Games

I have more than a soft spot for Valve. Their price recommendations over the years Turkish Lira reached the moon was stellar for the consumers here, and it wasn't just us. There are whole regions of countries that Steam has provided affordable game prices, which would otherwise simply have to resort to piracy completely.

On another side, Steam's many features like lenient refund policies, extensive yet on-point and open profile/library/workshop/community infrastructure add more than 50% of the content and quality on some games, and a complete easy of use for consumers.

Whatever one can say about their specific policies on some topics, I'm going to argue no other for-profit company has ever put this much feature on display without immediate gain from all of them. This is almost on par with many FOSS projects with such development behind them.

However, on this price-matching practice, I believe it is totally not a pro-consumer one. It is not exclusivity, which could completely bankrupt and erase all other competitors long ago if Steam went that way, but it is still somewhat meddling with blocking cheaper options for consumers.

All that said, and with another commenter mentioning that 30% price cut is standard in the industry and a developer selling a game expensive on Steam and having the possibility to sell it cheaper on another wouldn't make sense with the same cuts in place, I don't think this policy completely lacks any merit. Having unreachable presence on Steam and using it as an advertisement platform thanks to its reach while selling the game cheaper elsewhere with the same cuts, or even no-cuts in their own stores, would open a hideous scam many of the well-known companies in the industry would jump on without blinking an eye.

I also have a soft spot for Steam and have likely bankrolled a few employees there on my own, but it's been pretty funny seeing the usual anti-corporate sentiments set aside for Steam. This case looks pretty flimsy, but watching people defend Gabe's billion dollar yacht collection with "everyone needs a hobby" gave me such cultural whiplash here on Lemmy that I might need to go to the hospital. That guy has a true "get out of jail free" card with gamers.

Steam very much makes that 30% worthwhile with the support and features they provide for free. They can't be forced to host games, prices are set by publishers/devs, steam takes 0% of steam key sales.

The price parity is the part that might be argued, but I doubt it will go far. I'm not seeing very good arguments for this being anti-consumer, which is the key point.

I don't mind it. The Aussies gave us that two hour refund window through their courts. Valve had this kinda turn into an asset, because people felt that they had purchase protection vs say, nintendo. Where you are kinda out of luck if something isn't fun.

Consumer protections make products even better when the protections are well-crafted. (Some, like the dummy disk on bikes, maybe not so much).

Valve has been dealing with frivolous lawsuits for stuff like this for a while now, Epic Games just made it very public. I'd put it on par with copyright trolls.