Steam owner Valve accused of ripping off 14m UK gamers
Steam owner Valve accused of ripping off 14m UK gamers
Legal claim alleges Steam's market dominance means consumers are paying too much for video games.
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Very interested in how people in the fediverse will react to this news. I know some of us have soft spot for Steam.
I don't know enough about the UK laws and regulation to pick sides as of now.
Valve has been dealing with frivolous lawsuits for stuff like this for a while now, Epic Games just made it very public. I'd put it on par with copyright trolls.
Steam very much makes that 30% worthwhile with the support and features they provide for free. They can't be forced to host games, prices are set by publishers/devs, steam takes 0% of steam key sales.
The price parity is the part that might be argued, but I doubt it will go far. I'm not seeing very good arguments for this being anti-consumer, which is the key point.
I think 'anti competitive' is here framed as 'anti consumer'
This rule ensures that Steam doesn't have to compete with their 30% cut. If competitor was selling a game for 5$ cheaper, many consumers would rather buy it from that competitor instead, potentially forcing Steam to lower their 30% cut.
Now Steam at the moment is very good for us gamers, but it should not be taken for granted and can change in future.
Except it's bogus, Steam doesn't require price parity UNLESS you sell a steam key, so as long as you don't want your customers to have the game on Steam you can sell it for cheaper than on Steam.
I had gifted a game while there was a sale but the person i gifted it to never got on their pc within the next month so i just got refunded and they never got the game. I complained that i still want them to have the game and they essentially just said that i need to now pay full price or suck it. They just didn't seem to understand that this was an issue at all and were just fobbing me off. I guess technically since i didn't lose money it's not the worst thing. But it's massively annoying because we were about to play that game together until we realised they never received it due to this so to me it felt very anti consumer.
That's a fair argument and a decent case, but not one that strongly backs an anti-competition legal action.
True on the legal front but just wanted to share my anectode on how they're not always the best for customers because usually you just see the good stuff when it comes to steam and valve
I don't mind it. The Aussies gave us that two hour refund window through their courts. Valve had this kinda turn into an asset, because people felt that they had purchase protection vs say, nintendo. Where you are kinda out of luck if something isn't fun.
Consumer protections make products even better when the protections are well-crafted. (Some, like the dummy disk on bikes, maybe not so much).
I have more than a soft spot for Valve. Their price recommendations over the years Turkish Lira reached the moon was stellar for the consumers here, and it wasn't just us. There are whole regions of countries that Steam has provided affordable game prices, which would otherwise simply have to resort to piracy completely.
On another side, Steam's many features like lenient refund policies, extensive yet on-point and open profile/library/workshop/community infrastructure add more than 50% of the content and quality on some games, and a complete easy of use for consumers.
Whatever one can say about their specific policies on some topics, I'm going to argue no other for-profit company has ever put this much feature on display without immediate gain from all of them. This is almost on par with many FOSS projects with such development behind them.
However, on this price-matching practice, I believe it is totally not a pro-consumer one. It is not exclusivity, which could completely bankrupt and erase all other competitors long ago if Steam went that way, but it is still somewhat meddling with blocking cheaper options for consumers.
All that said, and with another commenter mentioning that 30% price cut is standard in the industry and a developer selling a game expensive on Steam and having the possibility to sell it cheaper on another wouldn't make sense with the same cuts in place, I don't think this policy completely lacks any merit. Having unreachable presence on Steam and using it as an advertisement platform thanks to its reach while selling the game cheaper elsewhere with the same cuts, or even no-cuts in their own stores, would open a hideous scam many of the well-known companies in the industry would jump on without blinking an eye.
I also have a soft spot for Steam and have likely bankrolled a few employees there on my own, but it's been pretty funny seeing the usual anti-corporate sentiments set aside for Steam. This case looks pretty flimsy, but watching people defend Gabe's billion dollar yacht collection with "everyone needs a hobby" gave me such cultural whiplash here on Lemmy that I might need to go to the hospital. That guy has a true "get out of jail free" card with gamers.
Not a fan of yachts but it beats the usual rich person hobbies of "buy a politician" or "fund a cult/hate-group"
(okay maybe gamers count as a cult, now that I'm thinking about it)
I'm not even passing judgment on Gabe here. We live in a capitalist society and he came up with a pretty solid idea and built a fortune off of it. I do think we should be taxing the fuck out of it well before a person can buy a fleet of yachts, but I don't think Gabe is the type that's actively perpetuating this system either. He seems like a genuinely nice guy who had a talent and a fair bit of luck.
Lemmy is a hell of a lot more anti-capitalist than I am though and it was wild to see that thread.
I'll pass judgement. No one deserves a billion dollars so long as a single human being is going hungry or without shelter. When the rich are getting eaten, I won't pause because Gabe had a cool storefront.