Comment by forrestthewoods
3 days ago
They have an implicit most favored nation clause which is by definition anti-competitive.
Valve takes 30%. You can’t, in practice, sell your game on Steam and on another store at a lower price. That’s anticompetitive.
Downvote me if you want. But I recommend reading the transcripts from the Wolfire Games antitrust lawsuit against Valve before you do! They’re not a good look for Valve to say the least.
> Valve takes 30%. You can’t, in practice, sell your game on Steam and on another store at a lower price.
Note the use of ‘store’ here. You can sell your game on your own website for a lower price.
One example is Factorio, that is cheaper on factorio.com than it is on Steam, Gog, or Humble. Steam, Gog, and Humble all sell at the same price, however.
> Note the use of ‘store’ here
No. It’s an implicit rule. You don’t get to language lawyer.
> One example is Factorio, that is cheaper on factorio.com
Just checked, $35 on both.
Valve would only allow a dev to sell a game on their website for a lower price so long as the game sales numbers were not a threat to Steam. If Factorio sold very less on its website and suddenly 90% of sales were direct Valve would not be pleased and there would be consequences.
Isn't that only true for selling steam keys, not the whole game? Bigger problem with the monopoly is less sales on steam means less visibility in steam's algorithm, so you get punished for having people buy off steam.
Same if you want a video on your site: if you don't YouTube embed and instead host yourself, you get less amplified by youtube even if people want to watch it just as much. YouTube ends up getting to plaster ads interrupting your website trailer as much as they do on YouTube.
If you spread your marketing to a steam competitor with better cut you get the same problem, less amplification on Steam. Steam is today stone soup, Valve used to put in more of the meat and veggies but now that's more and more up to the captive devs. For a time Valve was the most profitable major company per employee in the US from this stone soup arrangement, but they did eventually have to drop their rates on the biggest devs, announced either a few days before or after the Epic Games Store launched.
2 replies →
> > One example is Factorio, that is cheaper on factorio.com
> Just checked, $35 on both.
This might be a regional thing then. When using a UK IP, it’s £30.00 on Steam, GOG and Humble. It’s £27.03 on factorio.com. I checked before posting.
I'm genuinely curious. If that's the case, how is it that I have bought dozens of games on the humblebundle store (for Steam) that were far cheaper than the retail price on Steam itself?
Humble bundle uses steam keys, so they are working in tandem regardless.
That said: enforcement on such things is not going to be 100%. Larger companies will either be purposefully ignores or make their own internal deals and contracts to follow. Some smaller games will slip through like everything else in life (Valve can still let Malware slip in once in a blue moon. I'm not surprised you can find some niche Japanese game sold for cheaper on DLsite or wherever).
But the point is that they can push thst in devs because of the monopoly. And that's how you get stuff like the Wolfire lawsuit when a few people do push back.