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.
They say that for legal reasons, but their actions are different. If you look at the actual Wolfire complaint, they say they were pressured regardless of steam keys.
I would absolutely agree if it were limited to steam keys, but it’s not. Steam can deprioritize your game in more ways than one. Even just not putting your AAA quality $60 game in the featured games list is a big deal.
If you all just give them a pass, they’ll keep doing this. If they get criticism for it, they’ll likely sweep it under the rug and pretend it was just the Steam key thing the whole time. In the second case, you should expect to see games beginning to sell on Epic (or on their own site) at a lower price than on Steam. There’s a reason you don’t see this now, and it’s not because of steam keys.
I haven’t seen anybody else except the litigants included in the class action make these claims. Nobody seems to be able to substantiate them. I’m actively following this because I want to know if it’s true. I’d welcome any proof someone can provide that these claims have been elsewhere substantiated.
yeah it’s because the publishers have higher margins on epic sales that way.
like, yeah, we want this market to be fair, and if what the wolfire guys say is true then it’s a problem. but remember, they started this suit when they ran a competing store! wolfire started humble bundle! and humble’s main thing is keys! and i don’t know how many other devs are affected by this, but wolfire is driving it and nobody else seems to talk about it.
We should be seeing lower All-Time-Lows off of Steam than on Steam then, right?
Do we regularly see that?
I track prices with isthereanydeal.com and yeah pretty often a new historical low is set by a Steam key reseller like Fanatical. It’s usually only by a few bucks (like maybe $5 max, though still not a bad discount if the previous price was like $25).
Of course if I buy the game, I stop caring about its price so maybe the same sale happens directly on Steam sometime after. I’m not sure on that so ymmv.
i mean, i guess? i know gog regularly host sales when steam doesn’t, but i’m not actively price matching. hell, gog even used to give away games for free if you already had them on steam.
