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
12034 readers
455 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.
If that's what they actually did then they deserve to have legal repercussions.
Right. Valve is claiming they didn't, and that they only demand price parity for steam keys. So it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Honestly, I am not sure what game valve would play to do this. Devs could just make a red and green version of their game to sell on different platforms and price them differently. Meanwhile, to customers, a games price is a games price and developer publisher and distributor are always incentivized to find the highest price a customer is willing to pay through game theory. The market has definitely proven that customers don't care about what percentage of the cut goes to devs. So there is no incentive for anyone to post a game at a lower price than what a customer is wiling to pay on steam as long as steam retains the highest volume. Telling devs to not price the way they want seems very counter productive to being a good retailer, so who knows.