From Newsgroup: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action


This time it's in the Netherlands. And technically it's not in court
yet; it's still all pre-trial stuff.

It's the usual spiel. The case is led by the 'Netherlands' Consumer
Competition Claims Foundation' (a non-profit that, despite its name,
is not an official government agency but a non-profit organization
with somewhat murky financing), and the argument is that Steam is
purposefully keeping game prices overly high.* They point -once again-
to Valve's 30% cut of all sales and the usual disingenuous claims
about that. Including the oft-disproven claim that Valve prevents
publishers from selling games for less on other marketplaces than they
charge on Steam.

Is the 30% cut high? Arguably, but publishers get a lot from selling
on Steam. Not just access to the huge audience Steam provides them,
but a lot of 'bonus features' too, like its APIs for voice-chat,
networking, screenshots/streaming, etc. Integration with the Workshop,
that lets users easily add mods. Stuff they'd otherwise normally have
to build themselves (or not have at all) if the publishers wanted it
in their games. Yes, some of these features are available on other marketplaces, but no other digital storefront offers as many. You get
what you pay for. Plus, it's not like Valve is entirely sitting on
that cash like Smaug on its hoard. Valve is investing in things like
VR, the Steamdeck, and SteamOS, expanding the market into new areas,
and making it available to publishers.

And that 30% cut isn't fixed, with it going down to 20% in some cases.
Steam is also famous for its sales which --while maybe not as
incredible bargains as they used to be-- still do counteract the
argument that Valve is purposefully keeping game prices high.

Plus, there's evidence enough that even when selling on stores which
take a smaller cut of sales, publishers don't reduce their prices
accordingly. So the idea that Valve and Steam are single-handedly
behind high game prices is fallacious... especially when you compare
game prices on Steam to prices on the publishers' own service, like
EA/Origin or on Ubisoft's UPlay. If anything, given publisher's openly announced preferences for pushing the base price of games to $79.00USD
and higher, the competition on Steam is probably pushing prices down,
not up.

Oh, and that old rubric about Valve not allowing publishers to
undersell Steam by pricing their games for less on other marketplaces? Bold-faced lies. You can't sell keys that unlock games on Steam for
less than they sell on that platform. But if you want to sell "Call of Battlefield 97" on Epic for 99 cents and sell it on Valve for $999?
That's perfectly acceptable. Just so long as that game doesn't
interact with Steam's network, you're fine.

There's a lot to dislike about Valve's activities (again, not least
being their obvious involvement with online gambling targeting
children). You can arguably say that Valve could afford to drop the
percentage of their cut of the revenue. But the truth is that PC games
on Steam sell far better than on any other market, and publishers get
what they pay for by using that market. There are other markets
available... and yet publishers still choose Steam.

A lot of the arguments being made in this case sound a lot like the
repeatedly rhetoric tossed around by Epic, a company which has
frequently tried to litigate itself to the top rather than, you know,
actually provide people with a product they want. I wouldn't be
surprised to find their fingers dipped into the Netherlands' Consumer Competition Claims Foundation's pie (albeit likely through several
layers of obfuscation). Unfortunately, this case being in the EU and
Valve being a US corporation, it's going to harder than usual for
Valve to defend itself than it might otherwise be (a fact I am sure
that the NCCCF's supporters are counting on, which is why this case
--and a similar one in the UK-- are being fought in Europe rather than challenging Valve in the US).

Then again, Valve has the cash to fight these battles, meritless as
they often prove to be. I just wish these fights didn't suck the air
out of more worthy cases, like Stop Killing Games or attempts to limit
lootbox gambling.





* clicky clicky clicky clicky click! https://nltimes.nl/2026/06/11/dutch-gamers-file-eu220-million-claim-valve-operator-game-platform-steam


--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

From Newsgroup: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action



Then again... maybe its not so simple.

Recent documents --including emails from Valve and Microsoft-- reveal
that Valve has been playing hardball with developers, insisting on
price parity regardless of whether or not the game was being sold on
Steam. *

Valve has often publicly insisted that they only force publishers to
have the same price for games on different markets if Steam keys are
involved. That is, if you sell a game on Steam for $30, but then sell
the Steam keys on Green Man Gaming, you can't sell those keys for less
than you'd get on Steam itself. This is a reasonable request, since
ultimately Valve would be handling all the back-end costs.

But it turns out that Valve has been doing more than that. They've
been insisting --and often enforcing those demands-- that games sold
on other platforms be always sold at the same price as the game was
sold on Steam. So sell the game on Steam for $30? You'd better not be
selling it on Epic, or GOG, or EA/Origin for less. If you do, Valve
would (and in some cases, did!) delist the game from their storefront.
And Valve wasn't only doing this to small independents; they forced
this on big-names like Microsoft, Warner Brothers and Ubisoft too.

Which is an entirely different thing all together. In fact, it was so
common that --according to some emails-- when Microsoft was releasing
"Gear of War 5" on Steam, they just assumed that the price parity was
a constant at Steam and didn't even bother to fight it. Which starts
getting into a whole collusion thing too. We're getting into the
territory of cartels here.

Those accusations of price-fixing and that Valve's actions are
intentionally keeping prices high are starting to sound more
legitimate. Not that the other storefronts are any better. But this is
a terrible look for Valve and whether it's true of what they were
doing in the past or not, they need to get ahead of it and publicly
mandate a new policy that says publishers and developers can sell
games at whatever price they want on other storefronts so long as it
doesn't involve Steam.

Because otherwise Valve absolutely deserves all the shit that will
come down upon them.







* more here
https://games.gg/news/valve-antitrust-lawsuit-steam-price-parity/

--- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2