Valve Corporation is being accused of using its market dominance to overcharge 14 million people in the UK.
“Valve is rigging the market and taking advantage of UK gamers,” said digital rights campaigner Vicki Shotbolt, who is bringing the case.
I’m fairly certain that applies to keys a dev requests be generated, so that any Steam keys can’t be sold elsewhere for cheaper than they are on Steam itself. Games that are sold on multiple platforms including Steam can absolutely be sold at different prices. I know, because I’ve bought games elsewhere because they were cheaper than on Steam at the time due to sales.
The lawsuit doesn’t imply that Steam forces their piece to always be cheaper than the competition. Sales can happen on different stores at different times, thus a game can be $50 on Steam and $40 on Epic today.
But Steam forces sellers to offer “the same offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time” - source (sorry, Shitter link) from this article, which is about a similar lawsuit from 2021.
And the language used means that, while this only applies to devs who make use of Steam keys, it doesn’t apply to the Steam keys themselves - if you want to use Steam keys, you also can’t offer discounts on competing storefronts. From the source:
Rosen said he ran into that issue when he decided to release Overgrowth at a lower price on other storefronts in order to take advantage of their lower commission rates. “When I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM,” Rosen wrote.
It says Valve “forces” game publishers to sign up to so-called price parity obligations, preventing titles being sold at cheaper prices on rival platforms.
Ms Shotbolt says this has enabled Steam to charge an “excessive commission of up to 30%”, making UK consumers pay too much for purchasing PC games and add-on content.
This is actually the norm on a lot of platforms unfortunately. Apple. Google Play. Not at all unique to Valve.
That 30% cut is also done on the Xbox and Playstation stores. I would assume Nintendo does the same thing.
It also sounds like Valve’s price parity agreement only applies to Steam keys. So, if a developer or publisher wanted to provide the game through their own storefront or on another third-party platform then they could charge whatever they wanted.
As for the 30% cut being excessive, I don’t know if it is or not, but storing data at the scale that Valve does costs a lot of money, not to mention the costs associated with ensuring the data’s integrity and distributing the data to their users all over the world at reasonable speeds. In all likelihood they are running multiple data centers on multiple continents with 100s of petabytes of storage each with some extremely high speed networking within the individual data centers, between the data centers, and out to the wider internet. Data hosting, especially for global availability, is damn expensive.
Still shitty. No need to defend it just because it’s valve.
Just because it’s the norm doesn’t mean it’s not excessive. In contrast, Apple’s implementation of a 30% cut is even worse, since with an iPhone you can’t just install an app from another source (and even when you can in the case of the EU, there are recurring costs for doing so). Since Steam accounts for the majority of PC video game sales, with AAA titles only not releasing on it when they have a clear financial motive not to, Valve’s use of a price parity clause effectively makes it the arbiter of what the industry standard markup on PC should be.
