Epic Games reduce their cut for Unreal Engine games for same-day Epic Store launches

Tim Sweeney is the best comedian of this century

Do you remember when he said "Installing Linux is sort of the equivalent of moving to Canada when one doesn’t like US political trends. Nope, we’ve got to fight for the freedoms we have today, where we have them today."? True to his words, he created a new store so that editors could move to Canada instead of fighting for their freedoms on Steam :D And now, after all the Epic exclusives, including the ones whose release was already planned on Steam, them dare saying "Launch Everywhere" ??? It's just plain mockery.

Meanwhile in Steam-Land: Yet another Steam Deck Verified game gets unplayable.
It's funny to see how Epic Games apparently puts it all into their platform while Valve just waits & hopes for the best.
Must be very hard for you guys to see the "enemy" do exactly what you expect from Valve.

I'm by no means a Steam fan person. Actually I tried to avoid Steam as much as I could. I was focusing on Humble Bundle and GOG. When HB was dedicated to porting games on Linux and against DRM. But I had to recognize that Valve did a lot, for Linux, and gaming in general.

1. They did fund DXVK and Wine development.
2. Even If I don't like their DRM, it was much worse before Steam. Do you remember games with 5 activations, no more?
3. They showed that gaming handhelds can be successful with Deck.
4. Even after many years Alyx is still the best game on VR.
5. Their client have been supporting Linux for a decade while competitors often don't support Linux at all or very badly. Note: Itch has a very good Linux support too!.
6. Steam sales were one of the few ways for many to get games at affordable price.

There are many things to say against Valve, starting from their cut being way to high. But saying they do nothing is just not true. Especially if you compare Steam to Epic! Comparing with GOG and Itch could be understandable. GOG has the merit to be against DRM and Itch is the platform for very indie games. There are reasons to love these two stores. But Epic? :D


Last edited by TheBard on 2 October 2024 at 6:07 pm UTC

Valve doesn't just wait they put millions of dollars into proton to get games playable on the SteamDeck and it seems to work.

Great to hear. Please provide the sources with the actual numbers. And while you're at it: Please provide the number of actually supported games (by the developers, not by Valve).

Also they launched a bunch of other intiatives for it, like souping up the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, Gamescope, KDE and MESA sponsorships, the verified rating system, DXVK sponsorship, Vulkan(they're one of the founders of the Khronos project) and the SteamMachine.

Which of these projects directly help the developers of the games? They mainly benefit Valve & their own operating system. DXVK & Proton are the only projects which would help but it's obvious that it's not enough.

I fully understand that Windows gamers and/or developers might see Valve as a dangerous imposing passive and unmoving force, because Valve earned that reputation in the Windows space, but in the Linux gaming space we benefit quite a lot from them.

I'm talking of getting the actual game developers to provide actual support for Steam Deck / Proton / Linux. What are they doing this way?

For Valve this is probably illegal and ineffective.
illegal:
Valve is big enough that anti-trust law applies to them and bundling services for a discount is probably a form of "tying" and thus illegal(ask Microsoft about teams and office).

If it was simply illegal, nobody would be able to do it. Bundling the Index with Half-Life: Alyx would be illegal. Microsoft tying Office & Teams is illegal because they have a monopoly with Office, putting any Teams competitor to a huge disadvantage to sell their alternative. That's not the case with the Steam Deck / Proton / Linux (they could bind it to Proton / Linux in general if we are saying they are market leader for PC based handheld devices).

Besides: They're already lowering their cut if the revenue surpasses a certain amount. This can easily be argued as illegal since they're forcing small studios to exclusively release on Steam to avoid splitting the revenue. So no, I seriously doubt any anti-trust law considerations.

Ineffective:
they tried bribing developers to support Linux for the Steam machine...

Steam machines were a complete disaster & failure, so that's not comparable.

Tim Sweeney is the best comedian of this century […]
3. They showed that gaming handhelds can be successful with Deck.

Funny. You have really never heard of Nintendo?

[…] There are many things to say against Valve, starting from their cut being way to high. But saying they do nothing is just not true. Especially if you compare Steam to Epic! Comparing with GOG and Itch could be understandable. GOG has the merit to be against DRM and Itch is the platform for very indie games. There are reasons to love these two stores. But Epic? :D

You fail to provide a single point which shows what Valve is directly doing to entice developers to officially support the Steam Deck / Proton / Linux.

Please provide the sources with the actual numbers.

Valve is a private company and they're very secretive about their financials. I doubt you're going to get any of the answers you want, but even if Valve only spent $100,000 on Linux development (which can't be true if you account for employing Joshua Ashton, Pierre, the primary DXVK developer, years of contracting CodeWeavers, recently sponsoring Arch Linux freelancers, just to start with), that's more than any other gaming company has done.

I think what's more important than the amount of money Valve has spent on Linux is the fact that all of us can clearly see and feel the impact it's making.

Please provide the number of actually supported games (by the developers, not by Valve).

Almost zero. But I'm not sure I understand the point of the question.

I'm talking of getting the actual game developers to provide actual support for Steam Deck / Proton / Linux. What are they doing this way?

That's never going to happen no matter what Valve does. Some developers might change their minds if the Steam Deck had 10 times as many sales, but there aren't hat many people interested in it (including me). Get millions of people to care, and game developers will care. There need to be more Linux users on Steam.

Fact is, Valve has doubled the number of users on Steam in 4 years. That's more than any other company has done in the last 20 years. I don't think they're doing a bad job.

Signed,
Someone who doesn't think Valve is going to come out of these anti-trust cases looking good.

Valve is a private company and they're very secretive about their financials. I doubt you're going to get any of the answers you want, but even if Valve only spent $100,000 on Linux development (which can't be true if you account for employing Joshua Ashton, Pierre, the primary DXVK developer, years of contracting CodeWeavers, recently sponsoring Arch Linux freelancers, just to start with), that's more than any other gaming company has done.

I'm aware. But this automatically means anyone claiming "they put millions" into something can't really substantiate that claim.

Almost zero. But I'm not sure I understand the point of the question.

Yeah, I got that since you're not really answering to my comment. People talk shit about Epic who are actually trying to get developers onto their platform (by means that already were suggested Valve should do for the Steam Deck). Meanwhile Valve does nothing to promote the Steam Deck to developers & is actually losing games (which turns into losing customer since this uncertainty really drives people to Windows alternatives).

That's never going to happen no matter what Valve does. Some developers might change their minds if the Steam Deck had 10 times as many sales, but there aren't hat many people interested in it (including me). Get millions of people to care, and game developers will care. There need to be more Linux users on Steam.

So you do agree with me that "Valve just waits & hopes for the best".

How can anyone care about Steam Deck / Proton / Linux if nobody knows how many customers there are? If the Steam Deck was such a big hit everyone here is believing, then Valve would just release the numbers.

Sweeney: "I wish they would get to tens of millions users"
Valve: "Hey, we are already at ten million Steam Deck users / 20 million Linux users"

Valve doesn't just wait they put millions of dollars into proton to get games playable on the SteamDeck and it seems to work.

Great to hear. Please provide the sources with the actual numbers. And while you're at it: Please provide the number of actually supported games (by the developers, not by Valve).

Also they launched a bunch of other intiatives for it, like souping up the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, Gamescope, KDE and MESA sponsorships, the verified rating system, DXVK sponsorship, Vulkan(they're one of the founders of the Khronos project) and the SteamMachine.

Which of these projects directly help the developers of the games? They mainly benefit Valve & their own operating system. DXVK & Proton are the only projects which would help but it's obvious that it's not enough.

I fully understand that Windows gamers and/or developers might see Valve as a dangerous imposing passive and unmoving force, because Valve earned that reputation in the Windows space, but in the Linux gaming space we benefit quite a lot from them.

I'm talking of getting the actual game developers to provide actual support for Steam Deck / Proton / Linux. What are they doing this way?

For Valve this is probably illegal and ineffective.
illegal:
Valve is big enough that anti-trust law applies to them and bundling services for a discount is probably a form of "tying" and thus illegal(ask Microsoft about teams and office).

If it was simply illegal, nobody would be able to do it. Bundling the Index with Half-Life: Alyx would be illegal. Microsoft tying Office & Teams is illegal because they have a monopoly with Office, putting any Teams competitor to a huge disadvantage to sell their alternative. That's not the case with the Steam Deck / Proton / Linux (they could bind it to Proton / Linux in general if we are saying they are market leader for PC based handheld devices).

Besides: They're already lowering their cut if the revenue surpasses a certain amount. This can easily be argued as illegal since they're forcing small studios to exclusively release on Steam to avoid splitting the revenue. So no, I seriously doubt any anti-trust law considerations.

Ineffective:
they tried bribing developers to support Linux for the Steam machine...

Steam machines were a complete disaster & failure, so that's not comparable.

Tim Sweeney is the best comedian of this century […]
3. They showed that gaming handhelds can be successful with Deck.

Funny. You have really never heard of Nintendo?

[…] There are many things to say against Valve, starting from their cut being way to high. But saying they do nothing is just not true. Especially if you compare Steam to Epic! Comparing with GOG and Itch could be understandable. GOG has the merit to be against DRM and Itch is the platform for very indie games. There are reasons to love these two stores. But Epic? :D

You fail to provide a single point which shows what Valve is directly doing to entice developers to officially support the Steam Deck / Proton / Linux.

What directly helps the developers.
Proton basically took all the active effort needed to support SteamDeck away and left only active blocking efforts(Batteleye does support SteamDeck EA just really wants to not support it when they include it, Roblox gave active Wine isn't supported errors, LOL worked until the devs publicly declared to start blocking Linux, etc).
DXVK gave significant preformance improvements(in both Windows and Linux) that meant they've to spend less time optimising the game to get it to work.
MESA means they can work with a single graphics api instead of twenty different dirvers.
NVIDIA driver improvements means performance and more importantly stability improvements on Linux
VAC and Steam store Linux support means they can rely on the Steam API, drm and anti-cheat in the SteamDeck space.
KDE sponsorship means that the stuff they show actually gets shown right.
The Steam store separate distribution mechanism made live easier for anti-cheat providers to support SteamDeck(which they did although based on how it went I suspect Valve flatout bribed them with direct payment, which was effective in this case, since there are a lot anti-cheat products than Games, for which we can the Microsoft driver signing policy).
The SteamDeck itself means direct financial gain for the devs for supporting Linux(A growing market with paying customers)
The Nautilus patches mean better performance on the SteamDeck specifically, so they don't have to deal with a slow platform forcing them to spend time on platform specific optimizations.

\
EDIT:
What you actually meant is: what helps the direct income of the studios(cost savings don't count) for SteamDeck games?
SteamDeck(cutting into the console market with pc games).
Proton improvement(if your game becomes available on a new platform through no effort of your own, suddenly a new group of people will license it.)
VAC and Steam Store Linux support(anti-cheat and drm against pirates and cheaters which don't pay you for your services/products and are assumed to do that if they can't take them another way.)
(Grudgingly) the Steam Deck verified system. By providing a way for customers to easily check whether a game works they create a financial incentive to build working games, because customers prefer to buy working games and if they're not wasting it on non-working games they have more money leftover to spend it on the working games.
\

On the ineffectivity stuff:
The steam machine was a failure, because they took the bribery path.
What makes Steam a success all the available games.
Bribes are slow and expensive.
A successful bribe costs at least the price of porting an entire game to Linux(+profit margin), which was back than several days to months of work and gets you one game.
If you get something working in Proton it works for all games with the same dependencies and it is comparably expensive, because porting is mostly replacing Linux incompatible parts dependencies and Proton is too(and giving it the same name as the incompatible dependency) and it's forward compatible too this problem won't show up by new yet to come games.
Valve has lots of money that's true, but they don't have the kind of money that would allow all studios to do a soft rewrite of 60% of all their games and support a platform without significant amounts of users for 5 years(The SteamDeck userbase is growing rapidly, but it took 5 years to get to this point and it's still an ignorable platform, the SteamMachine wouldn't have grown faster)(I estimate that would require a 61% cut instead of a 30% cut).

\
Edit:
Also you might argue that it's not comparable, but it's the failure Valve learned from for the SteamDeck.
First they published a failure.
Then they published a success.
That's because the first they did things that don't work.
Than they did things that work.
It's how learning through experience works and as we all know "experience is the best teacher, but the tuition fees are really high."
\




On the anti-trust stuff:
A. just because it's illegal doesn't mean people can't do it. Murder is illegal in the USA, yet on average somebody is killed at least every day. Piracy is illegal, but there are still million and even billion dollar businesses if you count AI companies(trillion if you count Google) based on it, GPL violations are super common in the IOT space(AHEM Samsung, Vizio, CISCO, etc.) and they still get rich from it, Microsoft pays on average 30$ dollars par Windows license worth in active litigation of patent violations in Windows.
Firing workers for going on strike is illegal in the USA, but according to Trump in their X conversation Elon Musk did it.
I'm happy to hear you're such a law abiding citizen that you can't imagine people could break the law to get rich, but not everybody thinks like you.
B. Tying isn't simply illegal.
It's illegal if you're the seriously dominant player in one of the markets your tying.
Valve is that in the pc gaming distribution space.
Marketshare matters in whether or not something is anti-competative.
This lawsuit actually accuses them of tying.
One of google's defenses in the Google search anti-trust trial was that they had always even when they were smaller behaved this way.
That got thrown out, because the same behavior can be anti-competative when done by a dominant player.

Edit:
About the increasing discount:
In that case they're using only one service/product to achieve what they want, the Steam Store.
That falls under Bulk discounts.
A big difference in such case is that you can explain to the judge that thanks to scale economics you actually spend less par product and that you're simply calculating your discount through to the customer.
This doesn't work for tying, because the different products are supposed to have a mostly different supply chain(translated in an example most to all of the developer time spend adding features and improvements UE doesn't help adding features to Epic Store and vice versa).
It's how Sweeney negotiated this one out.
He argued that the 30% percent made sense when the Steam Store was smaller in scale, but that, because these same economics of scale Valve spend a lot less on it and Valve agreed(grudgingly) and gave large publishers a discount, because their larger scale provided them with cost savings(the only cost savings agreed to officially were marketing, big games pull many customers, but this's at least also true for hosting(storing one file of a hunderd gb is easier to index and store than a 10 of 10gb), legal and moderation).
Epic Games negotiation. Sweeney might not have gotten his favored outcome, but he did win this round.


Last edited by LoudTechie on 3 October 2024 at 12:09 pm UTC

On the anti-trust stuff

What about the price parity enforcement Valve has been doing?

On the anti-trust stuff

What about the price parity enforcement Valve has been doing?

They're currently in court for that on anti-trust charges, so the option: "yes, that is illegal" is very much on the table.
As Google can tell you doing multiple anti-trust violations can very much result in multiple really expensive convictions.
Valve's lawyers might be getting wise and slowly start advising Valve to not break the law.

I suspect this will actually turn out to be asymetric tying in a market in which they aren't a monopolist(drm(the market in which they do the tying) to SteamStore) instead of enforced price parity, because you can use SteamStore without SteamDRM(ask Epic Games), but not SteamDRM without SteamStore, but that is a question for the judge.


Last edited by LoudTechie on 3 October 2024 at 7:18 pm UTC

On the anti-trust stuff

What about the price parity enforcement Valve has been doing?

There's been no evidence that that's a thing that they've done.

Maybe some evidence of that will turn up, but it hasn't yet.

I still think it's funny that Tim laid off 870 people from the company in September of 2023, because the company was in such financial trouble that they could not possibly find some other method of employing them that did not require them to kick staff to the curb. Somehow, the elimination of 16% of their total work force is not grounds for his own dismissal from his position as CEO of the company, though even if he had been dismissed, I'm sure he would have had a substantial golden parachute to send him on his way.

He then not more than a day ago makes a statement at Unreal Fest 2024 saying that the company is now financially stable, and then proceed to launch what will undoubtedly be yet another massively expensive lawsuit aimed at Google and Samsung.

On the anti-trust stuff

What about the price parity enforcement Valve has been doing?

There's been no evidence that that's a thing that they've done.

Maybe some evidence of that will turn up, but it hasn't yet.

I was looking through the court documents for the case the other day: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/59859024/wolfire-games-llc-v-valve-corporation/

In the Exhibit 85 document on Aug 23, 2024, there is some reference to emails from Valve about price parity that is being submitted as evidence.

For example:

Tom Giardino, a Steam Business Team member, described Valve’s pricing padty requirement as "a platform goal that goes beyond Steam keys[.]" See: Valve, Emails Regarding Game Pricing, 7/23/2018-7/25/2018 (VALVE_ANT_0605887-89, at VALVE_ANT_0605887).

For example, Valve withholding promotion unless the publisher prices the game the same as they do on other platforms:

When publisher XXX asked Valve if it could leave XXX out of a discount it was planning to run, Valve told the publisher that "we didn't want to be known as the store where XXX prices are unfair. We’ve pursued this same policy with other partners and in other regions, to make sure Steam customers aren't put at an unfair disadvantage to customers shopping at retail or online at other stores." See: Valve, Emails Regarding XXX Game Promotion, 1/21/2015-2/5/2015 (VALVE_ANT_0809427-434, at VALVE_ANT_0809428-429). (Emphasis in original.)

Valve explicitly asking that prices for games not be cheaper anywhere else, even if only by a dollar:

A drafted Valve announcement regarding new currencies on Steam asks publishers that "Just make sure that you're not disadvantaging Steam customers; if you sell your game for £8.99 on another store, it shouldn’t be £9.99 on Steam." See: Valve, Emails Regarding New Currencies on Steam, 7/9/2015-7/24/2015 (VALVE_ANT_0114214-20, at VALVE_ANT_0114215), available at Tom Giardino, Dep. Tr., 11/2/2023, Exhibit 187 (Emphasis added.)

Valve suggesting that publishers should stop selling their games on Steam if they refuse to price their games on Steam at parity elsewhere, and then saying they've de-listed games for this behaviour before:

Valve remarked in another email that "if you wanted to sell a non-Steam version of your game for $10 at retail and $20 on Steam, we’d ask to get that same lower price or just stop selling the game on Steam if we couldn’t treat our customers fairly[,]" and went on to confirm that this was not a new policy: "we’ve always asked that partners treat our customers fairly, and we've often opted not to promote games or stop selling them altogether if we aren’t able to get fair treatment for our users." See: Valve, Emails Regarding Steam Key Guidelines, 6/28/2018-7/3/2018 (VALVE_ANT_0605087-89, at VALVE_ANT_0605087)0 available at Gabe Newell0 Dep. Tr., 11/21/2023, Exhibit 349.

Valve talking about how important price parity is and referencing a game they de-listed for refusing to tow the line:

Valve, Emails Between XXX and Valve, 6/6/2013-6/7/2013 (VALVE_ANT_1216044-45, VALVE_ANT_1216044). ("[T]his
presents a problem for us on Steam. We want to make sure that our price on Steam is competitive with retail and other
digital stores in XXX so that we do not teach customers that Steam is always the expensive option.")

Valve, Emails Between XXX and Valve, 8/15/2014 (VALVE_ANT_2576464). (Valve tells XXX that it "[j]ust saw today that the pricing for XXX on Steam is uncompetitive with other retailers, similar to the issue we’re having with XXX and XXX.... We’ve made the choice to take the game down until we can reach price parity.")

I recommend reading through some of the documents in courtlistener. There seem to be several publishers involved in this case willing to enter email correspondence from Valve as evidence.


Last edited by pleasereadthemanual on 4 October 2024 at 1:44 am UTC

In the Exhibit 85 document on Aug 23, 2024, there is some reference to emails from Valve about price parity that is being submitted as evidence.

For context, the plaintiff's expert witness produced a report saying what the plaintiff wanted; Valve's expert witness (compellingly, IMO) said that plaintiff's report was terrible and shouldn't be allowed in the case, and the document you're looking at is plaintiffs arguing that their export report should totally be allowed. None of it's actually in the case as evidence yet. Both sides are still in the "what is this case actually about" stage. Although, to be fair, once "what a case is actually about" is decided in anti-trust cases, the outcome tends to follow directly - hence the years of haggling before that point.

In the Exhibit 85 document on Aug 23, 2024, there is some reference to emails from Valve about price parity that is being submitted as evidence.

For context, the plaintiff's expert witness produced a report saying what the plaintiff wanted; Valve's expert witness (compellingly, IMO) said that plaintiff's report was terrible and shouldn't be allowed in the case, and the document you're looking at is plaintiffs arguing that their export report should totally be allowed. None of it's actually in the case as evidence yet. Both sides are still in the "what is this case actually about" stage. Although, to be fair, once "what a case is actually about" is decided in anti-trust cases, the outcome tends to follow directly - hence the years of haggling before that point.

I won't pretend to understand the specifics here (and there are a lot of documents to sift through), but my understanding is that these are direct quotes from emails. I think the only way Valve could come out of this cleanly is if the emails were completely fabricated.

But it does seem early to conclude whether that is evidence or not.

I won't pretend to understand the specifics here (and there are a lot of documents to sift through), but my understanding is that these are direct quotes from emails. I think the only way Valve could come out of this cleanly is if the emails were completely fabricated.

But it does seem early to conclude whether that is evidence or not.

Oh, I'm sure they were excerpts of actual emails sent from actual people at Valve. Discovery dredges up a tonne of stuff - from other companies, too, as you noted. The court will look at the context of the documents, and both sides will make their arguments, and the court will decide whether it shows a policy or pattern of wrongdoing, or whether it's just perfectly fine course of business stuff.

Plaintiffs have to throw every accusation they can, since they can't generally add them afterwards, and then they have to dig around to find something that might support their position; the court case is what determines whether there's any validity to it.

Media and commentators love to look at accusations of the plaintiff, since they get to go first and they necessarily have to throw in the most salacious stuff, whereas actual court cases are really long and kinda boring.

I won't pretend to understand the specifics here (and there are a lot of documents to sift through), but my understanding is that these are direct quotes from emails. I think the only way Valve could come out of this cleanly is if the emails were completely fabricated.

But it does seem early to conclude whether that is evidence or not.

Oh, I'm sure they were excerpts of actual emails sent from actual people at Valve. Discovery dredges up a tonne of stuff - from other companies, too, as you noted. The court will look at the context of the documents, and both sides will make their arguments, and the court will decide whether it shows a policy or pattern of wrongdoing, or whether it's just perfectly fine course of business stuff.

Plaintiffs have to throw every accusation they can, since they can't generally add them afterwards, and then they have to dig around to find something that might support their position; the court case is what determines whether there's any validity to it.

Media and commentators love to look at accusations of the plaintiff, since they get to go first and they necessarily have to throw in the most salacious stuff, whereas actual court cases are really long and kinda boring.

I agree with all of this, though assuming all of these emails are factual, I don't think any amount of context will change my opinion. But we'll see.

Do you have a link to Valve's rebuttal? I'd be interested in reading it.

I agree with all of this, though assuming all of these emails are factual, I don't think any amount of context will change my opinion. But we'll see.

What Valve have said is that they want their customers to get a fair deal, and if it looks like they aren't they would like to find out why and if there's anything they can do to change that. Is that "getting a good deal for your customers" or is that "monopolistic price-fixing"? Given that it's publishers that set their own prices, and you can find games cheaper than on Steam, is there any actual harm from Valve's actions even if their intent was super nefarious? Those are the kinds of questions that the court would have to find answers for.

Do you have a link to Valve's rebuttal? I'd be interested in reading it.

It's the first two attachments (reports from two expert witnesses) on the motion to exclude testimony of Dr Schwarz, as I recall. The first one is about 300 pages. It's a while since I read it. Um... these two, I think: Attachment 1 and Attachment 2

What Valve have said is that they want their customers to get a fair deal, and if it looks like they aren't they would like to find out why and if there's anything they can do to change that. Is that "getting a good deal for your customers" or is that "monopolistic price-fixing"? Given that it's publishers that set their own prices, and you can find games cheaper than on Steam, is there any actual harm from Valve's actions even if their intent was super nefarious? Those are the kinds of questions that the court would have to find answers for.

For sure, it's up to the courts and not armchair lawyer P.R.T Manual. My opinion is this:

Threatening to de-list a publisher's game from Steam if they do not bring the price down to match the game's price on other stores has a direct impact on other stores—namely, Epic Games Store (EGS). EGS takes a smaller cut than Steam, which means publishers would be able to price their games lower on EGS to get more sales. But because of Steam's price parity policy, publishers can't take advantage of this. We can argue whether Steam's cut is fair or not (I think it is), but it's that royalty split that is responsible for EGS customers getting a better deal than Steam customers. If Valve is really so concerned about making sure Steam customers get a better deal, they should match EGS' royalty split. If not, they shouldn't threaten publishers with de-listing because EGS has a more attractive deal.

I mentioned EGS because of its obvious relevance to the case, but this applies equally to smaller stores like itch.io. Wolfire is an indie publisher, and Valve is not above threatening smaller publishers. If Valve didn't enforce price parity, itch.io could rightfully be much more relevant because of its ridiculously good royalty deals for publishers. And I think that's kind of sad.

There's also the fact that Valve has said, for years, that there is no such price parity policy when in reality they actively enforce it, so clearly they think they're doing something wrong too by attempting to hide it.

It's the first two attachments (reports from two expert witnesses) on the motion to exclude testimony of Dr Schwarz, as I recall. The first one is about 300 pages. It's a while since I read it. Um... these two, I think: Attachment 1 and Attachment 2

Thanks! This should make for some exciting bedtime reading.

Threatening to de-list a publisher's game from Steam if they do not bring the price down to match the game's price on other stores has a direct impact on other stores—namely, Epic Games Store (EGS).

Note that it's not just that they don't want publishers to specifically rip off Steam customers on price, they also don't want them to shaft Steam customers on content. If, say, a game bought on PlayStation has a PlayStation exclusive item, and bought on Xbox has an Xbox exclusive item, and bought on EGS has an EGS exclusive item, then they for sure want the game bought on Steam to have an equivalent Steam item.

As to whether games can be sold cheaper on EGS (or wherever), they absolutely can.
!link

[…]

The developers keep developing for Windows. They don't care much about the Steam Deck or Linux or they would provide actual support. They just take the money from people who mostly would buy the games anyway.

Valve suppport these projects because they're part of the platform. Without it they would've had another Steam machine disaster. Steam machines didn't fail because of "bribery" but because Valve overestimated their standing with customers & developers. I'm sure everyone was really shocked nobody wanted to buy expensive PCs you could basically play no games with.

If you murder someone in public there is usually less of a question about it. Microsoft & Valve are bundling their stuff in public. It took quite some time to reach the conclusion that Teams bundling is in fact illegal. So no, in general it's not illegal. Valve does not have a monopoly in the handheld or Linux sector. So I doubt there is any more consideration than their existing illegal activities.

They're not selling anything, what bulk discount should that really be? It's just a mechanism to hurt their competitors. They have basically no extra costs for additional sales (we're talking about digial products). If there was some kind of storage cost, they would've to tie it to the actual storage size needed. Marketing would be just another tying to force developers move their customers to Steam (by your definition illegal).

The developers keep developing for windows

And yet the amount of their games compatible with GNU/Linux keeps growing rapidly.
It didn't cost them anything and allows them to compete in places they could've never afforded to compete in.
Thanks to the technical way of wine/proton.
It's easier to convince computers to do something technical than people.

Valve only does it, because it's part of the platform:
that's backwards.
XBOX, Playstation, Android, Epic game store and Switch don't have vendor developed compatibility layers as part of their platforms(Windows does with WSL and Apple does with game porting toolkit).
Especially not one that is open source and is as such useful for other platforms, like Mac(game porting toolkit) or GNU/Linux(UMU).
This is something Valve offers extra on their in an effort to appease users and developers in strengthening their platform.

On the steam machine thing I concede.
I remembered some things wrong.

I still say that paying publishers to develop for an extra platform isn't as scalable as developing translation layers especially in an open source context, because convincing people is hard and expensive, while developing translation layers allows you to use existing talent and projects and once you've achieved something for one case you've also achieved it for all other cases.

on the murder thing:
A. As I already said tying isn't always illegal. It's illegal when a. you're the distantly dominant player in the tying market and b. you're actually using your market dominance to keep other players from effectively competing with you.
This is the minority of all tying cases.
What Epic did for example is legal tying. They're not the distantly dominant player in the game store market and/or the game engine market, so condition a won't be met.
That doesn't make it legal for Valve, because they're the distantly dominant in the game store market.
It actually admits this in the case pleaseReadTheManual refers to.
This simplifies a lot of legal analysis.
It removes the "what is the market?" question, which makes anti-trust cases often difficult(this one is often found in cases against Google).
It removes the "what is market dominance?" question, which less often, but still often makes anti-trust cases difficult(this one is often found in cases against Apple).
B. Even the most obvious murder cases take multiple years, before you get a guilty verdict or even a trial, because the lawyers need to figure out who the damaged party is, what compensation the damaged party wants, which kind of murder it was(manslaughter, first/second/third degree murder), whether there're extra complicating elements to the case(mental health, suppliers, criminal liquidation, etc.), how far the relevant parties are willing to go to get what they want, etc.



The case pleaseReadTheManual refers to actually has an even more wide interpretation of "the tying market" than I present here.
They say that if you connect the use of a product in which you're not dominant(steam keys) to using a product in which you're dominant(steam) without also doing the reverse it's tying.
I simply present that connecting a product in which you're dominant(gaming stores) to a product you're not dominant(OS's) and thereby exploiting your dominant market position(anti-competiveness is exploiting a dominant market position to quell competition) is tying.


On the: they're not selling anything point.
They do sell something for which they as I described before they make several kinds of costs.

What do they sell:
Distribution, service, protection and store space/marketing.
Distribution: the games are hosted on Steam servers meaning that they can be bought, downloaded, maintained and repaired in a large array of possible locations when the publisher can't supply this themselves(DOS, costs, bankruptcy, crashes, etc).
Service: Steam offers several default options like payment method/drm/anti-cheat/api/etc. saving you several man days of choosing the right one for your game(and still the freedom to choose a different one if you want a different one, but that's a different discussion).
Store space/marketing: this is actually a scarce good to them. They have thousands of buying wallets looking at their store, but it is still a finite number, which wallets do you show what? Steam has taken the lottery approach, you can buy a chance to get there, but not the assurance.
Protection: by hosting the content they take a certain level of legal responsibility and risk on themselves the publishers would otherwise have to(this can't be opted out if you use other services, because laws can go pretty far in holding digital infrastructure responsible for what happens there).
Also they moderate both comments and games.


Costs they make for this product:
Hosting: each and every game on the steam store is hosted on Steams servers ensuring availability.
Legal: they take various legal risks and that requires lawyers.(DMCA(prosecuting and defending), EU cybersecurity act, gdpr, ISTG2021, Sherman act, DMA, FTC act, DSA, taxes, etc.)
They function in different jurisdictions, so they will need many different kinds of lawyers(and yes although the location of your headquarters matters it isn't enough several countries will block your platform if you don't comply with local laws).
Moderation: moderators are expensive.
Development: they need to keep the store and the services it offers up-to date.
Marketing: steam gift cards in the physical stores, flatout steam ads, etc.
Administration: lots of money requires lots of administration.
Communication: keeping your customers informed about changes is needed, because they need to be able to adapt.


Savings made thanks to big publishers:
Hosting: fewer files and file classification and thus better compression and less fragmentation and tendency to run own update systems(saving Steam update bandwidth)
Legal: less total content, better legal pre-processing(internal legal teams of the publisher avoid crimes and possibly even send documentation)
Moderation: publisher moderation teams, more uniform content(all of Fortnight has no sex, but only most battle royale games)
Development: most stuff is developed in house and shipped with the game reducing system dependencies(which is the stuff which can force you to update) and better security reviews of the using hosted software.
Marketing: big publishers pull many payers.
Administration: large sums of money are easier to administrate than many small sums, because you need to classify each transaction(ask crypto).
Communication: it's easier to inform one publisher than a thousand.


On the marketing forces and is thus illegal part:
In marketing they're a. not the dominant market player(Google, Apple appstore, etc. are much bigger) and b. it's part of the product they sell and thus within a single market definition.
In this case it thus fails one of the two standard problematic tests: "What's the market?", "What's dominance"
Dominance isn't the case in marketing and in Gaming Store space(where they do have dominance) it's all part of the same product and thus not anti-competative.
As I already said before tying isn't always illegal, but it certainly can be and coupling Steam Store prices to anything other than Steam Store services is certainly one of those.

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The developers keep developing for Windows. They don't care much about the Steam Deck or Linux or they would provide actual support. They just take the money from people who mostly would buy the games anyway.

Valve suppport these projects because they're part of the platform. Without it they would've had another Steam machine disaster. Steam machines didn't fail because of "bribery" but because Valve overestimated their standing with customers & developers. I'm sure everyone was really shocked nobody wanted to buy expensive PCs you could basically play no games with.

If you murder someone in public there is usually less of a question about it. Microsoft & Valve are bundling their stuff in public. It took quite some time to reach the conclusion that Teams bundling is in fact illegal. So no, in general it's not illegal. Valve does not have a monopoly in the handheld or Linux sector. So I doubt there is any more consideration than their existing illegal activities.

They're not selling anything, what bulk discount should that really be? It's just a mechanism to hurt their competitors. They have basically no extra costs for additional sales (we're talking about digial products). If there was some kind of storage cost, they would've to tie it to the actual storage size needed. Marketing would be just another tying to force developers move their customers to Steam (by your definition illegal).