My extremely Baby’s First Monopoly take is that whatever your feelings about specific aspects of Steam’s service, or Valve in general, no individual company should exert this much power over the fortunes and overall culture of an artform. As such, I welcome efforts such as Wolfire’s to challenge Valve and Steam, even if I may not agree with the detail of the suit in question.

What a stupid take. Valve isn’t doing anything anti competitive, they just provide an objectively better service which is why everyone uses it. Anyone can put their game up on Steam, Gog, Epic, Uplay, and Origin at the same time. Valve doesn’t own the space, and tbh we’re probably getting the best deal we can get with them being the top dog, cuz you know Microsoft and the like would never treat us that well.

The closest thing I can think of wrt competitive rules is their price parity rule, where if you sell your steam keys (note that. not epic or uplay, just steam.) yourself, the price can’t be noticeably lower (or a sale can’t happen) without a comparable discount/sale on Steam within a reasonable timeframe.

The closest thing I can think of wrt competitive rules is their price parity rule, where if you sell your steam keys (note that. not epic or uplay, just steam.) yourself, the price can’t be noticeably lower (or a sale can’t happen) without a comparable discount/sale on Steam within a reasonable timeframe.

That’s pretty anti-competitive, unless I’m misunderstanding it.

If Epic takes a smaller cut, a developer might be willing to sell it at a lower price than on Steam. But if Steam says that the sale on Steam needs to be the same, then that means the developer can’t put out the same sale on Steam (since Steam takes a bigger cut).

So instead, they’d have to make the sale price equal to the price they’d be willing to accept after taking Steam’s cut into consideration…which would be higher than the price they’d be willing to sell for on Epic.

That’s bad for developers AND consumers.

it’s only applicable if you sell steam keys.

We should be seeing lower All-Time-Lows off of Steam than on Steam then, right?

Do we regularly see that?

Why should we? Why should publisher charge less when they can just charge the same amount and make more money?

If you look back in history:

• EA removed their Games from Steam and only sold them on their own Storefront (essentially 0% fee) for the same price.
• the price on digital vs physical stores stayed the same even though it’s way cheaper to sell digital