CDPR judges that selling on Steam is enough of a boost that it's worth the cost. Riot (for example) doesn't. If you think every game company or indie studio feels *mandated* to use Steam, that's a hugely consolebrained take. Nintendo has a monopoly. Want your game on Switch? Follow Nintendo's terms and list on Nintendo's store. Apple has a monopoly, challenged recently. Want your app on iPhone? Follow Apple's terms and list on Apple's store. Want your game on Windows PC? Upload an EXE somewhere. Sell a disc. Run your own launcher. Or license out to Steam/Epic/whoever. The only reason you get more sales on Steam is because the PC gaming userbase overwhelmingly prefers Steam. Hell, I play Guild Wars 2, a 12 year old MMO that "launched" on Steam a couple years ago. You can still buy and play that game without any third parties getting involved at all, and always could. It doesn't have any Steam achievements, doesn't benefit from any Steam features, and has a decade old community in spaces other than Steam ones. ArenaNet decided that exposure via Steam recommendations was worth losing $x/player to list on Steam.

> CDPR judges that selling on Steam is enough of a boost that it's worth the cost. I literally just explained this in the comment you just replied to. > Want your game on Windows PC? Upload an EXE somewhere. Sell a disc. Run your own launcher. Or license out to Steam/Epic/whoever. You can upload it wherever you want and create whatever launcher you want, you will be unsuccessful. Fucking EA did this for 8 years, failed, and went back to Steam. As did Ubisoft. You simply won't be successful without Steam. *That's what a monopoly is.*

I know you didn't google anything or you would have said "nothing I found substantiates your point" instead of "these specific two articles don't say what you said". But let's assume you're not lying and you did look up the situation. What's your claim then? That Steam has no price veto policy or that they don't abuse it? Because one is wrong and the other is *incredibly* naive. Talk about taking unfounded claims at face value. Also, what do you keep bringing up Steam Keys? That has nothing to do with anything. Focus.

No, it's not. That's an entirely different policy that you keep bringing up for no reason. That policy is also anti-consumer bullshit but I digress. What I'm referring to is the following shady wording: > Initial pricing as well as proposed pricing adjustments will be reviewed by Valve

You started in with being extremely rude so I'm just gonna move to ignoring your other commentary now. Shocking I know.

You don't know shit. My search turned up nothing more concrete than your own apeing of the plaintiff's claims as though those were evidence, so I didn't bother. Meanwhile, the subject at hand quite literally revolves around Steam and Steam-Keys. We don't even have to get into third-party distribution *without* Steam-Keys to disprove your argument, although that market also remains alive and well as ever. The rest was just me matching your energy, but I'm not exaggerating when I say I should have just blocked your belligerent ass a while ago. You can't be bothered to prove your own points, yet keep pretending to be the most "mature" and "focused" person here. It's painful to watch the trolling this far off the rails.

It’s maybe a poor example, but it is what the plaintiff is alleging, so I think it is a good analogy

Valve will never IPO, yes! I don't care *why*. Platforms that IPO universally get worse and worse as they wring every drop of shareholder value from their users to feed the infinite growth machine. Platforms that have shareholders (which includes Epic and CDPR's GOG) have a primary motive of "being more profitable than last year". If, let's say, Epic made ten billion dollars in profit last year but *also* made ten billion dollars in profit in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023, it'd be a *failed company*. I'll happily take the only company in the PC gaming space that's content with *one* money printer over every other option that's always thinking about how to make a second one, or reduce the ink costs, or blah blah blah. It's just a happy coincidence that in the PC gaming space (unlike pretty much every other space), the shareholder-free thing is *also* the most popular, and best thing. I'd use the worse less-popular thing if that thing were the only thing free from growth capitalism. If a game dev doesn't value their presence on the Steam store higher than the cost of Steam's service, they don't list on Steam. Simple as. It's just that a lot of dev studios consider "visible on the Steam store" to be very valuable indeed. That's what they're paying for, not the stuff about Steam that benefits the user (client features like Input, Workshop, Cloud, Community, etc).

Your search turned up nothing because you searched for nothing. Steam Keys are irrelevant here, you only keep bringing them up to derail the discussion to a greyer area where you can better defend your beloved corporate overlord. This was always about the price veto policy. Very telling how you flat out refuse to even address anything regarding that topic. Grow up.

Bye now.

Sorry that my mean words hurt you more than Valve abusing you.

> Alan Wake 2 wasn’t profitable until EGS exclusivity expired Well yeah, because EGS sucks. If you look at Steam's competitors, none of them are really developing their feature set. So even if customers were dissatisfied w/ Steam, who is actively trying to earn their business? > aren’t you worried that having one good option is being one good option away from having no good options? Sure, I'd _love_ it if another platform stepped up to actually compete w/ Steam. My expectations are fairly low: it needs to work well on Linux. Heroic largely resolves that for EGS and GOG, but I'm not particularly interested in supporting a platform that only works because some community project has done the work for them. So if GOG supported Galaxy on Linux as a first class citizen, I'd probably still use Heroic, but I'd buy a _lot_ more games from them. But as it stands, GOG is one update away from blocking access to my games through a launcher, and dealing w/ WINE/Proton directly is a pain. EGS is so far away from what I care about that I don't think they could ever earn my business, but who knows, maybe they'll surprise me. But the fact that we're even _having_ this discussion is a testament to Steam's success. Heroic probably wouldn't be a thing w/o Valve's investment into Proton/WINE, so GOG/EGS wouldn't even be a consideration for me at all. But since that work _was_ done, I now have more options. I've played some GOG and EGS games through Heroic, so it's not even theoretical, they are realistic alternatives. It's important to note that at every turn, Valve has earned my trust. When games are pulled from their store, owners of those games still have access (e.g. I bought Rocket League on Steam, and when they went EGS exclusive, I _still_ had the old version of the game). They have a solid refund policy, and they have gone out of their way to make things more pleasant for their customers. Even if they didn't have a dominant market position, I'd probably _still_ choose them just based on the user experience. So yeah, not having a realistic alternative isn't great, but I don't think it's because of anything nefarious Valve has done, but instead lack of interest by their competitors.

Ah yes. Massively unsuccessful games like... *checks notes* League of Legends. World of Warcraft. Fortnite: Battle Royale. The magic part of the PC is that if your independently distributed game *does* fail, you can still, after the fact, decide to slap it on someone's storefront in a desperate attempt for eyeballs - see Overwatch 2. Why *not* double dip? It only costs you hypothetical money you haven't made yet. Am I supposed to be *sad* that E fucking A failed to install their shareholder value store on my computer?

What? That wording isn't even relevant to the case. That's just Valve saying they will do a review of the price changes *on Steam*. They set out no specific requirements (other than a minimum price of $0.99, but will try to catch errors based on their pricing recommendations. It's similar to how Valve reviews new store pages and provides recommendations to devs on how to improve them. They do have rules against games set up for card farming scams, but that makes sense. Wolfire's case is about how Valve as an extremely large player is impossible to go around, so game devs have no choice but to accept their 30% fee if they want to reach most of the market out there. Valve then uses these fees to entrench this supposed monopoly position (Wolfire specifically cites the acquisition of WON back in the day, which Valve eventually shut down and merged with Steam). Wolfire argues that a fair price is much lower than 30%, and that Valve should lower the fee and therefore have less funds to fight their competitors, creating a more competitive environment.

As far as I can tell, the lawsuit alleges that steam threatened pulling their (wolfire games) steam sales if they sold elsewhere for cheaper. Which would be bad if true. However, this does not appear to be anywhere in steam's actual seller agreement. The only clause in that agreement is about steam keys being sold for cheaper, which is why the other poster was focusing on that. That allegation seems to be that steam in practice is threatening things that are outside of the contract itself.

Until the case is concluded, all we have to go on is what Wolfire says. And considering who the head of that developer is, I would not take their word for anything.

> Am I supposed to be *sad* that E fucking A failed to install their shareholder value store on my computer? No, you're just supposed to recognize _why_ it failed.

>there's a reason Steam is number 1 Monopoly, and Stockholmed G*mers

For me, it failed because I wasn't willing to install some shareholder-driven company's storefront app on my computer just to play Mass Effect 3, so I pirated Mass Effect 3. Then I got to watch it fail because it turns out I wasn't the only one willing to skip/pirate games because they came with Origin attached to them. Epic's exclusives are the exact same. I get my PC games from four sources. Steam, GOG's *website*, Itch's website, standalone launchers (I'd probably be okay with a "store" of games as small as the Riot launcher, but I don't use that because I don't install rootkit anticheat), and piracy. Launcherless Itch and GOG have convenience parity with piracy with the added benefit of the devs getting paid (and the ease of acquiring updates), and I'll usually use them over Steam if available. Itch could easily get bought by a corp like Humble did and CDPR is already a shareholder value company, but they sell DRM-free products that I can use even after the stores die / sell out. A recent launch I paid for and didn't use Steam for is "The Bazaar" - it has a standalone launcher. The game went pay to win so I uninstalled it, but its lack of presence on Steam didn't keep me from playing it. I'll use stuff other than Steam no problem. But I'll always cheer when a platform owned and operated by a shareholder backed company dies in favor of one that isn't. My experience in the hobby space of PC gaming is better when there aren't exclusives locked on EA Origin or UPlay or Microsoft UWP store or Epic, because I might want to play those games without installing a stock-ticker company's adware on my computer. Having the space "capitalism free" is unrealistic, unless we're talking "pirate everything". I'll settle for "profit driven" over "YOY growth driven" leaders in the space any day of the week. Now, if Steam's position as the best distributor/launcher platform is a de facto "monopoly", what's the solution to that? Anecdotally I know plenty of people that play non-Steam games while not playing any Epic games. Epic tries to fight Steam by directly paying developers to *not* publish on Steam, and also effectively guaranteeing studios a financial success by cutting a deal to put their game up for "free" on the Epic storefront. Plenty of games have been "Free" on Epic while full price on Steam. Valve tries to fight Epic by... Acting like Epic doesn't exist. They don't chase exclusives or get into a price war with Epic. Steam is the most popular platform for PC game releases. A subset of users will not consider ever using other platforms. If we accept this as the definition of "monopoly" the way we'd say Windows has a monopoly on x64 PCs, how would changing the revenue split for devs (which appears to be the issue this company's suing Valve over) alleviate this "monopoly"? Sounds to me like forcing Steam to explicitly allow "the game is more expensive on Steam" tactics would just make Steam *even more* of a no-brainer for devs over stuff like Epic or their own platform. You could say that paying the devs/studios a better cut is the point, and I'd see the validity in the argument. But it's completely unrelated to whether or not Valve operates as a monopoly.

So can developers just 'create' steam keys out of thin air that can be used to activate their game on steam? Does Valve get paid when the keys are created or activated? Or not at all? Seems fair maybe if it's using all of Steams infrastructure, considering developers can distribute the game themselves without steam keys.