Nothing more disappointing to me than seeing a game I might enjoy… and then it’s only available on PC on Epic Games store. Why can’t it be available on Epic, Xbox game store and Steam? It’s so annoying, like you have no choice but to use Epic… which I would literally do ANYTHING not to use.
But why should this matter to a consumer? If you don’t like Steam or Valve’s business practices, it’s much more difficult to avoid Steam because of its exclusives.
There’s a class action lawsuit against Valve now, over Steam’s practices similar to price fixing. Part of the reason Epic has to pay for exclusives is that Steam prohibits publishers from offering lower prices on lower cut stores like Epic. If publishers could pass on part of the savings to consumers from the smaller cut, Epic could be more successful without exclusive contracts. Anyway, hopefully what comes out of the suit will be better for consumers in the end.
That’s not why epic has to pay for exclusives. They have to pay to cover the income gap developers would face from eschewing the better store.
Publishers are free to skip using steam and pass along their savings, but they invariably don’t. They just pocket the difference.
That epic game store exists, takes a lower cut and gives away free stuff, and still struggles to be viable is an indicator that valve isn’t be anticompetitive.
It’s not illegal to have a better product, only to use your market position to keep other products from trying to compete.
It’s one thing to be generally against big companies, and another to be against one in favor of another, when the stakes are “which company keeps money”.
It’s not illegal to have a better product, only to use your market position to keep other products from trying to compete.
That’s exactly what the lawsuit alleges though. The only way smaller featured storefronts have to compete with Steam is on price. Valve uses its market dominance to prohibit offering a better price on smaller stores. If you offer a better price on Epic, Valve will kick you off Steam.
Valve not letting you use their advertisement and distribution network at the same time you undercut them on sales elsewhere doesn’t feel anticompetitive to me.
Some games choose to skip steam and use epic. Epic pays them to do so, and the publisher doesn’t lower prices.
If you’re a publisher, why would you want to offer a lower price elsewhere? The appeal to a lower cut to you is higher revenue, not equivalent revenue.
That lawsuit is ridiculous and misses a ton of huge boons to developers. The fact is , valve only takes that sales cut for games sold on their platform but they never require you to make that sale on their platform. In fact, they are totally cool with you making the sale elsewhere and giving a steam code out which means steam makes nothing on that sale and they still host the software distribution for said sale. You can use their multiplayer infrastructure, their distribution infrastructure, and their communication infrastructure without paying them a dime if you sell your game on your own website. And it’s by design that you can do this.
As for consumer benefits, steam has a system that allows you to give your friends and family members access to your library. They are constantly selling games at steep discount (after getting permission from developers to do so). They allow a huge range of content with very light handed censorship policies. They have a robust multiplayer system and communications platform that integrates seemlessly with the games they sell and distribute. I won’t get into the Linux stuff but all I will say is Proton wouldn’t be where it is without valve and steam.
Steam is single handedly the most pro-consumer and pro-developer platform on the market. When developers put their games on steam, everyone wins. And it’s never a requirement that those games only exist on steam. When steam is the only place a developer sells their game, it’s because steam is legitimately the only place that developer wants to sell it anyway.
they are totally cool with you making the sale elsewhere and giving a steam code out which means steam makes nothing on that sale
And they can afford to do this because they still require price matching, so all it does is create an inconvenience for the user to sign up for another site (something Steam fans don’t have a problem noticing in other contexts). They still get the game at the same price. I personally have hundreds of games on Steam and I don’t think I have ever purchased a Steam code this way, and I expect it’s the same for the majority of Steam users.
Steam is single handedly the most pro-consumer and pro-developer platform on the market
The lawsuit wants to create a world where a new game can come out for $60 on Steam and $55 on Epic. Valve doesn’t want this. Valve wants you to be required to pay the same price on Epic and Steam. This doesn’t seem very pro consumer.
It’s great that Steam is investing in their platform and Proton and Steam Deck. But they shouldn’t be requiring publishers to pretend that that stuff is free, to make consumers pay other storefronts like Epic as though Epic is also investing in these things.
I got a ton of my games through humble bundle, Which distributes steam codes. I’ve also gotten steam keys through Itch.io.
As for your price argument, price matching is only for the lowest price steam has ever sold the software for. So you can sell your games at steam sale prices 100% of the time and have a higher price on steam. So you’re literally just wrong.
Steam because of its exclusives.
Exclusives? Never heard of them paying devs to release only on steam, epic did that and still does that (?? I think). Steam offers a better store and features to devs so they release the games there.
You know steam offers you to generate infinite (?) Steam keys to sell them on your website or anywhere else and valve gets 0% from it? It’s plenty of bad practices and devs accepting money just before the steam release (Metro exodus, I’m talking about you)
If it’s only on Steam and no other PC platform, it’s exclusive. I don’t see the relevance from a consumer’s point of view whether money changed hands for that exclusivity. You could even argue that no money changes hands, Epic just doesn’t take its cut from the game’s sales is how I believe that works.
If Steam has the better store, then it should have no need to require publishers to match their prices. Of course if you’re buying a game on a fully featured, 30% cut store, it should cost more than on a less fully featured 12% cut store. Steam is using their large market share to bully publishers into not passing on savings to consumers from lower cut stores.
Steam keys can be generated, but the product can’t be discounted, ie again the 0% cut savings cannot be passed on to consumers. So all this does is create an extra inconvenience for the consumer to sign up to some publisher’s storefront to get the same product at the same price.
The difference is the developer deciding they don’t want to bother going through the effort of making their game available on every platform on the Internet, vs. a dev saying “we are going to release a game on this platform”, even doing presales, and then saying “oh, some guy just gave us a bunch of money to not sell you the thing we promised.”
Ya, that’s great for the devs being given a bunch of money, but that’s shitty for me so I’m not going to give money to the rich asshole doing this so that he can keep doing it
