Are you joking? I’ve saved thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, by waiting for Steam Sales and buying games at a reasonable price for me(I’m poor) rather than paying $60 a game. Nobody else does this(When was the last time Nintendo put Mario Kart on sale?)
The statement “Steam overcharges gamers” is self-defeating and hilarious.
Totally agree, steam is one the big players that stills offers a quality service both for consumers and for developers
Maybe this lawsuit is founded by this dodgy lawyer group on behalf of a competitor under the table, who is pissed at exactly the fact steam sales are too generous and others cannot compete
Would said competitor be the one who successfully trained their users to only look at their store once a week for a free game or two then close the store again? 😉
I recently got my first current-gen game console a couple of years ago (Nintendo switch) and was floored at how expensive all of the games are and how meager the sales are. PC gaming is shockingly cheap when you get down to it
Right?! Having moved off of consoles entirely this generation, I’ve hoovered up amazing games during the countless Steam sales at prices CEX can’t even beat.
I hope this gets thrown out as hogwash.
They get a 30% cut and make enough money that Gaben is a billionaire so yeah, games prices could be much cheaper.
I mean literally everything could be cheaper. Welcome to a capitalist society.
Can we not go after one of the few good guys in gaming? Please? If you want to hound someone Nintendo is right over there.
No. It's easier to go after the "good guys" than the bad guys because they're easier to beat. They won't use all kinds of slimy, underhanded tactics to fuck you over.
Edit: I don't approve of the lawsuit against valve, but that's the way of the world. Scummy companies and people have many tools they can use to drag you down to their level.
Oh fuck off with the good guy thing, it's a private company trying to make money, there's no good people when profit is the goal, there's no good billionaires and Gaben is one.
Let's replace "good guy" with "one of the few actually good services in gaming", would you still disagree?
Okay, but is Gaben more deserving of this than white replacement supporter, anti-trans fearmonger and apartheid diamond mine baby Musk? Than makes people piss in bottles in warehouses Bezos?
Is what steam does more predatory than basically every major music publisher (the big three), than MPAA? Than OpenAI? Than Meta? Than the streaming services? Than Nintendo? Than Apple? Than Google? Uber?... And so on and so on.
So why pick on Valve? I'd go after fucking taco bell before Valve. Make it make sense.
This lawsuit build on a false premise. Steam doesnt have a price parity clause for other stores. What this lawsuit alleges applies to Steam keys that the developer generates through Steam. If the developer lists those keys for sale at a price lower than what the game is listed for on Steam, then the price of the Steam Store purchase price must match it, so that people visiting the store page on Steam get the same discount. It doesn't matter if you list your game on GOG and discount it there.
Its literally helping players.
Smells like a smear campaign. Some idiots try to get some fake-ass grass roots movement going.
Bold move, let‘s see how it plays out for them.
How can this be? All the games I buy on Steam are cheaper than on other platforms. Where are these cheaper games?
I think that is the main point of the lawsuit, if developers sell their game on Steam they can't sell it cheaper somewhere else. If Value gets 30% the developer has to raise the price a bit to compensate and they have to raise it everywhere. Outside of sales I don't think most games that are not on Steam are much cheaper elsewhere, so not sure how this plays out.
So don't sell the game on Steam? Either the huge boost in visibility is worth a 30% cut or it's not.
As far as I know, this only applies to Steam keys: developers are allowed to generate Steam keys for free to sell on their website (Valve does not get 30% of these sales either) with the restriction being they cannot be cheaper than the price on Steam
I don't think there's ever actually been any proof that Valve disallows selling games for cheaper elsewhere as long as you're not selling those freely generated Steam keys
Sue Meta or Google instead geez
I'll reiterate here that I think it would be funny to see steam actually lowering their cut to 20-10% or something and the mass migrations of developers from other competing stores to steam, and finally making the other store even more insignificant. That's what they want isn't it? And even more funny when after the changes are applied there is no difference in price because after all, publishers get more money for free, why should they lower their profit? If anything, when the policy is reversed/back to when it was, we will only see an increase in game price lol.
Tim Sweeney, is this you?
Why is the 30% publishing cut of dev sales thing even part of a CLA of players? It literally doesn't affect them.
My favorite recent example:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1493640/Banishers_Ghosts_of_New_Eden/ (50 EUR)
https://www.playstation.com/de-de/games/banishers-ghosts-of-new-eden/ (60 EUR)
PS5 game on sale did cost 2 EUR less than the regular price on Steam. I don't think Steam overcharges me. It's not like the game is cheaper somewhere else on PC either: https://store.epicgames.com/de/p/banishers-ghosts-of-new-eden-f9e3f2?lang=de (50 EUR)
In 2022 the median household income in the USA was $74 580, that means 50% of households had less than $74 580 in income.
A person that has at least a billion in wealth (like Gabe Newell) owns at least the equivalent of 13 409 times the median income.
I would love to illustrate it by copy pasting $74580 13409 times, but it creates a comment too long Lemmy.
If we go by net worth instead?
https://www.fool.com/research/average-net-worth-americans/
5190 US medians, 25 615 US medians for people under 35 (the crowd on this platform).
No one deserves that kind of wealth and anything that's done to prevent it is a good thing.
Your point is valid but this kind of lawsuit isn't really the way to go about the change you're describing
What a load of rubbish.
How is Lemmy so anti corporate, but bends over backwards to defend steam as an immaculate corporation. I love steam, and 90% of my game purchases or from their store. 5% are from stores that let me redeem steam keys.
I think their market position should have some scrutiny.
A few reasons:
I feel like any other major company with Steam's marketshare would be far less consumer friendly than steam.
Steam funnels a lot of money into Linux, and Linux is very popular on Lemmy. If you use Linux, you are benefiting from Steam's success.
Steam is just nice to use, and has good deals. It's nice to have my games in one place, and I don't know if any other storefront with as many nice user benefiting features as steam.
Mainly because Steam actually provides a really good quality service. Most corporations over time charge more while getting worse on quality. People can sell their games for cheaper on Epic which only has a 12% fee, but Epic's service is much worse.
They're not immaculate. They used to outright deny people the right to refund their games, but they turned that around after a massive lawsuit from a government agency. Good change! I support that. But they're not behaving in an anti-competitive manner. What, are they supposed to intentionally make themselves worse in the hopes that other stores pop up? That's not how any of this works.
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