
By default, as per the old rules, Steam takes 30 percent off the top of any revenue that a given title generates on the storefront. In the new system, once a game earns $10 million in sales, Steam will adjust its share to 25 percent. If a game proceeds to hit the $50 million mark, Steam’s share further declines to 20 percent. The total revenue includes any and all income sources for a given game, such as package deals, add-on packs, in-game transactions, and fees applied to trading on the Steam Community Marketplace.
According to Steam’s post on the subject, “Our hope is this change will reward the positive network effects generated by developers of big games, further aligning their interests with Steam and the community.”
In other words, this is meant to encourage big developers not to take their games elsewhere by rewarding them with a bigger slice of the income. $10 million may sound high, but at a $60 price point, that’s around 167,000 sales. As a glance at SteamSpy can tell you, that’s nothing special for a mainstream PC game. Conversely, even a successful indie game may not reach $10 million in revenue over the course of its entire operational lifetime. In practice, the terms of the new revenue system appear to mean that a big “triple-A” mainstream title is being rewarded with a more favorable income split by Steam simply for showing up on the market at all.
BuT vAlVe DoEsN't UsE aNtI cOmPeTiTiVe TaCtIcS!
This is just a description of a standard business model. Most percentage-based revenue or sales systems have lower prices for higher quantities.
It's called the "bulk discount" for a reason.