The serious business of making games

A lot of threads where this could go…

Seems like weak case from the article, but I haven’t yet read the full filling.

Apparently these are the people who ran the very first Humble Bundle, before it was spun out.

Like most folks that bitch about Valve’s “abuses,” they were complicit in creating Steam’s dominance in the first place by handing out steam keys by the boatload for the better part of a decade. It’s a little late to pitch a fit about it now. That goes for you too, Paradox.

There were those of us that tried to warn you about this back when something could actually have been done to prevent it.

This makes no sense to me.

How exactly do they suppress competition? They don’t even pay for exclusivity like EGS does. And the existence of EGS, Origin, Uplay, the Microsoft store, etc. all point to the fact that there are other stores in the market.

Devs aren’t forced to release there, they just want to release there because their userbase is so big. And their userbase is so big because A) they invested in it when everyone else was leaving PC gaming and therefore got a huge head start and B) it has the most features. A lot of customers are there because that’s where the customers want to be. If a Dev wants to get their game on that store then they can weigh their options. Sell the game directly, go to another store, etc.

Right, that’s what you’d hope to see explained in the full complaint. The only thing I could imagine it being, based on this article, are the requirements on Steam key pricing. But I don’t think Steam keys are a good market definition. Nothing stops a developer from offering the same game via non-Steam avenues at a lower price.

This was true before, but it might not be now. I haven’t dug into the 70 page text yet but I remember it being a big deal in the dev communities years ago.

When last I was involved, IIRC the deal was you could sell on another storefront at whatever price you wanted. You just had to give Valve the option to reduce the price on Steam to match.

Yup. As someone who got back into PC gaming in a big way because of Steam,

I can, and would, make the case that Steam is responsible in large part for enabling the flourishing of mid tier and indie PC games, and has been a huge net positive for the PC marketplace.

And it has benefits to devs too. Lets not forget the number of games that use Steam as their semi official support forums, and the hilarity of games who were listed on Steam then shifted to EGS exclusive, that still had Steam forums for bug reporting and support.

Yeah, this is a silly argument. Steam is interesting because they specifically don’t care about exclusivity. The couldn’t care less if you also publish your game with Microsoft, Epic, or yourself, and I’m not aware of them ever paying for exclusivity at all, for any game.

Valve more or less saved PC gaming. To a large extent Steam is PC gaming.

But, sure, they take a huge cut and are happy to publish everything, and searchability is kind of impossible on it. Certainly they could afford to take a smaller cut. Gabe Newell is likely one of the top 5 richest people in the USA and almost certainly one of the top 3 richest “secret” persons. They are basically an infrastructure company at this point anyway.

I certainly feel that they hadn’t been earning their 30% for some time, although I think that has improved a bit over the past couple of years. But being overpriced is not “anti-competitive”

My guess is Gabe Newell is nowhere near the top 5 richest in the US.

I think there was one, like 15 years ago, Darwinia from Introversion - they stopped selling it on their own website in favour of selling it on steam exclusively. But I have no idea if Valve paid them for it or not (but I guess they would, otherwise why take it down from their own site)

But yes, accusing Valve, of all companies, of acting anti-competitive is pretty ridiculous.

Durante had some interesting points about this:

From what I have observed so far, as a PC game consumer for around 25 years now, the so-called “monopoly” (it’s not) Valve has on PC gaming with Steam was and is highly preferable for me as a consumer compared to any attempt to usurp it.

Also, I don’t agree that the “hefty cut” (actually on par with or less than the industry standard) is actually a negative for me as a consumer : ultimately, new games will be e.g. €60 on all storefronts. On Steam, that includes a 30% Steam cut, which allows legitimate third party seller such as GMG or cdkeys.com to sell games with a ~20% discount on launch on average, cheaper than on any other platform. If the cut was smaller, or another platform which doesn’t offer free keys was dominant, I’d actually need to pay more as a consumer for most of the games I buy at release.

Actually, if you look at monopolistic behavior (according to the law) independent of market share, e.g. EGS shows a lot more of that than Valve does:

EGS has significant financial incentives for exclusivity, Steam doesn’t.
Epic uses its significant market position in other areas (particularly engines) to push their store, e.g. by dropping the UE revenue cut only for EGS releases. This seems similar to e.g. the old Microsoft/IE case, except for the market share aspect of course.
EGS operates at a massive loss, subsidized by other sources of revenue, which makes it basically impossible for other parties without external sources of revenue to compete in the store business on price.

Yup, if Epic ever somehow slimes their way into a dominant position, folks will learn what anticompetitive monopolies look like for real. I’m no Steam fan, and I actively fought against them achieving this level of dominance, but right now the alternatives are pretty clearly worse. Well, except for the miracle scenario where somehow GOG becomes king of PC gaming.

Your guess is correct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth:

Newell’s listed near the bottom of the page in the $4 - 10 billion club. Ludicrously wealthy, certainly, but nowhere near the top of this hopelessly unbalanced country.

Having fixed the Dark Souls frame rate limit doesn’t make him an authority on economics. He’s parroting the same idiotic Epic-hating talking points everyone else on Reset Era and Twitter use, primarily by misapplying terms in an attempt to fabricate a catch-22. Epics’s strategy isn’t “monopolistic”, it’s the lengths you have to go to gain any marketshare against an actual derfacto monopoly in the market.

And that “it doesn’t matter to me as a consumer” crap can be used to justify any horrendous behavior. “I’m just the consumer, it’s not my problem if my clothes are made by child slaves. They’re affordable and look nice.”

Are you seriously comparing Steam to sweat shops? I mean, really. As far as I can tell, as a consumer, there is no downside to Steam, given the price points of games stay about the same there (or lower, with all the sales), the sheer quantity of games they offer is so vast it makes it hard to search for stuff, and PC gaming is in something of a golden age largely because of Steam. I am sure developers would love to get more of a share of the sales, but that’s business, really. There’s Epic, actively competing for devs, they can go there.

It’s the kind of level-headed discourse I expect in anything around this topic, Sony vs. Microsoft, etc. :)

What I’m hoping is that we can turn this thread into another anti-EGS thread. We haven’t discussed that enough!

Small team that doesn’t want to maintain a separate deployment, distribution channel, or provide download infrastructure themselves.

Yes, Durante’s follow up reply on the kind of…stuff you wrote was:

I’m obviously not saying that EGS is an illegal monopoly.
What I am saying is that there are 2 components to being an illegal monopoly: (1) actually being a monopoly, and (2) engaging in anti-competitive practices while in that position; both need to be the case.

For Steam, (1) is not true (many of the most successful PC games are not on Steam), and (2) is also not true (I’ve never seen anyone make any convincing argument on how Valve engages in anti-competitive practices; offering the preferred option is not one).

For EGS, (1) is even more obviously not true, I don’t think this needs discussion. (2), however, is debatable, and if (1) were true and Epic was still behaving as it is currently then I think someone might actually have a case.