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Valve faces a £656 million lawsuit in the UK for 'overcharging 14 million PC gamers'
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this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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I think this is the key claim:
I had heard about it in the past and if true, I feel that is quite an uncompetitive practice, probably made possible by the dominant position Valve has.
The article also says
Saying “Don’t sell Steam keys off-platform for more than X% less than the game is priced for on Steam” and “Don’t sell your game elsewhere for more than X% less than the game is priced for on Steam“ are very different things. Steam openly does the former; I’ve never heard a reputable report of them doing the latter. The Wolfire lawsuit is explicitly about the former practice, for example.
The press release for this lawsuit reads like it’s about the latter, but I suspect that’s solely for optics. I reviewed the website dedicated to the lawsuit (steamyouoweus.co.uk) and thought they might have some more concrete evidence - nope, nothing. Under the first question in FAQs they have a link to their key documents, but the documents are “coming soon.”
Until they actually substantiate their claim, this lawsuit is just noise.
The latter point is a claim in the Wolfire case, and is supposedly a term in the Steam Distribution Agreement which all publishers sign. It's behind an NDA, though.
There is indirect evidence of this in the following: if Steam's cut is 30%, and Epic's is 12%, and a publisher's own site has no platform fee... Why don't we see gradiated pricing across these different services?
It seems like there must be some policy or threat of consequences that keeps a game's price consistent.
I'm open to the idea steam puts restrictions on publishers. But the obvious answer would be that the publisher is taking the extra profit for themselves instead
They certainly do pocket the difference. But the point is the behavior we see is that what we would see if Steam wasn't enforcing uniform pricing. Publishers would pick some list price on other platforms / their own sites that undercuts Steam and also gives higher margin for themselves.
E.g. a $60 game on Steam with a 30% cut nets you ~$42. If you list the game on for $50 on Epic with a 12% cut, you net $44. The price differential works in favor of the consumer and publisher, and would convince more people to buy on the high-margin platform. A greedy publisher isn't going to keep the $60 price tag, because that just pushes consumers to buy on Steam (which has the most features).