Here we go again, yet another lawsuit has been filed against Steam developer Valve Software over an alleged abuse of their market position with their 30% cut. This time around it's a noted developer, Wolfire Games (Overgrowth, Receiver), along with two individuals William Herbert and Daniel Escobar "on behalf of all others similarly situated".
According to the documents, the argument is similar to one we've heard before. They're claiming that of the huge market that PC gaming is, "75% flow through the online storefront of a single company, Valve" and that "Valve uses that dominance to take an extraordinarily high cut from nearly every sale that passes through its store—30%" which results in "higher prices and less innovation" and that Valve can do this because of their market position so developers "have no choice but to sell most of their games through the Steam Store, where they are subject to Valve’s 30% toll".
One of the cited people is former Valve developer Richard Geldreich, who famously tweeted:
Steam was killing PC gaming. It was a 30% tax on an entire industry. It was unsustainable. You have no idea how profitable Steam was for Valve. It was a virtual printing press. It distorted the entire company. Epic is fixing this for all gamers.
The suit also mentions clauses Valve have that prevent developers selling at cheaper prices on other stores, "Valve blocks pro-competitive price competition through two main provisions—the Steam Key Price Parity Provision and the Price Veto Provision".
It goes even further to mention the likes of Microsoft, EA and more companies that tried and "failed to develop a robust commercial strategy away from the Steam Gaming Platform" arguing that it shows how vital Steam is and so the behaviour is anticompetitive. On top of that it even pulls in the Steam Workshop and the Steam Market, to claim this keeps developers even more tied to Valve and Steam and that Valve takes a big cut.
What are they hoping to achieve with this lawsuit? On top of damages and the usual, they want "injunctive relief removing Valve’s anticompetitive provisions" to "bring competition to the market and benefit the public as a whole".
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Epic is fixing this for all gamers.
it sounds like Epic gave them money to open a lawsuit
25 Likes, Who?
Oh jeez. Steam is more than just an "online storefront". I'm sick of repeating that over and over again -.-
24 Likes, Who?
I hope the lawsuit succeeds, although chances are naturally slim.
Their cut is and always has been too high.
Yes, they offer a ton of services, but practically no developer utilizes even half of them.
The solution is simple: Lower the minimal cut to something reasonable (closer to the Epic cut), then allow developers to opt-in to features they actually need, which would then increase the cut.
Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 30 April 2021 at 8:53 am UTC
Their cut is and always has been too high.
Yes, they offer a ton of services, but practically no developer utilizes even half of them.
The solution is simple: Lower the minimal cut to something reasonable (closer to the Epic cut), then allow developers to opt-in to features they actually need, which would then increase the cut.
Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 30 April 2021 at 8:53 am UTC
13 Likes, Who?
Richard Geldreich, that guy has a huge chip on his shoulder about Valve, I don't believe a word he's saying. Of course he's siding with Epic.
16 Likes, Who?
rustybroomhandle Apr 30, 2021
The 30% may seem high, but it's a pretty standard retail markup. In a lot of cases as with physical goods, markups* are even higher. Anyway, I predict that Valve will actually drop to 12% in line with some other stores eventually.
* Although I guess technically not a markup since the starting point is the retail price, not the wholesale price.
* Although I guess technically not a markup since the starting point is the retail price, not the wholesale price.
3 Likes, Who?
I hope the lawsuit succeeds, although chances are naturally slim.
Their cut is and always has been too high.
Yes, they offer a ton of services, but practically no developer utilizes even half of them.
The solution is simple: Lower the minimal cut to something reasonable (closer to the Epic cut), then allow developers to opt-in to features they actually need, which would then increase the cut.
All of that is irrelevant though. The reason why Valve can continue to ask for their cut, is because they can the deliver a lot of potential customers. No other store comes close. Even the big publishers that tried to sell exclusively on their own platform have been crawling back to Steam. And until that changes, Valve has no reason to make big changes to their pricing.
Basically the whole industry left Valve alone for a decade and didn't wake up to the future until it was too late. And now trying to break into the market in which Valve has a huge head start is nearly impossible. It's actually not unlike trying to make a new desktop OS to break into the Windows market share. Nice idea, but nearly impossible to achieve.
12 Likes, Who?
All true, but doesn't change how I think about it.I hope the lawsuit succeeds, although chances are naturally slim.
Their cut is and always has been too high.
Yes, they offer a ton of services, but practically no developer utilizes even half of them.
The solution is simple: Lower the minimal cut to something reasonable (closer to the Epic cut), then allow developers to opt-in to features they actually need, which would then increase the cut.
All of that is irrelevant though. The reason why Valve can continue to ask for their cut, is because they can the deliver a lot of potential customers. No other store comes close. Even the big publishers that tried to sell exclusively on their own platform have been crawling back to Steam. And until that changes, Valve has no reason to make big changes to their pricing.
Basically the whole industry left Valve alone for a decade and didn't wake up to the future until it was too late. And now trying to break into the market in which Valve has a huge head start is nearly impossible. It's actually not unlike trying to make a new desktop OS to break into the Windows market share. Nice idea, but nearly impossible to achieve.
As I said, I hope it succeeds and I hope they eventually lower their cut.
But do I think this will happen, and soon? Nope.
4 Likes, Who?
Wolfire Games?
I'm way too disappointed to what humble bundle became to give them any credit. I mean, Valve is indeed a huge thing, but at least they still invest time and energy to cool things, helping both dev with nice tools and users with cool features (steam link, steam remote play, ...) and they try to raise Linux to be a viable gaming platform.
I used to love humble bundle over Steam, and I used to buy all my games there. But then they decided to aim only for money and dropped one by one the nice ideas that brought them success.
Less quality bundles, no more super video announcer for humble bundles (I used to be so excited from it!), no more multi platform, no more indie, and recently, lowering users choice for where their money go.
I feel now that my money should rather go to Valve than to them for sure.
I'm way too disappointed to what humble bundle became to give them any credit. I mean, Valve is indeed a huge thing, but at least they still invest time and energy to cool things, helping both dev with nice tools and users with cool features (steam link, steam remote play, ...) and they try to raise Linux to be a viable gaming platform.
I used to love humble bundle over Steam, and I used to buy all my games there. But then they decided to aim only for money and dropped one by one the nice ideas that brought them success.
Less quality bundles, no more super video announcer for humble bundles (I used to be so excited from it!), no more multi platform, no more indie, and recently, lowering users choice for where their money go.
I feel now that my money should rather go to Valve than to them for sure.
16 Likes, Who?
I follow a lot of indies on Twitter who genuinely despise Steam. Not just for taking a 30% cut, but for taking that cut and giving almost nothing back. They argue that the lure of the biggest audience for gaming is useless when Steam's algorithms are geared to only highlight AAA or "popular" content.
The same argument and frustration is often voiced around Play and Apple's store - they take their 30% cut but unless you magically put out the next minecraft, factorio or limbo, you're gonna languish with pitiful sales until you go out of business.
So, good luck to the lawsuit. It's doomed though, for sure. I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that you have to have some fairly hard evidence that Valve actually abused their market position to suppress competition. And the clauses in question have already passed muster in other law suits... so I'm not sure the point to all this is.
The same argument and frustration is often voiced around Play and Apple's store - they take their 30% cut but unless you magically put out the next minecraft, factorio or limbo, you're gonna languish with pitiful sales until you go out of business.
So, good luck to the lawsuit. It's doomed though, for sure. I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that you have to have some fairly hard evidence that Valve actually abused their market position to suppress competition. And the clauses in question have already passed muster in other law suits... so I'm not sure the point to all this is.
5 Likes, Who?
The same argument and frustration is often voiced around Play and Apple's store - they take their 30% cut but unless you magically put out the next minecraft, factorio or limbo, you're gonna languish with pitiful sales until you go out of business.
And the solution would be what? Everybody is always screaming for CoMPetItiOn... and when they have that and lose against other more popular titles, it sucks. Go figure.
4 Likes, Who?
I feel now that my money should rather go to Valve than to them for sure.They haven't been a part of Humble Bundle for years.
2 Likes, Who?
The same argument and frustration is often voiced around Play and Apple's store - they take their 30% cut but unless you magically put out the next minecraft, factorio or limbo, you're gonna languish with pitiful sales until you go out of business.
And the solution would be what? Everybody is always screaming for CoMPetItiOn... and when they have that and lose against other more popular titles, it sucks. Go figure.
The point is how they get popular. If the algorithm was fairer for new titles, then indies would have a better chance at leveraging Steam and becoming the next big thing. But since it doesn't, they never hit the front-page and the same tired (but popular) games are constantly regurgitated on the carousel and in the discovery queues.
There's also a huge amount of opacity around how that algorithm works. It used to be "okay" for indies, but a couple of years ago (maybe 2018?) it changed, and multiple indies saw their revenues destroyed. They weren't even being surfaced during sales. It put some studios out of business.
4 Likes, Who?
The same argument and frustration is often voiced around Play and Apple's store - they take their 30% cut but unless you magically put out the next minecraft, factorio or limbo, you're gonna languish with pitiful sales until you go out of business.
And the solution would be what? Everybody is always screaming for CoMPetItiOn... and when they have that and lose against other more popular titles, it sucks. Go figure.
The point is how they get popular. If the algorithm was fairer for new titles, then indies would have a better chance at leveraging Steam and becoming the next big thing. But since it doesn't, they never hit the front-page and the same tired (but popular) games are constantly regurgitated on the carousel and in the discovery queues.
There's also a huge amount of opacity around how that algorithm works. It used to be "okay" for indies, but a couple of years ago (maybe 2018?) it changed, and multiple indies saw their revenues destroyed. They weren't even being surfaced during sales. It put some studios out of business.
You can't force being popular. No algorithm in the world can change that. It used be be "okay" for indies, because there was less competition. Less games that would take away your attention.
Valve already tries what they can with Game Festivals and whatnot, where they highlight hundreds of games.
Do people complain about Bandcamp or iTunes or Amazon, because their unknown albums and movies aren't able to compete with Taylor Swift and Star Wars?
12 Likes, Who?
Epic is fixing this for all gamers.
I cringed. If Epic is the "future" of PC gaming then PC gaming is dead.
Like seriously, I understand that Valve has flaws and that Epic may not be all bad but this Richard guy sounds like a complete Epic shill and Valve hater. If someone was objectively critizing Valve they couldn't possibly put Epic as any type of savior.
10 Likes, Who?
The 30% cut is terrible but that doesn't make Epic the good guy. FAR from it.
What wouldn't be terrible?
I'd still like to see a number that's actually sustainable.
Video distribution for wrestling, boxing etc. is available on fite.tv - their cut is about 50%.
5 Likes, Who?
the issue is that the public dont want competition, they want convenience at all costs.
people want netflix to be an monopoly so they can sing an single bill and have everything that netflix decides to licence (while ignore that there are a lot of good content unlicenced by netflix), and at the same time they have an single user interface to browser for all the content (lets ignore that its possible to have this by another aproach: separate the content from the presentation, wich is what google tv want to achiev, so you can browser an single ui for the content avaliable on all streaming services)
people want the same convenience on pc gaming, all games in a single user interface, all achievments in a single account, and those steam stickers and other gimmicks on every purchase.
consumers can be quite stupid sometimes, i can understand when an linux user complain that other stores dont support linux at all, the issue is: are we willing to sacrifice everything to push linux foward /keep using it?
backward compatibility is pretty much non existent already.
Last edited by elmapul on 30 April 2021 at 11:46 am UTC
people want netflix to be an monopoly so they can sing an single bill and have everything that netflix decides to licence (while ignore that there are a lot of good content unlicenced by netflix), and at the same time they have an single user interface to browser for all the content (lets ignore that its possible to have this by another aproach: separate the content from the presentation, wich is what google tv want to achiev, so you can browser an single ui for the content avaliable on all streaming services)
people want the same convenience on pc gaming, all games in a single user interface, all achievments in a single account, and those steam stickers and other gimmicks on every purchase.
consumers can be quite stupid sometimes, i can understand when an linux user complain that other stores dont support linux at all, the issue is: are we willing to sacrifice everything to push linux foward /keep using it?
backward compatibility is pretty much non existent already.
Last edited by elmapul on 30 April 2021 at 11:46 am UTC
3 Likes, Who?
The same argument and frustration is often voiced around Play and Apple's store - they take their 30% cut but unless you magically put out the next minecraft, factorio or limbo, you're gonna languish with pitiful sales until you go out of business.
And the solution would be what? Everybody is always screaming for CoMPetItiOn... and when they have that and lose against other more popular titles, it sucks. Go figure.
The point is how they get popular. If the algorithm was fairer for new titles, then indies would have a better chance at leveraging Steam and becoming the next big thing. But since it doesn't, they never hit the front-page and the same tired (but popular) games are constantly regurgitated on the carousel and in the discovery queues.
There's also a huge amount of opacity around how that algorithm works. It used to be "okay" for indies, but a couple of years ago (maybe 2018?) it changed, and multiple indies saw their revenues destroyed. They weren't even being surfaced during sales. It put some studios out of business.
You can't force being popular. No algorithm in the world can change that. It used be be "okay" for indies, because there was less competition. Less games that would take away your attention.
Valve already tries what they can with Game Festivals and whatnot, where they highlight hundreds of games.
Do people complain about Bandcamp or iTunes or Amazon, because their unknown albums and movies aren't able to compete with Taylor Swift and Star Wars?
The algorithm did change that. It's nothing to do with competition. Sure, you can't force being popular, but even 1000 sales for an indie were important and they got those sales, year after year, sustainably. Then the algorithm changed (devs were informed by Valve that this was happening, but no details as to what it meant) and 1000+ sales turned into less than 100.
So, multiple indies reporting that their sales literally fell off a cliff, as a result of this one change.
These aren't popular games, but they're solid games that used to get exposure. Now they don't. So the 30% cut by Valve, for these devs, is particularly insulting, because Valve is adding precisely no value. Indeed, many of these indies saw (for the first time, ever, over years) greater sales via Itch, than on Steam.
3 Likes, Who?
The same argument and frustration is often voiced around Play and Apple's store - they take their 30% cut but unless you magically put out the next minecraft, factorio or limbo, you're gonna languish with pitiful sales until you go out of business.
And the solution would be what? Everybody is always screaming for CoMPetItiOn... and when they have that and lose against other more popular titles, it sucks. Go figure.
The point is how they get popular. If the algorithm was fairer for new titles, then indies would have a better chance at leveraging Steam and becoming the next big thing. But since it doesn't, they never hit the front-page and the same tired (but popular) games are constantly regurgitated on the carousel and in the discovery queues.
There's also a huge amount of opacity around how that algorithm works. It used to be "okay" for indies, but a couple of years ago (maybe 2018?) it changed, and multiple indies saw their revenues destroyed. They weren't even being surfaced during sales. It put some studios out of business.
You can't force being popular. No algorithm in the world can change that. It used be be "okay" for indies, because there was less competition. Less games that would take away your attention.
Valve already tries what they can with Game Festivals and whatnot, where they highlight hundreds of games.
Do people complain about Bandcamp or iTunes or Amazon, because their unknown albums and movies aren't able to compete with Taylor Swift and Star Wars?
The algorithm did change that. It's nothing to do with competition. Sure, you can't force being popular, but even 1000 sales for an indie were important and they got those sales, year after year, sustainably. Then the algorithm changed (devs were informed by Valve that this was happening, but no details as to what it meant) and 1000+ sales turned into less than 100.
So, multiple indies reporting that their sales literally fell off a cliff, as a result of this one change.
These aren't popular games, but they're solid games that used to get exposure. Now they don't. So the 30% cut by Valve, for these devs, is particularly insulting, because Valve is adding precisely no value. Indeed, many of these indies saw (for the first time, ever, over years) greater sales via Itch, than on Steam.
Yeah, and they change the algorithm again and they constantly tune it and they have the Steam Labs (they just released the new store to hopefully improve visibility), but when you are one in 50000 games, how is Steam supposed to give everybody the same exposure?
And if they aren't happy on Steam, they can just leave and be successful elsewhere, like Itch. Free market.
6 Likes, Who?
the issue is that the public dont want competition, they want convenience at all costs.
people want netflix to be an monopoly so they can sing an single bill and have everything that netflix decides to licence (while ignore that there are a lot of good content unlicenced by netflix), and at the same time they have an single user interface to browser for all the content (lets ignore that its possible to have this by another aproach: separate the content from the presentation, wich is what google tv want to achiev, so you can browser an single ui for the content avaliable on all streaming services)
people want the same convenience on pc gaming, all games in a single user interface, all achievments in a single account, and those steam stickers and other gimmicks on every purchase.
consumers can be quite stupid sometimes, i can understand when an linux user complain that other stores dont support linux at all, the issue is: are we willing to sacrifice everything to push linux foward /keep using it?
backward compatibility is pretty much non existent already.
I personally like to see what I own in one place. I would be really glad, if this was just a frontend that supports thousand of stores and allows you to buy from them, but this means that every store needs to have open API and this will probably never happen.
For now I'm using Steam for most of my games, MiniGalaxy for GOG games and I actually don't have any idea what I own on Humble Bundle (I'm not buying from it that often, so it's OK for me).
For e-books I'm using Callibre, still I would be rather to have them somewhere online, so I don't need to bother with storage, with option to download them if I want.
And the situation is much worse for music (where streaming is standard these days) and movies (there is literally no way to buy DRM free movie, which you could play where you want, except indie movies).
So from a consumer perspective if there would be one Callibre like app for games, that just let's you buy from different stores and allows you to manage the game library in one place, it would be awesome. The same for music, movies, books and any other multimedia content you can think of. And if it would be Free Software, that would be just EPIC. Oh the dreams, the sweet dreams :-)
4 Likes, Who?
Is it really the algorithm ?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/552623/number-games-released-steam/
There are more and more game on steam, people tends to also buy and play games from a few year ago especially as game tend to get support for years concurrency is not just new game but also all the game released on the last few years. 100 milions players is not that much when there is 40-50 thousand games compared with the one thousand or so DS game for the same userbase.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/552623/number-games-released-steam/
There are more and more game on steam, people tends to also buy and play games from a few year ago especially as game tend to get support for years concurrency is not just new game but also all the game released on the last few years. 100 milions players is not that much when there is 40-50 thousand games compared with the one thousand or so DS game for the same userbase.
9 Likes, Who?
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