this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
229 points (75.4% liked)
Games
16729 readers
570 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's still the market standard for digital stores, and if steam was greedy they could absolutely charge more with their market dominance.
For comparison audible has audiobook market dominance, and takes a 75% cut. If you agree to make your audiobook audible exclusive, they'll "only" take 60% of the profit, and many audiobook authors take that deal because getting an extra 15% cut on audible is worth more than the sales from other audiobook stores.
Audible is what you get when a greedy corporation has market dominance, in comparison Steam's cuts are very tame for all the benefits they give.
Or maybe they were as greedy as they could be without risking another company coming and taking their place, they also protected themselves against that by including a clause that prevents selling games cheaper on other stores so even if someone comes and tries to compete the devs are stuck because they need to choose if losing access to Steam's monopoly is worth it to be able to sell their game cheaper to end up with the same amount per copy in their pockets.
Is that even a real thing? Other stores sell games cheaper all the time. Even when buying steam games it's usually cheapest to buy the steam key from another store, because someone else will have it on sale for cheaper.
It's part of their contract, Wolfire Games is suing them for anti competitive practices.
That lawsuit is from 2021, and was thrown out later that year for failing to meet "the most basic requirements of an antitrust case,"
There's a new lawsuit, Gabe even has to show up in person.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/gabe-newell-ordered-to-make-in-person-deposition-for-valve-v-wolfire-games-lawsuit
https://casetext.com/case/wolfire-games-llc-v-valve-corp-7
It was approved not long after the first one was dismissed, but (surprise surprise) Valve fans like to pretend everything stopped in 2021.