They have a monopoly but that’s because they’re just the best service. It’s not just that they were the first, they’re just consistently the best. Everybody who has spun up another ancillary launcher and DRM service has always made an inferior product to Valve’s.
Epic games bribes you with free games, launched without a functioning cart, and hoovers your data.
EA has gone through Origin and the EA app, both of which are awful; Origin being the butt of jokes for years and the EA app being an unstable piece of garbage that logs you out every day with “a particularly annoying bug”.
Ubisoft. Self explanatory.
I could keep going on, but Valve earned their position in the market. Could they reduce the cut and still exist with a good profit? Absolutely, but that’s the only thing I’d really want them to change - treat the devs a bit more fairly.
It doesn’t matter. The suit is alleging that valve threatened to ban games if they were cheaper on other stores. Thats monopolistic price manipulation, and it’s illegal. Valve even pro.ises not to do this in its terms of service - their price parity policy is only supposed to apply to steam keys. That would be fair, because otherwise they couldn’t give out keys in the first place. But you can’t force devs to list games at the same price and then decide on the cut you will take if you are a monopoly. They will have to prove Valve violated its ToS.
If that’s what they actually did then they deserve to have legal repercussions.
Right. Valve is claiming they didn’t, and that they only demand price parity for steam keys. So it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Honestly, I am not sure what game valve would play to do this. Devs could just make a red and green version of their game to sell on different platforms and price them differently. Meanwhile, to customers, a games price is a games price and developer publisher and distributor are always incentivized to find the highest price a customer is willing to pay through game theory. The market has definitely proven that customers don’t care about what percentage of the cut goes to devs. So there is no incentive for anyone to post a game at a lower price than what a customer is wiling to pay on steam as long as steam retains the highest volume. Telling devs to not price the way they want seems very counter productive to being a good retailer, so who knows.
I don’t mind their market position. I do mind them taking an entire third of revenue, straight off the top. That’s bullshit enough when console manufacturers do it - and they claim that’s to subsidize the hardware platform that they built and control.
They offer a hell of a lot more per dollar for their 30% (which isn’t actually 30%, and increases your sales volume by way more than enough to make up the difference) than Epic does for their cut.
“Increases sales” just underlines that they have a monopoly.
No shit you sell more by dealing with a monopoly. They’re the biggest store. That’s what happens when you’re a monopoly.
And I don’t remember saying one word about Epic.
No, it doesn’t. It means that they add massive value and more people buy more games as a direct result of the value that they add. Valve has done more to grow the PC gaming space than anyone else and there isn’t anything close.
They could take 50% and they would still offer by far the best value out there with nothing else close. Their cut is extremely generous to developers.
Epic is the only one offering a meaningfully different cut from anyone else, and they’re doing it by being absolute dogshit at everything connected to their store in any way.
“They could take more and still control the market” is a confession, not a counterargument.
And it directly contradicts saying they need that much money, in order to… “provide value.” An aggressive hand-wave that ignores how Sony and Microsoft take the same cut for platforms they own and control completely.
This 30% off-the-top is a de facto standard that’s basically just left over from when Nintendo had 90% market share and had to physically manufacture cartridges months in advance. I don’t care what Valve says they’re providing - they did not do half as much per game as the people who made the fucking game. They don’t deserve a third of their money.
They could take more and still deserve it.
What they “need” is irrelevant. They deserve every penny.
If valve never existed, the best case companies would make way less than half as much on PC gaming, and a meaningful proportion would literally make nothing because distributing software for revenue is extremely difficult for a normal person or small team to do. Anyone paying 30% is getting a bargain, because distributing the same volume by themselves would cost more than that in labor and other costs.
The entire PC gaming market exists because Valve created it.
I got a binder full of PC CD-ROMs that says “bullshit.”
Valve has contributed to the PC gaming market. But they got there by shoving their middleman service into a game everyone bought anyway, at a store, because Steam did not exist. It sucked. It sucks a lot less now, in part because they take an entire fucking third of every sale, and if you think all those sales could only possibly happen by taking that much money from them, you’re not even listening to yourself.
