38
Gabe Newell ordered to make in-person deposition for Valve v. Wolfire Games lawsuit
(web.archive.org)
this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
38 points (93.2% liked)
PC Gaming
11963 readers
317 users here now
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
- Be Respectful.
- No Spam or Porn.
- No Advertising.
- No Memes.
- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
- Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They have a monopoly but that's because they're just the best service. It's not just that they were the first, they're just consistently the best. Everybody who has spun up another ancillary launcher and DRM service has always made an inferior product to Valve's.
Epic games bribes you with free games, launched without a functioning cart, and hoovers your data.
EA has gone through Origin and the EA app, both of which are awful; Origin being the butt of jokes for years and the EA app being an unstable piece of garbage that logs you out every day with "a particularly annoying bug".
Ubisoft. Self explanatory.
I could keep going on, but Valve earned their position in the market. Could they reduce the cut and still exist with a good profit? Absolutely, but that's the only thing I'd really want them to change - treat the devs a bit more fairly.
It doesn't matter. The suit is alleging that valve threatened to ban games if they were cheaper on other stores. Thats monopolistic price manipulation, and it's illegal. Valve even pro.ises not to do this in its terms of service - their price parity policy is only supposed to apply to steam keys. That would be fair, because otherwise they couldn't give out keys in the first place. But you can't force devs to list games at the same price and then decide on the cut you will take if you are a monopoly. They will have to prove Valve violated its ToS.
I wonder what would be said if isthereanydeals is pulled up as evidence, and shows games listed cheaper than steam on other stores. Pretty much reason a majority of my Steam games have been bought outside of the Steam stores, since I'm able to consistently get the games cheaper with better earlier discounts.
Is it listed retail price that is being talked about as opposed to sale price?