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Debunking the grey market beyond Steam
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> If I don’t like what Comcast charges I don’t do a class action lawsuit. That's a poor example, because in many markets, Comcast (or another cable provider) is the only option, or there's only one other option with much lower top-end speeds (e.g. DSL). So a class-action against Comcast _may_ be a reasonable idea, since they're an actual monopoly in many markets. The games industry is different. Steam _does_ have a commanding share of the market, but there's no real lock-in there, a developer can choose to not publish there and succeed. Minecraft, famously, never released on Steam, and it has been wildly successful. Likewise for Blizzard games, like Starcraft and World of Warcraft. Maybe a better comparison is grocery store chains? [Walmart has something like 60% market share in the US](https://www.foodindustry.com/articles/top-10-grocers-in-the-united-states-2019/), yet I have successfully been able to completely avoid shopping there.It’s maybe a poor example, but it is what the plaintiff is alleging, so I think it is a good analogy
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Valve will never IPO, why would they? They own a money printing machine that doesn’t need any more capital. They will print money until the heat death of the universe if we let it. I’ve never seen a conceivable scenario where anything else can happen unless Valve does something mental on purpose. Some people here raised they concern that they don’t value Valve input to merit 30% cut and would take lower price if it meant it didn’t have features they don’t use. What’s happening now means there’s no real free market or competition.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).
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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.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.
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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.
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You started in with being extremely rude so I'm just gonna move to ignoring your other commentary now. Shocking I know.
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PC gamers are stuck because Steam is a self-perpetuating monopoly. If your entire library is on Steam, and Steam has almost all of the games you’ll just keep on buying there for convenience. Alan Wake 2 wasn’t profitable until EGS exclusivity expired because they’d rather wait than buy this gem of a game on a different platform that gives away games like candy btw. Even if you think that Valve are just the best, aren’t you worried that having one good option is being one good option away from having no good options?> 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.
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> 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.*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?
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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 ValveWhat? 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.
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Nobody said anything about Steam keys. They don't let you sell games at lower prices, period. > Also, there is no mention of said policy in either the OP article, nor the separate article about the lawsuit it links to. Are you being serious, right now? The source isn't 2 clicks away so therefore it doesn't exist? Lawsuits are literally public knowledge. You should inform yourself about a topic before you get into a conversation about it. [Here.](https://www.classaction.org/media/wolfire-games-llc-et-al-v-valve-corporation.pdf) Perhaps you can stop defending the billion dollar company now.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.
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> Only if you are selling a steam key elsewhere No. That's not true. You're spreading misinformation. Read the fucking lawsuit.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.
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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?
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The wolfire games lawsuit is so damn cringe. No company is your friend, but there's a reason Steam is number 1. The reinvestment in the platform and breadth of features steam has is unrivaled. Epic has been trying for nearly a decade now and their store doesn't even have 1/4 the features of steam. I love GoG though. For me they offer something steam can't, installers for my games.>there's a reason Steam is number 1 Monopoly, and Stockholmed G*mers
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> 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.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.
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It is true. Valve does not enforce price parity for non Steam keys. Here is an example where the dev says that they are offering a better price on EGS because of the better cut: https://twitter.com/HeardOfTheStory/status/1700066610302603405 https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/heard-of-the-story-ff3758 https://store.steampowered.com/app/1881940/Heard_of_the_Story/ Pretty clear example of the same game having a lower base price on Epic than on Steam. Wolfire *claiming* Valve does this is something different from Valve actually doing it, and that's where the dispute lies. According to Valve, Wolfire's explanation of the price parity policy is incorrect. Here's the policy itself: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys#3 > You should use Steam Keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam. **It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers. ** The policy is pretty leanient regarding the "worse deal" aspect. You're allowed to have a sale on one platform but not on Steam, as long as you offer "something similar" at a different moment to Steam users too. > It's OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time. Even if you violate this policy, Valve will still sell your game, they may just stop providing you with Steam keys to sell. I don't see Wolfire winning this tbh.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.
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> Despite facing increased competition in the space, not least from the Epic Games Store, Valve's platform is synonymous with PC gaming. The service is estimated to have made $10.8 billion in revenue during 2024, a new record for the Half-Life giant. Since it entered the PC distribution space back in 2018, the rival Epic Games Store has been making headway – and $1.09 billion last year – but Steam is still undeniably dominant within the space. > Valve earns a large part of its money from taking a 20-30% cut of sales revenue from developers and publishers. Despite other storefronts opening with lower overheads, Steam has stuck with taking this slice of sales revenue, and in doing so, it has been argued that Valve is unfairly taking a decent chunk of the profits of developers and publishers. > This might change, depending on how an ongoing [class-action lawsuit initiated by Wolfire Games](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/wolfire-and-dark-catts-antitrust-lawsuit-against-valve-granted-class-action-status) goes, but for the time being, Valve is making money hand over fist selling games on Steam. The platform boasts over 132 million users, so it's perfectly reasonable that developers and publishers feel they have to use Steam – and give away a slice of their revenue – in order to reach the largest audience possible.Glad to see lawsuits against Valve. I love them as a company and I buy my games on Steam first, (GOG is my second choice)... but we need their monopoly reigned in. If not by a viable competitor than by making Valve beholden to their clients and not vice versa.
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>there's a reason Steam is number 1 Monopoly, and Stockholmed G*mers
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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.
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If there weren't enough people put off by Origin and uPlay to not install them or use them to buy games, Origin and uPlay would still exist. Steam didn't kill them, all it did was exist and be a better platform that people actually wanted to use. If there weren't enough people put off by the Epic Games Store, the EGS wouldn't still be paying developers to put their shit on the store. Steam hasn't killed it, and isn't even *attempting* to kill it. It's just existing and being a better platform that people actually want to use. If EGS can't compete with Steam while *giving shit away for free*, that's not a "Steam monopoly" it's an indicator of how dogshit the opinion of Epic as a corporation and storefront is. Origin failed because nobody wanted it. uPlay failed because nobody wanted it. The perks (being able to buy exclusives) weren't worth the downsides (literally just making another account and installing another program on your computer). I think that's beautiful. I hope it happens to Epic next. Steam's existence as an IPO/enshittification-proof platform has prevented the PC gaming storefront market from going the way of Netflix. Remember that? We had cable channels, pay-per-views, piracy, and DVDs/blu-rays as the only way to watch movies. Then a Blockbuster-over-mail company started getting licenses to let you pay to watch movies at home with one subscription, which was a massive success. Then every other IP holder went "hey wait, why are we paying Netflix when we could just eat the whole pie ourselves" and now we have Netflix Disney+ Max Peacock AppleTV+ Amazon Prime Video Fandango Paramount+ AMC+ Philo Hulu Tubi Fubo Dippy Weeno Poob all trying to be the new Netflix. And because Netflix itself is a shareholder-value-driven company, it's putting ads in its paid product and jacking up prices and paying for exclusivity.
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You’re still hung up that there’s consensus on anarchism and libertarianism being so generic terms that they’re near synonymous? I mean, if you made some arguments to the contrary then this comment would carry some weight. Other than that, please see comment you responded to again, it’s applicable to you too.What the fuck are you talking about? It's well known history that the right wing in the United States saw how successful the word was in leftist movements and aped it as their own word. If that's the kind of research you do you make people dumber. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism Libertarianism in the United States (1943 - 1980s) H. L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock were the first prominent figures in the United States to describe themselves as libertarian as synonym for liberal. They believed that Franklin D. Roosevelt had co-opted the word liberal for his New Deal policies which they opposed and used libertarian to signify their allegiance to classical liberalism, individualism and limited government.[166] LITERALLY YOU WERE INSULTING PEOPLE FOR NOT READING WIKIPEDIA
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> Despite facing increased competition in the space, not least from the Epic Games Store, Valve's platform is synonymous with PC gaming. The service is estimated to have made $10.8 billion in revenue during 2024, a new record for the Half-Life giant. Since it entered the PC distribution space back in 2018, the rival Epic Games Store has been making headway – and $1.09 billion last year – but Steam is still undeniably dominant within the space. > Valve earns a large part of its money from taking a 20-30% cut of sales revenue from developers and publishers. Despite other storefronts opening with lower overheads, Steam has stuck with taking this slice of sales revenue, and in doing so, it has been argued that Valve is unfairly taking a decent chunk of the profits of developers and publishers. > This might change, depending on how an ongoing [class-action lawsuit initiated by Wolfire Games](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/wolfire-and-dark-catts-antitrust-lawsuit-against-valve-granted-class-action-status) goes, but for the time being, Valve is making money hand over fist selling games on Steam. The platform boasts over 132 million users, so it's perfectly reasonable that developers and publishers feel they have to use Steam – and give away a slice of their revenue – in order to reach the largest audience possible.
