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mabeledo

@ mabeledo @lemmy.world

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  • Valve antitrust lawsuit reportedly reveals lengths Steam owner is willing to go to prevent cheaper prices elsewhere

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  • They are. Nowhere it says that a publisher cannot sell their games outside Steam at a different price. Valve employees then threatened Ubisoft with delisting the game if they did.

    In any case, none of the competing stores have dislodged Steam from its role as the most important sales channel for PC games, and Valve employee testimony and corporate records disclosed in the case illustrate the aggressive ways the company has interacted with the developers that rely on it. Emails indicate Valve employees once threatened to delist all editions of Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege “by end of day tomorrow” after they learned the publisher was marketing a separate $15 “starter pack” exclusively on its in-house Uplay store.

    From the Bloomberg article: https://archive.ph/YvHxF

  • Valve antitrust lawsuit reportedly reveals lengths Steam owner is willing to go to prevent cheaper prices elsewhere

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  • Stop acting like Valve isn’t the best we could ask for out of all the alternatives.

    I'm going to stop right here, because this is absolute nonsense.

    There are plenty of big tech companies out there that are the "best" at what they do, and still shouldn't be allowed to do shady and illegal stuff. Simple as that.

    If we are going to forgive this behaviour just because "people want games", then I'm sorry to say, but this society might be more fucked up than I thought. Probably beyond salvation.

    Panen et circenses with a side of billionaire cock.

  • Valve antitrust lawsuit reportedly reveals lengths Steam owner is willing to go to prevent cheaper prices elsewhere

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  • From my previous response: https://archive.ph/YvHxF

    I understand that you refuse to read sources, but the comments you are responding to? That's a new low.

    Why would Steam put your game on their site for free, giving it exposure to potential buyers, just for the buyers to turn around and buy it cheaper somewhere else?

    Because it's not their fucking product.

    If I go to, say, Amazon, because I want to buy a Samsung TV, and then I go to the Samsung website and find that the same TV at MSRP is cheaper, should Amazon be allowed to force Samsung to raise their prices so they cannot compete?

    The answer is no. It's called abuse of market dominance and is codified in the Sherman Antitrust Act.

    "But hurr durr Steam is better I love GabeN"

    Who. The. Fuck. Cares. Being better doesn't mean that you get to bully your suppliers and customers. That's just insane and such a childish argument.

  • Valve antitrust lawsuit reportedly reveals lengths Steam owner is willing to go to prevent cheaper prices elsewhere

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  • Steam only takes a share on sold copies. Having YOUR game on THEIR site while selling it cheaper on your OWN site would effectively be leeching free exposure off of Steams front page. How is it not reasonable for Steam to not want that?

    Seems that Steam has reach and power that most publishers cannot afford to ignore, whereas in an earlier comment you said that "nobody forces developers to publish their games in Steam". Turns out, they kind of have to after all.

    The question here is, why should Valve be allowed to set the prices of software they didn't create?

    According to you, a developer who gets a better deal in, say, the Epic Store, and thus publishes their game at a lower price there, should be delisted from Steam. Do you really think that's reasonable? Doesn't that sound like an abusive business practice?

  • Valve antitrust lawsuit reportedly reveals lengths Steam owner is willing to go to prevent cheaper prices elsewhere

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  • That "hat" bought outside of Steam, cannot be used by a player in Steam.

    but if ubisoft were allowed to set prices like that it would almost certainly count as anticompetitive practices, right?

    Are you really saying that Valve should be allowed to set the prices of Ubisoft products, but Ubisoft shouldn't be allowed to price their own products? What?

    Why stop there, then? Why wouldn't Steam go after, say, Playstation? Someone gets an exclusive DLC for Playstation that some players can "see" during games, what do we do in that case?

  • Valve antitrust lawsuit reportedly reveals lengths Steam owner is willing to go to prevent cheaper prices elsewhere

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  • See, this is the reason why it is important to read the fucking article.

    A few years later, Rosen started his own game distribution program, allowing customers to pay whatever they wanted for a collection of indie games called Humble Bundle. The program, which Rosen ran with his brother, took only a 5% cut but, he says, was still turning a profit. Rosen started looking more closely at Valve in 2018, when it implemented a tiered system that gave rate reductions to large game makers, angering indie developers who were stuck paying the higher rates. Rosen reached out to the company again, this time to see how it would react to him selling Overgrowth, another Wolfire game, at a discount on Humble Bundle’s store. “They replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere,” Rosen wrote in a May 2021 blog post (https://www.wolfire.com/blog/2021/05/Regarding-the-Valve-class-action/) explaining why Wolfire decided to sue Valve.

    Emails indicate Valve employees once threatened to delist all editions of Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege “by end of day tomorrow” after they learned the publisher was marketing a separate $15 “starter pack” exclusively on its in-house Uplay store. In 2017, Kassidy Gerber, who works in business development at Valve, wrote to Warner Bros. executives that preorders for its new Middle-earth: Shadow of War game had been deleted from Steam because the price was “significantly higher than what was available at other retailers for the same version of the game.”

    Honestly, I'm astonished at the near cultist behaviour I'm seeing here. This is a multibillion operation in a dominant market position, pulling the rug on publishers because of an internal policy that requires "material parity" with prices on Steam, which, given that they get 30% of the sale price, forces higher prices everywhere else where they don't take such an outrageous cut.

    I really hope you folks have the same sympathy for your landlords.

  • Valve antitrust lawsuit reportedly reveals lengths Steam owner is willing to go to prevent cheaper prices elsewhere

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  • Those requirements being that they cannot price the product lower outside of Steam, even if the specific version of the software doesn’t use Steam at all.

    And by the way, this wasn’t on a contract, it’s a non written policy uncovered on email correspondence between Valve and Ubisoft.

    Maybe you should try reading the article for real this time.

  • Valve antitrust lawsuit reportedly reveals lengths Steam owner is willing to go to prevent cheaper prices elsewhere

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  • I hope that, at some point, you get to appreciate the irony of not wanting to accept some cookies because you don’t want to “pay with your privacy”, while you ardently defend Steam, a platform that doesn’t even tell you what they do with your data or who are they selling ads to.

    Here’s the archived version from Bloomberg: https://archive.ph/YvHxF

  • Valve antitrust lawsuit reportedly reveals lengths Steam owner is willing to go to prevent cheaper prices elsewhere

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  • Do yourself a favor and read the article before commenting on it.

  • Valve antitrust lawsuit reportedly reveals lengths Steam owner is willing to go to prevent cheaper prices elsewhere

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  • Any DLC bought outside of Steam, doesn’t work with a Steam game.

    A DLC bought in UPlay, might in some way be used by a third party on a crossplay online game, e.g. a map which both the buyer and their friend on Steam can access to, if the buyer creates a game in such map and invites their friend.

    And Steam doesn’t take a cut of such sale and cannot set the price, because it wasn’t sold on Steam. Plain and simple.

  • Valve antitrust lawsuit reportedly reveals lengths Steam owner is willing to go to prevent cheaper prices elsewhere

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  • They can.

    I’m not sure where your questions are leading to. The Steam version either uses the Steam network SDK or UPlay, I don’t know which one. The standalone version uses UPlay alone.

    This is nothing new. Crossplay is a thing. Baldur’s Gate 3 allows for crossplay between XBox, PlayStation, and PC, yet it sells on Steam too. But I’m 100% sure the PlayStation version does not use the Steam network.

  • Valve antitrust lawsuit reportedly reveals lengths Steam owner is willing to go to prevent cheaper prices elsewhere

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  • I’m saying that the non Steam version, which is the one the article mentions, has no Steam features, and proof of it is that anyone with Uplay can play online.

  • Valve antitrust lawsuit reportedly reveals lengths Steam owner is willing to go to prevent cheaper prices elsewhere

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  • otherwise there'd be a need to have separated server infra for steam and non-steam users.

    That’s exactly how it works. There are companies whose focus is precisely that, e.g. EdgeGap, but UbiSoft have their own infrastructure.

    Why did you think you need an Uplay account to play UbiSoft titles?

  • Valve antitrust lawsuit reportedly reveals lengths Steam owner is willing to go to prevent cheaper prices elsewhere

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  • “I will opine on something I refuse to learn anything about, as it is my god given right”.

    Sounds about right.

  • Valve antitrust lawsuit reportedly reveals lengths Steam owner is willing to go to prevent cheaper prices elsewhere

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  • Calling Amazon just a “seller” is an understatement. It’s like saying that the Google Play store is just an hosting platform. Amazon provides ad and marketing services, hosting, support, and more importantly, logistics.

    Games sold outside of Steam have no access to Steam features, in the same sense that products sold outside of Amazon aren’t promoted and delivered by Amazon.

  • Valve antitrust lawsuit reportedly reveals lengths Steam owner is willing to go to prevent cheaper prices elsewhere

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  • Not true. Games bought outside of Steam have no access to most Steam features outside of local based ones, e.g. Steam Input, Remote Play.

  • Valve antitrust lawsuit reportedly reveals lengths Steam owner is willing to go to prevent cheaper prices elsewhere

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  • Giving “if we tax billionaires they will leave!” vibes.

  • Valve antitrust lawsuit reportedly reveals lengths Steam owner is willing to go to prevent cheaper prices elsewhere

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  • Versions bought outside Steam have no access to Steam services. The closest you can get is manually adding the game to Steam, and it would account for the hours spent in it and let you use Steam Input, which is completely local.

    But in many cases, it is the same product because things like online gaming don’t go through Steam servers other than perhaps serving the Steam friend list, e.g. BG3 online coop works across GOG, Steam, and consoles, and obviously the servers aren’t hosted by Steam.

  • Valve antitrust lawsuit reportedly reveals lengths Steam owner is willing to go to prevent cheaper prices elsewhere

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  • Yes, let’s do that too.