FYI: Eurogamer is owned by IGN who is owned by Ziff Davis.
IGN has been known to write hit pieces against competition for Ziff Davis and their partners.
Bloomberg cites two high-profile cases referenced in the ongoing lawsuit, one involving Ubisoft, and another Warner Bros.
First of all, I trust Ubi and WB way less than valve.
Valve allegedly threatened to delist all editions of Rainbow Six Siege after Ubisoft offered a cheaper option on its Uplay store.
Yeah.
Because it violates their policy. That’s not a “threat”, those are the terms of the contract Ubi and WB agreed to. Terms that everyone has to follow.
Heck, Ubi and WB should be hit with a counter suit for trying to leverage their market position to exert control over valve and getting unusually favorable terms.
Clown suit. Ubi and WB are mad they can’t break their contract with valve in a one sided way.
edit: I forgot some context:
The deal between valve and a publisher or dev is: they can sell on steam and elsewhere if steam is at least tied in price, or cheaper, but when they sell somewhere else, that includes the steam key and access to steam and steam’s distribution at no cost.
What the devs and publishers wanted to do was leverage other features of steam and the steam ecosystem, while undercutting steam’s price.
They are always free to just not sell on steam for a cheaper price. That’s not what this is about.
First of all, I trust Ubi and WB way less than valve.
You shouldn’t trust any of them. No billionaire has your best interests at heart. Even Gabe.
That is true, definitely a “lesser evil” situation.
Username checks out
No love for those companies but just because you agreed to a contract doesn’t mean the clauses of the contract are legal or enforceable.
True, but this deal is that companies stick to the terms and in turn they get access to steams shop, implicitly the community.
They don’t have some unalienable right to access another company’s customers.
You don’t have a “right” to go into a BurgerKing and advertise and sell your burgers there.
… and in a country with rule of law whether a contractual clause is legal would be decided by a court, no?
Yeah, isn’t that the point of the lawsuit? That this exact clause is challenged in court?
Valve allegedly threatened to delist all editions of Rainbow Six Siege after Ubisoft offered a cheaper option on its Uplay store.
Yeah.
Because it violates their policy.
And that policy only exists because monopoly enables them to set anti-trust/anti-competitive practices and further cement their position by ruining competition’s chances.
Imagine there’s a huge fuel station that’s so big they essentially set rules towards suppliers that they can’t offer their gas to other stations at a cheaper price otherwise they can’t sell it in their station with 95% market share.
If you don’t see a problem with this as a customer, then don’t forget to support your local billionaire by paying a 30% fee for each game purchase (and that 30% cut also exists due to no one being able to take on steam, ridiculous amount of money).
I’m slowly getting tires of gamers defending Gabe like he’s Jesus when in reality valve is a corporation doing corporation things.
40% of the market is not a monopoly.
Monopoly implies there are no alternatives. There are plenty of alternatives. People just choose Steam because the other ones are (mostly) crap.
If you can buy from GOG do it. Need to make sure viable competition sticks around plus they actually let you own the game
GOG isn’t really competing in the same market as Steam.
Most importantly, GOG games don’t include Steam keys, which is what’s the issue here.
Steam lets publishers include Steam keys if they don’t sell them for cheaper than on Steam.
I really wanted GOG to be a viable competition, but their years and years of broken promises are not going to make me leave Steam.
…such as…? Whenever I’m shopping for a game, I check GOG (and 3rd party sites for steam keys via ITAD) before I buy from steam. If it’s available on gog and drm-free, that’s where my money goes.
The only issue I see with gog is that devs don’t give a shit. One and done, one pump chump. Why give customers choice, when you can be jerking it with their money already instead?
I don’t know what I have to do to get a game listed on GOG though. I don’t buy a lot of games but I think the last three I tried to buy were all unavailable on GOG. There’s that page where you can wish for a game on GOG but I’ve no idea how effective that is.
GOG only sells DRM-free games. If a game isn’t there, it’s probably because the developer/publisher refuses to allow that, requiring DRM in their game.
they’re saying that publishers can’t take a higher price on steam than on other platforms. basically they don’t want their customers to pay a premium for using their platform.
But steam is taking an additional 30% for themselves. So the customer is always paying that premium.
if prices are the same, then the publisher is the one paying the premium.
Not of the publisher is just pricing it 30% higher. Remember: they wanted to sell it for a lower price on their own stores and valve was against that.
So now the consumer has to pay more everywhere
Yup. It would simply be more fair if this rule would be applied after distributors took their cut. Let devs make their games cheaper when platforms ask for a smaller share. That‘d only be reasonable.
Yeah I hope Valve loses this in favor of developers and consumers. If another platform asks for a smaller share devs should be allowed to set a lower price.
If valve loses this, they will clamp down on their features.
Because why would they provide infrastructure for free when the developer sells keys for less somewhere else?
If you expect them to provide storefront, infrastructure and community integration for free, I don’t think they will.
