A new Dutch class action has been filed against Valve Corporation, the company behind Steam. The case is brought by the Stichting Consumenten Competition Claims (CCC), which has launched the proceedings under the name GameClaim. The foundation acts on behalf of all Dutch PC gamers who have purchased games through Steam or other PC distribution platforms since 2013, IGN Benelux reports.
But if you go on isthereanydeal.com you will see a whole bunch of online stores that offer sales on games. They offer Steam codes too but are not limited to Steam, they cover many other platforms (including Epic).
(Those btw are all legit sites showing only sales endorsed by the game publishers themselves, they all sell new game codes. ITAD has a standing policy to only source from that kind of sales, strictly no key resale sites.)
So if you can get Steam games cheaper than are currently listed on Steam, and many games are also available on GOG which is DRM free… not entirely sure what this lawsuit is about.
Limited time sales is not what’s being talked about. Those are allowed.
It’s the regular pricing. A game listed on steam needs to make up for their 30% cut. Some other sites take a smaller cut. But multiple game companies have found that trying to list their games on non-steam key selling websites, for less money (because they don’t have to make up for as big a cut) are getting threatened to have their games removed from Steam for doing so. This is well outside any clause in Steam TOS, and would be illegal even if it was covered.
Has any of these claims been proven yet?
They’re still working their way through the courts.
One of them is over two years old, though, so it’s not just a clout chaser blowing hot air based on absolutely nothing.
Which only proves my point. They allegedly do, and we yet to discover if they actually do it or Epic, Ubisoft and whatever another publisher are lying. 2 years to prove if Valve was abusing the system and still nothing out there to confirm this suspicion.
I suspect that is really tough to prove and that is why eventually case will be dropped due to lack of evidence.
A court case with zero evidence doesn’t last 2 years…
Have you seriously never heard of the Nintendo v Palworld cases? Those are still going on after 2 years despite Nintendo’s claims being complete bullshit
Court case with undeniable and sufficient evidence also doesnt last long. There is more to the story than “they do it/they dont do it”
But claiming they do before it has been proven is dumb.
Defending a company with multiple unrelated entities suing them over the same thing, including non competitors, before they’ve been proven to NOT be doing that thing is very stupid.
Blindly believing those claims before they’re proven in court is very stupid.
Let the courts make their ruling.
How do we know they’re really unrelated? A lot of the lawsuits are in the US, where
briberylobbying is very prevalent, and the lawsuits brought forth by private entities could be backed by Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Epic, etc. under the table. Hell, any publisher/developer involved in the ESA is by definition not “unrelated”.Until these lawsuits are fully resolved, nothing has been proven. All we have are claims and speculation at the moment.
Could you share an example of a deal that is less than on Steam? I couldn’t find one.
It can import your Steam wishlist and give you tons of examples. 😊
Here’s some: Civ 5, Disco Elysium, Yakuza 6, Borderlands GOTY, Outer Wilds, Doom Eternal.
You can also make filters that limit the suggestions to a certain sale percentage (eg. 50%+ off), or to a max price (eg. $10).
I looked at the examples you gave and in all of them, Steam has the lowest price . I added an example of Doom Eternal
Civ 5 is 30€ on Steam and 2-3€ on other Stores.
Outer Wilds is 23€ on Steam and 16€ elsewhere.
There may be regional differences for either of us.
Literally all of them are Steam keys. Do you think that if you buy a Steam key from another site it’s somehow not Steam that profits?
I think you might start to understand what this lawsuit is about haha.
All those stores just sell the game on steam, so we’re back to steam being the cheapest. This is why the lawsuit exists.