Have you ever found yourself in a conversation with people about Valve’s anti-competitive practices? Well, I have. And I defended Valve’s requirement to let customers choose their preferred storefront when buying games, as long as Steam keys were involved. After all, you end up getting to use all of Steam’s features and services when you activate the game on Steam. We can argue about this, but it turns out, that was a red herring!

I’ve spend the better part of today digging through this newest class action lawsuit, again made by Wolfire, against Valve. (This has been going for a while.) I was compiling a response to each of the points in the overview (can’t go through the whole thing, sorry), and there was one thing that stood out after searching for the “Price Veto Provision”. I had heard people make claims to the same effect before, but they were never able to back it up. (And it being conflated with the “Steam Key Price Parity Provision” made it worse.) So here it is:

Valve pressures developers into price parity across different storefronts, even if Steam keys are NOT part of the equation.

We basically see any selling of the game on PC, Steam key or not, as a part of the same shared PC market- so even if you weren’t using Steam keys, we’d just choose to stop selling a game if it was always running discounts of 75% off on one store but 50% off on ours. . . . That stays true, even for DRM-free sales or sales on a store with its own keys like UPLAY or Origin.

When I looked for this quote, I found a podcast episode that I hadn’t listened to (The Hated One, Episode 228 - More evidence of Valve enforcing price parity beyond Steam keys), but that thankfully provided some sources for more related quotes, from earlier lawsuits, such as:

“The biggest takeaway is, don’t disadvantage Steam customers. For instance, it wouldn’t be fair to sell your DLC for $10 on Steam if you’re selling it for $5 or giving it as a reward for $5 donations. We would ask that Steam customers get that lower $5 price as well.”

“If the offer you’re making fundamentally disadvantages someone who bought your game on Steam, it’s probably not a great thing for us or our customers (even if you don’t find a specific rule describing precisely that scenario).”

a Steam account manager, Tom Giardino, reportedly told publisher Wolfire that Steam would delist any games available for sale at a lower price elsewhere, whether or not using Steam keys.

The developer asked, “Regarding the pricing policy, can a non-Steam variant of a game be sold at a different price than on the Steam store page?” Steam’s response was “Selling the game off Steam at a lower price wouldn’t be considered giving Steam users a fair deal.”

These were apparently from 2017 and 2018, so things might’ve changed since then, but it’s reason enough to question Valve. I unfortunately haven’t been able to find much on these other quotes (search engine enshittification, or has this really not been talked about?), and I’m unsure why they’re not also included in this newest lawsuit, but there they are. Hopefully this helps anyone who was misinformed or lacked proof, like myself. Also if anyone has related stories from gamedevs or articles that actually get to the core of the problem, I’d love it if you could share them.

  • fruitcantfly@programming.dev
    7·
    1 day ago

    While there are legitimate grievances in this lawsuit, they do also complain that Valve doesn’t let developers generate as many Steam keys as they want, and then sell them on other stores at lower prices than on Steam (see p. 35, “Valve Distorts Competition Through The Steam Key Price Parity Provision”).

    Keeping in mind that Valve lets developers generate keys for their games for free, this amounts to Wolfire complaining that they cannot offload the costs of hosting/services to Valve, while at the same time minimizing how much Valve earns. And that just sounds ridiculously entitled to me.

    If Wolfire somehow were to win the right to undercut Valve in this manner, then I would not be surprised if Valve responded by charging developers for keys, or otherwise limited the ability of developers to generate keys. Which would have wide reaching consequences for PC gaming

    • copygirl@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      To add to what you’re saying: To be fair, most of the lawsuit I don’t really agree with, but maybe it’s just laying it on thick.

      Part of the argument is them trying to separate the Steam “Store” from the Steam “Gaming Platform”, and in many ways that’s obviously not possible. But they say that because of Steam’s monopolistic-ish position, publishers can’t not be on the “gaming platform”, because it’s where most people want their games, or else they’ll lose out of a large chunk of money. (And without it, these games likely would not be made in the first place.) Thus Steam can force these unfair terms on developers.

      There was also this portion on discounts that was quite revealing:

      1. For example, Valve has set up visibility in its Steam Store to focus on games that are nominally “on sale” to gamers. Knowing that the best way to reach their audience is through discounting, game publishers must artificially inflate their list prices so they have headroom for discounting. But the “sale” price is not consistently available, and therefore some gamers pay an artificially inflated list price for the game. These supracompetitive prices increase Valve’s cut, force gamers to overpay, and prevent publishers from setting the most efficient game prices they could in the first place. Even worse, these supracompetitive prices are transmitted across the broader market by the contractual restraints discussed above.

      They’re admitting to inflating games’ prices, so they can then offer a fake discount that’s closer to the actual price they actually wanted the game to be. And then they complain when Valve doesn’t let them list a game on sale for an extended period of time, just so they can essentially scam people. (Probably, once again, standard in the industry and elsewhere, but I feel like that’s gotta be banned by EU pro-consumer laws.)