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Steam is basically a PC gaming monopoly, so why isn’t anyone mad?
(www.digitaltrends.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2026
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Most of those conversations seem to be steam asking the vendor to allow them to lower the price it's being offered on steam to match the lower price it's being offered elsewhere (or remove the sale from steam). I dont see any threats to kick games off steam (though that could be implied) or demands to remove lower priced sales from elsewhere.
It doesnt look particularly abusive to my eye at least.
How explicit does Valve need to be for you to agree that they make the point clear? In one quote further in this thread, they say "we’d just choose to stop selling [the game]", in another, on p. 161, they say "we'll be ready to release [once you match the price]", prompting the dev to raise the price from $7 to $14 elsewhere. It's highly anticompetitive because it prevents other platforms from competing on price. Great discounts are instrumental as well, as noted by OP's very article.
I don't understand. If the price is $7 elsewhere, why try to release on Steam for twice that price?
Why did the dev have to increase the price elsewhere to "match the price", instead of matching the price to $7 on Steam?
Why would any store stock your product for the twice the price that it can be bought elsewhere? There is no obligation for them to stock a certain product (at any price).
I can't dictate what other stores price it at, but I can certainly refuse to sell it in mine if it is not profitable for me. How is that anticompetitve?
I'm glad we at least have moved on from people outright denying Valve does this to defending Valve doing this.
You'd have to ask the dev, but obviously Valve takes 30%, while the dev would get 100% on its own store. If there's a publisher involved, and publisher contracts often cover specific platforms, the dev would get much less than 70% on Steam.
Comparing Steam to traditional stores is incorrect. Even Valve's own argument in the same Wolfire case was that monopoly power requires a market share of 75%, which Steam exceeds.
So the dev wants all the benefits of selling on the Steam store while at the same time earning profits that they would if they sold it independently?
Am I reading that correctly?
As I said, we don't know the terms of their publishing contract, if any, so that would be a baseless assumption to make. I could also flip your argument and say they might not even want to sell on Steam, but feel forced to because of its monopoly power. It's one of the points of the class action lawsuit.