Steam

Oh wow, lots to unpack here. Bear with me.

Wolfire v valve was thrown out right? So they didn’t successfully prove valve were doing anything anti competition.

AFAIK still ongoing, looks like most recent filings were on 06/12.

To my knowledge the price parity is only on steam keys sold elsewhere not for you selling a game on another storefront, happy to be shown evidence that isn’t the case.

The actual terms of the Steam Distribution Agreement are behind an NDA so we can't publicly know for sure, but Wolfire alleges that it applies to non-key sales (see points 204, 205, 207 of the Wolfire v. Valve filing)

In terms of what is a “fair deal” we could quibble about the 30% but that’s literally the only thing up for discussion right? And at the moment that’s an “industry standard” ...

Bit of a chicken and egg situation. Is Steam charging 30% because that's standard, or is the 30% standard because Steam charges it? Epic's attempt at 12% at the very least indicates the "industry standard" is much higher than it has to be, which is a good indicator of non-competitive behavior.

There is some slop in this argument because obviously the quality of platforms could influence this; but that is a bit moot due to the price policy preventing competitive pricing (see below).

... so by all means lower it if they can, I’m all for savings as a consumer, but not at the expense of the service they provide.

For example if Valve personally came to me and said “you can either have games 10% cheaper but we would have to retire X features” I would happily keep the features and forgo the discount.

That's great for you, but I'm sure we could find plenty of consumers who would make that trade. The choice should be available to them.

Also being realistic if Valve were to drop their cut to 20% game prices wouldn’t change, the publishers would just pocket the difference, as we have seen with Epic.

You can't point to current publisher behavior on EGS, because their behavior at present is influenced by Valve's price policy (called the "Platform Most Favored Nation" or "PMFN" clause in the court filing) which is the foundation of the anti-competitive case against Valve.

Re: concerns about publishers eating the difference. An ideal greedy publisher would drop the price on Epic by some amount in the middle—cheap enough to convince consumers to buy on Epic instead of Steam (since it yields more revenue to them) without making it too cheap that the difference in profit between a sale on Epic and a sale on Steam goes to 0.

This is how competition between platforms should work. It drives down the cost by some amount, but the publisher isn't going to pass up the chance to profit where they can.

Again most other mainstream platforms take 30% and while I do think they could ALL trim that down a bit, I don’t see why Valve should be the first one to cut back when they offer the most bang for buck, get Sony and MS to reduce their cut and start offering more basic features, then once the competition is ACTUALLY competing we can turn our eyes to Valve.

I think that sums up my perspective here, most storefronts are not trying to compete, they are just offering the bare minimum for same cut and then wondering why everyone wants to use the more feature rich store front… Why wouldnt you?

I'm confused by your response here since this is addressed in my prior comment. Is there something not quite clear enough?

Steam clearly wins on features, the only metric to beat them on is price. Epic is trying to do so, but publishers are not actually lowering the cost on their platform because of Valve's policies—policies which are only effective because a publisher cannot afford to be delisted from Steam due its large market share.