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That lawsuit against Steam’s 30% cut of game sales is now a class action, meaning many other developers could benefit
(www.rockpapershotgun.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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What a stupid take. Valve isn't doing anything anti competitive, they just provide an objectively better service which is why everyone uses it. Anyone can put their game up on Steam, Gog, Epic, Uplay, and Origin at the same time. Valve doesn't own the space, and tbh we're probably getting the best deal we can get with them being the top dog, cuz you know Microsoft and the like would never treat us that well.
The closest thing I can think of wrt competitive rules is their price parity rule, where if you sell your steam keys (note that. not epic or uplay, just steam.) yourself, the price can't be noticeably lower (or a sale can't happen) without a comparable discount/sale on Steam within a reasonable timeframe.
That's pretty anti-competitive, unless I'm misunderstanding it.
If Epic takes a smaller cut, a developer might be willing to sell it at a lower price than on Steam. But if Steam says that the sale on Steam needs to be the same, then that means the developer can't put out the same sale on Steam (since Steam takes a bigger cut).
So instead, they'd have to make the sale price equal to the price they'd be willing to accept after taking Steam's cut into consideration...which would be higher than the price they'd be willing to sell for on Epic.
That's bad for developers AND consumers.
It's specifically Steam keys, even says so in the quote. If they sell it on Epic for a lower price and it doesn't come with a Steam key then there are no restrictions on the price.
So we should be seeing lower All-Time-Lows on Epic than on Steam, right?
Do we?
Why would we? Companies want to make money. Epic taking a smaller cut isn't a consumer benefit.
Lower prices can "unlock" more customers/sales
If they did then surely folks would have had lower normal prices on Epic and we'd hear them talking it up, either then or now, but overwhelmingly they don't, because publishers don't actually view uplay, epic, steam, etc. as different beasts.
Its just one more spot to throw their game on and make money. Epic just lets them make a little more off the same sale.
It does (allegedly) happen in non-NA regions though. I wonder if there's something there.
isthereanydeal lets you check by regions, along with historically. IIRC the only place they don't check is Amazon because of nastygrams from their lawyers (IMO to keep black friday scams alive but that's a whole other discussion.)