Valve faces a £656 million lawsuit in the UK for 'overcharging 14 million PC gamers'
Valve faces a £656 million lawsuit in the UK for 'overcharging 14 million PC gamers'
A new lawsuit was filed earlier this month in the UK that alleges Valve, owner of Steam, has been overcharging 14 million PC gamers and abusing its dominant position in the UK.
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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.
WDYM I don't know what I was talking about? I never claimed anything about whether steam or the publishers control prices, I was just making a statement about how no matter who controls the prices it's not in violation of any current UK laws or rights.
I think I just have responded to the wrong comment. My bad.
Well yeah but even if it were hypothetically something steam could control, would that really be grounds for a lawsuit?
No, but anything can be grounds for a lawsuit as long as you have enough money to throw out. And given that they are being sued by the government, all bets are off.
That's my whole point, none of the provided arguments are a good reason for a lawsuit. This has early 2000s "It's those darn videogames" vibes, except this time instead of saying that their doing it to protect our children, they are openly doing it to get the money.
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.
These like to dislike ratios feel manipulated.