Yeah, that is how you make sure that you stay a quasi monopoly and can keep taking that massive middle man cut.
It makes no economic sense for a corporation to play fair and allow competition to rise.What doesn’t make sense is that these companies want to force Valve to be a free advertising and leads service for them, and force them to help funnel their own customers away by using anti-consumer practices (the third party company being the one using anti competitive practices).
Any reseller will stop handling your product if has a pricing disadvantage.
I find the comments in these threads unbelievable.
If pretty much any company on earth threatened a supplier over a storefront they have nothing to do with, there would be outrage. That’s blatant anticompetitiveness. It means they have the power to set pricing like a dictator because their store alone is more important than the rest.
It’s a fact. A state of the matter. It is a textbook definition of monopolism in progress.
Yet Lemmy, and every gaming forum, turn out to defend Valve?
WTF.
I mean, I’m not ditching my Steam library. Valve does many things right. But I wouldn’t be caught dead defending the greedy monopolistic practices of… any corporation abusing that situation.
And I haven’t seen a single convincing argument to justify this specific policy from Valve, either.
This is an older article. Ubisoft was (and is?) pulling some shady shit here though. What they’re doing:
- Selling the base game via Steam for free (limited features, but most important stuff is there) or a frequently discounted amount for full access (think less than 10 bucks).
- Selling a bonus starter pack that can be used for the Steam game for a larger amount (used to be 20? Looks like 15 now) exclusively via Ubisoft’s own platform.
So for a new player to get started, they’d get the base game for free, with Valve paying for all the costs related to the download infrastructure, etc…, and then pay Ubisoft directly for their ingame starter gear, bypassing Valve entirely. This was just an attempt by Ubisoft to skirt by Valve’s rules.
Valve is extremely lenient when it comes to this sort of stuff. But they’re not going to allow a publisher to abuse the system to essentially get free game distribution via Steam while still making a profit via this side channel. It’s basically a way to bypass the Steam key resell rule, where Steam keys may not be resold for lower prices on other platforms (but you don’t have to pay the 30% fee when you do).
To put Ubisoft’s case to the extreme, imagine a game comes out for free on Steam, but opening it opens up another storefront where you first need to pay 60 bucks to actually play the game. Does it make sense for Valve to continue offering their services here if they are blocked from making any money off of it?
What you’re describing sounds a lot like iOS’s/Google’s IAP fee cut and the controversy around it.
…And I’d still side against Valve in that case, like I did against Apple and Google.
The issue is Valve shouldn’t be in that anticompetitive position in the first place.
Ubisoft isn’t “leeching” off Steam because they want to, they have their own download and game networking infrastructure already. In that scenario, Ubisoft is only listing on Steam and trying to skirt the 30% cut because they effectively have to be on Steam.
And the only response I’ve seen to this is “well, Ubisoft just shouldn’t be on Steam if they don’t like it.”
But that’s commercial suicide now. It’s list, or die, basically.
What? So in your head Valve has to be okay with companies using their infrastructure for everything while selling the main access elsewhere just because it’s a bad idea not to have your game in Steam?
Look, if this had been a “you can’t sell the same thing cheaper elsewhere or we delist you” kind of deal I would agree it’s using their power to dictate price. But from what that other commenter said this was the other company selling a cheap launcher on Steam and then selling in-game content for everything inside it. So try were making Valve pay the price to host the full game but only selling some content of it on their store. It’s like saying Epic launcher were to be sold on Steam (except even worse, because it’s a launcher that contains the full game thus forcing Valve to foot the bill for hosting/downloads while the other company takes the profit for the game sale).
Ubisoft is only listing on Steam and trying to skirt the 30% cut because they effectively have to be on Steam.
They didn’t have to be on Steam. They could have put in the effort to make their storefront worth going to instead of being an awful pile of trash.
Not contesting that the Ubisoft launcher is a gigantic pile of trash.
But that doesn’t make a pseudo monopoly okay.
It does not mean Valve should get to dictate what happens in other stores with threats of their own. A policy like that is anti consumer and should be illegal.
Letting companies sell DLC outside of the Steam Store sounds like a bad deal for Valve but they look like a good company for publicly following through with it. If too many companies are abusing that policy, Valve is well within their rights to revise the policy and ban the behavior, taking the resulting PR hit. What they are not allowed to do is act like the good guy publicly while secretly and selectively enforcing a ban for companies that they are mad at
P.S. If Valve does ban selling DLC outside of the Steam Store, it would make Steam an unusually restrictive store. I can open up Steam and buy DLC for any game by Wise Wizard Games, associate that DLC with my online multiplayer account, then download the same game (for free) on iOS and Android, open up the new copies, log into my online play account, sync purchases, and play my newly purchased DLC from another app store. I have never heard of an App store not allowing it but most game developers do not implement it because it costs them money to code it up and they make money from people who buy the same contents multiple times.
Thats unusual for iOS/Android, as they are pretty strict about the 30% cut for in-app purchases, and the “no external stores” thing.
I can think of other cases where some external purchases (like, say, a streaming subscription) apply to the app. But if you buy that DLC in-app, Apple/Google get the cut, no question. If you buy a streaming subscription in the app, AFAIK they get a cut too.
In my experience, Android and Apple’s enforcement is quite spotty. I wouldn’t be surprised if WWG arbitrarily got a hammer dropped on them at some point.
I think one reason is that given the stage in capitalism we’ve been living for some time now has completely fucked people’s understanding of what markets, competition, monopoly power, and so on are. Not people’s fault really. We live in this system, we observe and learn about it from what it claims about itself. We have to do extra work to have any different understanding. Most people don’t have extra time for unpaid work.
…That makes some sense.
It explains a lot of commentary I see, framing it as “who the price setting is benefiting,” customer vs publisher vs dev, as if the storefront price fixing is a predestined thing already.
It’s not supposed to be that way.
But it makes sense if that’s all people see in big box chains, the App Store/Google Play, streaming services, Amazon, or wherever.
Yup. And platforms like Play/Amazon/etc. are even further away from markets than big box stores because people don’t all see the same items for sale to choose from, which is fundamental to the functioning of free markets.
BTW I’m not a fan of free markets, but for the limited set of economic use cases they serve well, at least they gotta function as such.
The thing being described is exactly how Amazon fucked the market. If someone can understand why Amazon is bad (business-wise) then they can understand why Valve needs to be held accountable. Lest they become the Amazon of vidjagames
There is no justification if what you describe is true. But a lot of people are willing to give Valve benefit of the doubt, assuming it is false until proven in court. Especially coming from Ubisoft of all places.
I’m not in favor of these practices by Valve either. It seems like the group you’re describing are interpreting this as Valve wont let anyone rip off their customers so you can be sure you’re getting it at the best price there, rather than Valve wont let anyone change the narrative that you’re getting it at the best price there and should buy everything there.
Why complicate it?
It’s simply “Valve is dictating prices on unrelated stores.”
That’s the fact. It’s a lot harder to get around that than contemplating motivations.
Thats not even what’s happening. If what theyre saying is true, Valve is dictating prices on Steam based on third-party stores (they are very related if they are competitors and selling the same products.)
Don’t spin the narrative.
This happened after Valve discovered that Ubisoft was marketing a cheaper $15 “starter pack” exclusively through its own Uplay store. The report suggests Ubisoft was effectively given a short deadline to fix the situation or risk losing its Steam presence entirely.
Another example cited in the same report involves Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. In 2017, Valve employee Kassidy Gerber reportedly informed Warner Bros. that preorders for Middle-earth: Shadow of War had been removed from Steam. The reason given was that the Steam price was “significantly higher than what was available at other retailers for the same version of the game.” According to the report, Warner Bros. leadership quickly reached out to resolve the issue.
Valve is threatening to delist games for undercutting Steam in price.
That is the allegation.
Why is this any different than any other supplier/retail relationship? Hey you are giving a deal to another store, we want a better price. No? Okay then we won’t carry your product if you can give us a better price but don’t want to.
Explain to me why that’s a problem with Valve, and not every other business ever.
I’m assuming I’m not understanding something correctly and hoping you can explain what I’m missing
Valve is setting the shelf price. On the supplier’s own store.
To reiterate, what Valve said was “we don’t like that sticker price. Change it to match ours or we won’t carry your product.” It’s not Valve requesting “a better deal” on the supply end, it’s Valve demanding sticker price parity.
In any normal, competitive market, this would be ridiculous.
Either Valve would reduce their profit margin to match the other store’s price, or if they can’t, stop selling the good and part ways with the supplier. The game would be sold everywhere else, business as usual.
But Valve controls majority of the PC game market, hence this would be commercial suicide for Ubisoft. So they can’t.
They control the price of their supplier and all the competing storefronts.
…How is that not blatant monopolism?
And why would other companies doing that make it okay?
Yeah, that’s what they’re alleging. And if it turns out to be true, that’s fucked and hope they get punished for it.
However, in the article there’s two quotes and neither prove that’s what they’re doing.
The reason given was that the Steam price was “significantly higher than what was available at other retailers for the same version of the game.”
This sounds consistent with all the previous instances and with their rule of matching whatever low price others provide which is not about price fixing.
They agreed to valves terms when they listed their game. Then they aren’t following the deal, and Valve responds. I don’t see your problem. Valve takes 30%. If the game is less than they are selling it on steam else where and the deal was we will sell your game for you, but you can’t sell it cheaper elsewhere then that’s fair as I see it. “But Steam is Very good so we have to sell it there!” Is not a good argument if that’s being made
Do valve’s terms dictate they can delist your game if you sell it somewhere else for cheaper?? Even if it is, that’s fucking shitty to have in your terms lmao
As I understand it that’s the price everyone pays to use steam. Dont fucking use it if you dont like it. Why is this a problem? Because steam is too good is the only thing I’m hearing and that’s not steams fault. Everyone else has to do the same thing. Valve didn’t hide this. Also note that they didn’t in fact delist it. They merely considered it.
This is the same problem/argument I had when microtransactions in games started. Everyone jumped on board and now we have a gaming industry that because users can’t fucking say no they bitch and complain when they don’t get what they want.
Cry me a fucking river. Go sell your game everywhere else but Steam. Too fucking bad.
Also I have bought literally hundreds of games from other places, cheaper than steam. Many of them I needed steam to download the games…
Steam isnt doing anything wrong just because they are handsdown the goat of digital distribution. It’s about as anti competitive as Wayne Gretzky was at his best
The terms in question being anti competitive. Steam being very good is not an argument against them using there prominent position in the gaming sphere to do the same monopolistic shit Amazon did to enshitify shopping
“But Steam is Very good so we have to sell it there!” Is not a good argument if that’s being made.
That’s it!
That’s the argument!
It’s that Steam is so good that Ubisoft has no business choice but to accept Valve’s terms and sell it there.
It’s literally not viable to sell it cheaper on Ubisoft’s storefront, not to speak of every other gaming storefront in existence: Steam is more essential than all of them put together.
The pricing is not market driven.
If that’s not monopolistic, I don’t know what is, and if you still don’t see that I just don’t think we’re going to resolve this disagreement, because our perspectives are light years apart.
Then Ubisoft is a failed company if they can’t make a product that people want to buy. I have 0 empathy for them.
The second one with WB seems pretty reasonable as a business. If they’re gonna set the price at your store to be so much higher that nobody will buy it from you, why bother carrying it at all?
The one with Ubisoft, however, does not sound reasonable witthout knowing what, exactly, this starter pack was and how it worked. Was it a stand alone thing inside the game like some operators and skins, or was it something associated specifically with a Steam key that you are buying elsewhere? It sure does not sound like it would have a Steam key or have any specific connection to Steam except that it probably works for any version of the game, including if you have it on Steam, so it seems pretty sketch.
But if Ubisoft agreed to the terms then I don’t understand the problem with Valve taking action
The problem is that Valve is even in that position in the first place.
A storefront with pricing terms a supplier can’t say no to, with no viable alternative, is anticompetitive. If it was a competitive market, Ubisoft would break the agreement and sell lower, with dynamic pricing on other stores.
Valve has every right to take action on their own terms, of course, but that’s not the issue.
valve is a game company, did so good at helping others sell their games that you people call them anticompetitive. That’s just fucking laughable and I will never understand why so many of you seem to miss that. They didn’t go out and give a different deal to anyone else. But Ubisoft broke the terms they agreed to because they wanted to use VALVES service to hawk their wares. Well they have to pay the Piper, and they don’t get to cry foul if they try to fuck over the hand that fed them.
You can’t succeed without Valve is a dumb argument.
Blizzard had no problem with battlenet until they pissed in their customers faces.
Good old games is alive and kicking
Humble bundle now has a storefront
Greenman games is doing just fine.
And if you don’t like it then just stop using it and do the hard work yourself but NOOO that’s too hard to have to figure out how to actually sell your product.
God I hope valve just shuts steam down some day and says fuck you to everyone who complains like this
I assume it is a case of monopoly abuse. There are things you are allowed to get away with as a minor player in a market because no one has to do business with you.
For example, GoG can insist that developers give them a game build without DRM since they are a minor software store and a majority of their customers know they can buy software other places.
Steam, on the other hand, is used by almost all gamers. For many gamers, it is the only game store they use. If a game is listed on the Steam front page, a large portion of the games market will learn about the game. If Steam decides not to list a game, customers may assume that the game is not out yet, regardless of the amount of advertising they see for it. The publisher would need to have a special advertising campaign saying “yes, the game is out already but you have to use this other game store to buy it.”
But if that’s the policy that built steam, it isn’t abusing their position if they have been consistent from the before times. I’m don’t know if that’s the case but I don’t recall any particular discussion about it changing and we definately would have heard about people complaining of so.
A long standing policy that built this “monopoly” simply because no one else wanted to and were happy to hand over the reigns to steam for so long, you dont get to cry foul now if they aren’t actually using this supposed monopoly to punish people.
I think 30% is a lot, but it hasn’t been problematic till some big garbage company is upset about it? Ubisoft can go eat a bag of dicks. They had every chance to do something about this a decade ago. They shit the bed. Too bad for them. Flush. Move on imho
It’s common for those “other stores” to just be the dev’s own store or a store which takes a smaller cut than Valve.
To me, anyways, it seems perfectly expected for a business to want to pass on Valve’s charges to the customer. Whether this is harmful depends on whether you focus on the player or developer, and whether the developer responds by making the game cheaper everywhere or more expensive everywhere.
if you’ve had any personal experience with ubishit you’d know why
i’m not going to waste my limited time and energy caring about ubi
I don’t know if this is the same policy, but one thing Valve doesn’t let you do is sell Steam codes for cheap on external platforms, because that evades their platform fee while still using Steam for distribution and makes it hard for the Steam listing to compete (since it’s more expensive).
That might not apply here because I feel like Ubisoft has their own distribution infrastructure on UPlay, but it could be that they were selling the Steam version on UPlay for cheaper.
It is not.
Valve controlling Steam keys is perfectly reasonable. In fact they’re used to be pretty lenient with those.
Controlling independent storefronts is not. Which Uplay absolutely is.
You can link your Steam and UPlay accounts so I wouldn’t rule out something like this being the case here without knowing more about the circumstances.
Anticompetitive to ensure everyone sells it at the same price?
Valve are not the only company to do it either, I know razer used to but I don’t work in a retail environment anymore to know if that is still the case.
Anticompetitive to ensure everyone sells it at the same price?
Yes, goddamnit! Haven’t you ever heard of “price-fixing?”
It would only be price fixing if they said all games must be £60
RRP and RPM isn’t price fixing.
Bless you bruce, out here doing the lord’s work educating chucklehead Gaben simps on basic concepts like market power and anticompetitive practices that we somehow manage to apply to every tech monopoly except Valve
Ooof I always maintained that this clause was for other storefronts selling steam keys. If ubisoft was supplying their own download/update architecture without using steam but getting punished anyway then this is a bad look.
Part of the contract to sell on steam is this exact pricing point issue.
If it was another third party store yeah bad look since it was first party you can see ubisofts start of the enshittification. In the short term drive down the price to drive out all other third party resellers stores.
Then bam jack up the prices on first party after driving out all the competition. Then its just like streaming instead of 3 library’s you have 24+ and even higher prices. But if there was proof they did this to gog or another third party store then throw the book at them.
I just wish they would compete on features not so much price. Because while i like paying less for games. I have seen the amazon model of drive out everyone else with price with VC money then jack up the price. When we have less choice.
That is so far off realistic it’s weird to contemplate. How much market share does Uplay have compared to steam?
The market share is not the issue when they make the product. Taken to the extreme they sell their game at $200 on steam and $30 their store only. We now have effective consoles on PC with first party exclusives. Like I said find me proof of them doing this with third party stores and I will be more up in arms. Right now it feels like a company signed a contract and now want out of it.
It’s not like you’ll find any valve games outside of steam, right?
What is wrong with them offering the game only through their own platform? It’s annoying because you have to have another login? Anything more than that?
It’s annoying because you have to have another login?
That’s not the reason, but I have refunded games that require me to create a 3rd party account just to play.
There is nothing wrong with only selling in your platform from a business standpoint. Though certainly plenty from a consumer standpoint. That isn’t the scenario though.
This happened after Valve discovered that Ubisoft was marketing a cheaper $15 “starter pack” exclusively through its own Uplay store.
Seems fair to me, assuming that starter pack is a server-side component usable with a copy of the game from Steam.
Honestly, good. It’s nice to see that the terms apply to everyone equally, even the big names.
They’re a distribution platform with surprisingly few rules, of course they’re going to enforce the few rules they have; whether that’s Hentai Hitler or Rainbow Six Seige — you just have to have the same or better deal on steam that you have on any other platform where the game is sold, not given away, just sold.
Yeah, that’s the same monopolistic shit Amazon does.
Why would I want to stock “inventory” of a product as a distributor if the OEM is going to undercut me?
Cool, Steam isn’t a monopoly
“Monopoly” is neither illegal nor immoral. It’s a de facto label given based on observation. A “good” company can still be a monopoly.
Steam distributes ~75% of all PC games. It took me less than 30 seconds to find that that was the same market share needed to indict USMC in 1954. This is what happens when you hahave an entire (multiple?) generations who have grown up with gutted anti-trust policies.
ETA from my other comment ITT but worth reiterating:
ETA: Monopolies are generally allowed to exist in the US until they start either harming customers or engaging in flagrant anticompetitive measures. Without either of these, there is no victim class to sue. The Sherman Act makes it much easier to litigate instances of “harming customers.”
There are tons of existing private monopolies in the market today that are allowed to exist just because no one’s sued for harm. The Govt. doesn’t just go around trust busting without cause.
The glass bottle industry is dominated by Owens, which has a ~85% market share but is allowed to continue because they’re ostensibly the best for the economy. Glass bottles are cheap to buy and no one’s really eager to start a competing plant. If either of those changed then trust busting might begin, but that doesn’t mean they’re not already a monopoly.
You can argue what kind of monopoly that Steam is, but the idea that it’s not is completely unfounded in reality.
Not really no, and it’s not monopolistic, especially given steam’s low cut and again no restrictions on being able to sell on any other storefronts.
Other storefronts are just objectively worse. Like if you release a game on EGS, you will make less money per sale than on steam because of how EGS does their free games and sales cuts; and you’ll get lower sales because EGS is fucking awful to use for consumers.
It is monopolistic. If I start a brand new company and try to pull that, nobody will respect my pricing scheme. The only way you can enforce such a pricing scheme (if you don’t have regulatory power) is to be large enough that ignoring you loses more revenue than it gains, whether or not people want you to be in that position of power.
If Steam charges 30%, then just like Amazon, they don’t have to restrict your ability to sell elsewhere for it to be bad for both the studio and the consumer.
If my game is $100, and $30 goes to Valve, and I want to make $100 in profit, I have to raise my game’s price to around $143. Even if another storefront offered 0% fees, I would have to sell there for $143 if I wanted to not be delisted from Steam.
Everyone pays a higher price, even if they don’t use Steam. Either that, or developers make less overall by keeping prices the same and losing Valve’s cut, which means less money for developers, servers, etc.
This is monopolistic because if someone tries to price their game lower elsewhere, making the same profit while paying less fees, and giving their players a cheaper price, instead of that just being regular 'ol competition, Valve gets to remove their main buyer base entirely unless they keep giving Valve a cut of most of their sales.
Other storefronts might not be great, but you don’t even get the ability to make a good storefront if your competition can just say “I already have most of the users, if you try to compete with me on price, I’ll remove all of your games from my platform and take away most of the market.”
Being “good” doesn’t mean you’re not a monopoly.
See: US Postal Service, most municipal utilities.ETA: Monopolies are generally allowed to exist in the US until they start either harming customers or engaging in flagrant anticompetitive measures. Without either of these, there is no victim class to sue. The Sherman Act makes it much easier to litigate instances of “harming customers.”
There are tons of existing private monopolies in the market today that are allowed to exist just because no one’s sued for harm. The Govt. doesn’t just go around trust busting without cause.
The glass bottle industry is dominated by Owens, which has a ~85% market share but is allowed to continue because they’re ostensibly the best for the economy. Glass bottles are cheap to buy and no one’s really eager to start a competing plant. If either of those changed then trust busting might begin, but that doesn’t mean they’re not already a monopoly.
You can argue what kind of monopoly that Steam is, but the idea that it’s not is completely unfounded in reality.
Asked about this rule, Newell repeatedly denied it exists, even when shown internal communications seemingly showing Valve employees enforcing it: “Valve does not have a policy or practice of dictating prices to third-party software developers on other platforms.”
either he’s lying or out of the loop, because a lot of publishers reported that rule does exist.
What kind of backwater, hit piece, landfill did you dig this article up from? There is absolutely nothing verifiable in this and zero details. Beginning to think Valve is the victim of a mass propaganda effort by God knows who, possibly Israel at this point.
Instead of blaming an unrelated country, maybe do a google search? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-06-01/valve-s-antitrust-reckoning-over-steam-has-echoes-of-apple-google-app-store-sui
There were new transcripts from the deposition released.
I cannot wait for Ubisoft to go bankrupt and sell all their gold IP to anyone. I don’t care if it’s steam, EA, square enix or epic just get tom clancy and assassin’s creed away from from these buffoons.
Don’t forget Far Cry! God I want to play something in it’s vein that’s not just a reskin.
I don’t know who’s downvoting. Far Cry too hasn’t had a good release in years. R6 is only good because it was “beta” for 10 years
