Das britische Gerichtsverfahren gegen Valve wegen Steam-Preisen wird eingeleitet

Oh ffs. They better not screw Steam up. It’s great.

The UK here is „digital rights campaigner Vicki Shotbolt [in 2024](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpwwyj6v24xo) on behalf of up to 14 million Steam users across the UK“.

Shit headline.

> The lawsuit – filed at the Competition Appeal Tribunal in London – alleges Valve „forces“ game publishers to sign up to conditions which prevents them from selling their titles earlier or for less on rival platforms.

Kind of weird how there’s a growing overlap between Steam and GOG catalogues then, even with AAA games. Where GOG is lacking is multiplayer games but I suspect that is mostly because developers might be depending on Steam’s architecture and don’t want to develop and maintain multiple backends.

> It claims that as Valve requires users to buy all additional content through Steam, if they’ve bought the initial game through the platform it is essentially „locking in“ users to continue making purchases there.

I mean, that’s just how digital platforms and DLC work since the platform manages the installation and updating of the content. It’s like buying a base game on the PS5 and then complain because you can’t purchase and play the DLC for it on Xbox because Microsoft is having a sale.

This is the firm that sues Sony /Nintendo/Microsoft/epic/apple every few months. They’ve never won and never will.

Stream doesn’t set prices it’s just a store page, and devs and publishers have lots of choices where to sell games. 

30% cut is literally industry standard for every business in the world. 

All they want is for the other company to settle out of court so they get paid. These idiots are in the news every few months doing the same exact thing, just a bunch of conmen. 

If Steam lowered their cut to 1% tomorrow the prices wouldn’t drop a single penny. Even on marketplaces directly owned by the game developers the prices remain the same!

If Ubisoft or anyone else wanted to discourage gamers away from Steam properly they could just sell the game for £10 cheaper on their own site, but that doesn’t happen because this isn’t a real concern.

They’ve come for our porn now they’re coming for our video games.

The point about 30% commission doesn’t really hold water

Most publishers require more than a 30% cut and provide much less value than the steam algorithms and festivals do for game developers.

There are other platforms where there is 0 cut (itch.io) but obviously developers can’t make as much money there.

No one is stopping other store fronts from competing with Steam, they just do it better than anyone does at the moment

I do somewhat agree with the licensing take though, you should be able to download games you own and play them offline forever, only being required to log in to play on steams servers

Source: I make steam games sometimes

is this the one with the AI generated „evidence“ or is that another?

Does Steam just have a flat rate platform fee? If so, and this goes through, they might drop the % of the fee… but then just break out data hosting for the game data and updates and itemise the data uploads/downloads.. so big and network heavy game get secondary bills for hosting. Not sure the law would have anything they could do about that… as Valve would be recouping costs of business?

This is nonsense in my opinion. I buy stuff on the Epic Game store sometimes purely because there are som genuine steals on that launcher, but usually avoid it because Steam provides a much better experience. Epic Games despite its issues and how many make fun of it I see a lot of people use mostly by those who spend their money well. Steam is not a monopoly and never will be.

Yes they charge 30% but that’s not because they hold a monopoly, it’s because their competition is bad. The 12% from Epic Games causes so many games to go on sale and developers do often prefer it, and that holds an advantage, but Steam does not have a monopoly, it just has better UI, better user agreements and better help to developers that puts it on top.

Apple, Sony, Nintendo etc all hold monopolies and charge 30%. Nintendo and Sony there isn’t even a workaround for that isn’t illegal. This is who regulators should be going after, because these guys are truly anti competition, outside of the console itself. Once you own the console you’re locked in, forcing these companies to allow Steam or others to make their own stores or lower their stake would be way more beneficial and productive.

I doubt anything will come of this,as they would have to go after Microsoft and Sony who also take 30% commission

Since no one seems to have commented on the substance of the article:

> The lawsuit – filed at the Competition Appeal Tribunal in London – alleges Valve „forces“ game publishers to sign up to conditions which prevents them from selling their titles earlier or for less on rival platforms.

> It claims that as Valve requires users to buy all additional content through Steam, if they’ve bought the initial game through the platform it is essentially „locking in“ users to continue making purchases there.

Don’t really see the latter part going anywhere as that’s more a distribution problem that’s hardly unique to Steam. The former though, I wasn’t aware of that rule, if true that would explain why this case got the go ahead for trial… That kind of rule in Steam’s market position could absolutely be construed as monopolistic behaviour. Guess we’ll see what comes from this.

Why is everyone talking about stem’s cut when the issue is in their ToS prohibiting games to sell for less on other stores?