That lawsuit against Steam’s 30% cut of game sales is now a class action, meaning many other developers could benefit

It isn't enshittification because they never had a high-quality product to offer.

That's just called capitalism. And yes, it makes everything shit.

I wonder who are the people buying games from the epic game store over Steam or gog.

"On 6 September 2023 the European Commission designated for the first time six gatekeepers - Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft. In total, 22 core platform services provided by those gatekeepers have been designated."

That's a direct quote from their website. Perhaps you can elaborate on what specifically makes Valve a gatekeeper in this space, and why they have not been labeled one under EU law by the Digital Markets Act and those who enforce it?

I'm especially curious about how you came to this conclusion. I'm also curious about the do's and don't section of this article and what you might feel Valve has fallen afoul of as their obligations to the public and their competitors under this law.

The source: https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/priorities-2019-2024/europe-fit-digital-age/digital-markets-act-ensuring-fair-and-open-digital-markets_en

That requirement only exists when you also offer a Steam key for the game that's being sold. So Valve is actually the good guy here: You can sell on another store, where Steam doesn't get any money, and give the user a Steam key, provided by Steam for free, and the only thing they ask is to match the price on Steam.

Don't offer a Steam key, and you can pick any price.

That is my understanding of the issue.

There is a claim by some developers that Valve was pressuring them behind the scenes ("don't offer your game for cheaper elsewhere or else we'll take it down from our store") a while ago, but I've never seen appropriate proof of it, and that was part of (an earlier?) lawsuit.

They don't and it would be faster to fact check yourself than spreading this misinformation further.

The other comment points out that it's only a case of selling steam keys where steam must have the lowest price.

I released a game a while back and while reading the terms it sounded like I couldn't link my Steam store page to another storefront where the game was available cheaper. Which, honestly, also kind of fair.

But again, I think that's really only if you're selling steam keys. If you sold the game DRM-free on your own website, I can't imagine they'd take down your company website.

If you link to an Itch page or something similar that might be a thornier issue because they're primarily a storefront.

I'm of the opinion that my game costs X unless it's discounted to Y. I don't see the appeal to the end user of having a dozen different prices on a dozen different storefronts.

I could see a situation where a developer wants to always earn, say, $10 from their game. So on Steam it might sell for $13, on another platform it might be $11 to show the difference in platform fees. But I wouldn't do that because it's putting me before my players, and that's not why I make games.

I mean a for-profit corporation owned by an ex-microsoft employee...

Everything about that screams enshittification, but they've done a pretty good job to be relatively consumer friendly.

Then stop complaining and go buy the game directly off the developer's website. Many large publishers have their own storefront. Or you can tell your favourite Indie dev that they can set up a virtual storefront (with diacoverability so users find their game), distribution service with CDNs, support forums, online user reviews, customer support, and who knows what else for their own game. If this sounds like a lot of work, that's because it is. Alternatively, they are allowed to pay someone in the form of profit sharing for all of this if they want to. But no one is forcing you to use Steam.

It just seams the majority of pc gamers find the service useful, so they tend to buy the games there.

They're doing 100% of the distribution though. And some of the marketing, when they promote a trending game or feature one in a collection.

I don't know if a 30% cut is fair, but from my perspective, it seems to be working.

I’d rather more money go to the people actually creating the content

This was the argument when EGS came, and it's been known for a long time that for the most part devs don't see a cent from that extra cut, the publishers keep it. Unless they self-publish, of course.

Valve's role is more that of a custodian I'd say. And one that is really competent.

Can I ask what you get? I'd like to understand what steam provides for a 30% cut vs what app stores like Google or Apple provide and what you value more from one vs the other.

Indeed, the only limitation is to not sell the keys for less than Steam sell them for.

It's optional for publisher to put their games on Steam. Games like Starsector seem to do ok not on Steam. Helps if the game is really good.

Put down the games and pick up a reading comprehension lesson

You can look at literally any other storefront that takes 10% less than Valve does with Steam and see they're not 10% cheaper. Which is also one of many ways you can tell this case is bullshit.

That's naive. People already pay 80$-90$, publishers will pocket the cut and keep the price the same.

I'm happy to pay a premium for convenience. Steam is a great product that saves me from having 20 different store-fronts clogging up my computer, most of which wouldn't have proper Linux support. If developers don't like Steam's terms of use then don't use it, and best of luck selling your game that nobody ever sees.

What substantiates the claim that games will become cheaper? We already know games are one of the few commodities that are getting cheaper over time when taking inflation into account. I've seen this claim everywhere but I don't understand what makes people think it's true and nobody has been able to show me the logic or reasoning of it. Also, you claim that game development becomes more lucrative. It only becomes lucrative at all with a return on investment which requires that a developer be able to afford to make the game, market it, advertise it, and sell it to a wide audience all while handling the financial side of things (licensing agreements, handling the financial details of consumers in a secure fashion, providing refunds within the constraints of laws worldwide, etc).

These cases and the litigation process also cost money. You absolutely can lose by looking into it.

games can get cheaper,

Hahahahahahahahaha

When was the last time since you actually saw something get cheaper?

Epic Games promise cheaper games with 12% cut, but most of them have same price as Steam or even console release.

I bet you believe in "free market" as well huh

IMO the only way game prices will get lower is if people just stop buying them at the higher prices. If the price of a game goes from $60 to $100 and people complain but still buy the game, then the next one's going to be $100 too (or more.)

Bingo. We even saw price increases on the EGS instead of reductions lmao.

People are coping so badly because they want to hate valve or something, idk. It's cringe beyond believe. Of all the shitty semi-monopolistic companies you could hate, valve is at the bottom of the list.

Tbf, any game that's on both steam and Epic Game Store will be priced the same, because anything other than steam having the lowest available price is against Steam's terms of service. You cannot be priced lower on another platform. GOG and a few others like it get around this by selling steam keys.

While that's in place, you definitely can not see prices go lower.

You are in the wrong here, Steam have a term where you can't mark the sale cheaper on any other place, including your own website as you can generate your product keys.

Taking money away from one billionaire and giving it to another billionaire is completely irrelevant.

Also, of all the billionaires we have, gaben is one of the few I like. Steam has brought linux gaming ahead like nobody else ever did before, and there was no profit incentive until the steam deck which was like 5 years after the first release of proton, and that's something I'm genuinely thankful for.

Worker-owned businesses do not work on a large scale. If it would, more people would do it.

Please go back to lemmy.ml

it's only applicable if you sell steam keys.

You are misunderstanding it, and it’s been explained to you so many times that I feel I have to imply that you are misunderstanding it on purpose

It's specifically Steam keys, even says so in the quote. If they sell it on Epic for a lower price and it doesn't come with a Steam key then there are no restrictions on the price.

Heroic Games Launcher and/or Lutris are what you're looking for on Linux.

With HGL it's simply login and install GOG, Epic Games and Amazon Games games like Steam games. No huge issues I've ever really run into.

for GOG Games you can use the process i described here; just download the offline installers and go from there.

(just a small remark: lutris sometimes chooses the wrong executable to run, especially with unity games (it tends to select the crashhandler instead of the game exe) - if you run the game and nothing happens, check the settings.

Sorry I was talking about the site specifically. I should have clarified that.

Yeah, it's also ignoring that the issue with Apple's "30% cut" isn't that they take 30% of game sales. It's that they're forcing you to use their payment processing service to put an app on the store, and then they take a 30% cut out of that, even though third-party payment processing providers take much smaller cuts than that.

Physical stores also took a 30% sales cut, because there's value in getting people to see your product. It's literally been the standard storefront cut for decades. Microsoft and Sony take the same cuts for their console sales/transactions.

Valve does a lot more for companies than just put eyes on their games, too. They're pushing for Linux-compatibility with Proton, they provide you with networking libraries and infrastructure for multiplayer servers if you use SteamWorks, Steam will optionally update your game's SDL libraries so you have up-to-date controller bindings, etc. It's not like they're sitting there twiddling their thumbs and taking 30% of your money for nothing.

I'd argue Microsoft and Sony do comparable work for devs on their platforms too.

The whole argument against the 30% cut is so fucking dumb.

Do you need to own a platform to have a de facto grip on game distribution? I like Steam as much as the next guy, but it’s totally douchey the way nerds fall all over themselves to shit on Apple, but not Valve for charging the same thing. But, I guess not “owning” a platform makes you immune from criticism. Glad to know where the arbitrary line has been drawn. Given that “owning” the platform is the problem, then I’m hoping to see an equal amount of rage at Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft for their online stores that charge 30% to distribute games.

Steam is a DRM system. It's amazing to hear people profess their horniness for a DRM system.

Delusional to thing one cares. We live in a capitalist civilization. No one gives a flying fuck about us.

I didn't learn things but I can count two sides which, since they are sides, that means they're the same.

/s

Just remember to stay moist.

Private companies, for better or worse, are beholden only to the boss. No shareholder value to worry about.

That's the only reason steam hasn't been turning the thumbscrews on developers for stage 3 enshittification profit seeking.

The only actually decent big company I can think of with a decent product

A company that promotes gambling to underage kids with a proprietary third party launcher.

What are you doing on dbzer0 btw?

People should really read the Steamworks documentation to get an idea of the absurd amount of services Steam offers https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/home

Yeah, I think the big difference between Steam and Google Play and the App Store is that Steam does not own Windows and has actual competition.

I think asking for a cut just because you own the OS is despicable, but Steam is actually providing a service.

And all the community features for the consumers.

Steam employs like 100 people, they could take 5% and still make generational wealth year on year

You forget to mention the cut that goes into the ceo billion dollar worth fleet of mega yachts

https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/gabe-newell-luxury-yachts.php

That's all nice, but you're dreaming if you think any of that adds up to 30% of the value of a video game.

Those days didn't even exist (or if they did, they were very short). I feel like Steam came out just before the broadband boom (when they released HL2, it was still on five CDs). And by the time other devs started switching, most of them just went to Steam.

However, re: the broadband thing, they could distribute with bittorrent, kind of like how linux distros do it.

For bandwidth, it'd absolutely make sense if a game that's 10GiB+ because uncompressed audio and pre-rendered cutscenes (and likely huge day-1 updates) had to pay more of a cut to its platform than a 200MiB (or less) game. Particularly if the smaller game doesn't even have multi-player.

Nobody wants to pay for bandwidth? Nobody wants to have to pay for secure management of credentials and billing? :O

They absolutely would if it didn't mean getting deprioritized on Steam. Those things aren't that difficult or expensive these days. I could have secure management of credentials and billing up in a weekend if I needed it (correctly), and I'm a single developer.

Steam is better than Microsoft, Apple, Google and Tencent. Using monopoly power to maintain the 30% standard is still a problem.

But it's definitely not 30% worth of additional value.

They're actually claiming to be adding almost 50% (43%, to be precise) in value, since that's how much more you have to add to end up at 30% of the final value. (By analogy, imagine they took a 50% cut. That would be claiming to double the value. Something that used to be worth $10 is now going to cost $20 if the original wants to maintain the same cut.)