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
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
FYI go walk your local target from time to time. They’ll sometimes have random sales on the big switch games with no online listing of the sale. I got the last pokemon game 6 months or so late for $20 off
Nintendo doesn’t reward super patient gaming though like other consoles where I didnt pay more than over $20 for any PS4 first party exclusives. It is actually on the weird side where sometimes physical prices actually go up with Nintendo seeming to be more conservative about number of physical copies they make to keep prices high compared to Sony where brick and motor stores look to offload physical inventory. So leads to used market for Nintendo games going crazy compared to downward trend of other consoles.
Oh that’s good to know! Too bad my nearest target is 20 miles away and a very annoying drive over a poorly designed arterial road
Sales of physical copies of games is where consoles truly shine. It’s not as great as a few years ago (getting surplus steelbook games for like $10 sometimes), but you can still regularly pick up AAA games that are a handful of months old for $20 or sometimes less.
Check sites like dekudeals and psprices (steamDB is great too for making sure you’re not being over charged on Steam).
It’s just being a savvy consumer.
But yeah, when it comes to Nintendo hardware, the only reason to have it imo is the first party games, and those will never go on sale so you might as well just pony up. You can do the voucher thing and save $10 on each if you get two games (dunno if that’s still a thing).
I remember a couple of years ago when my little brother saved up for a switch for like a year, and then didn’t have any money left for games because of the prices.
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.
Playstation and Xbox regularly put games on sale. And their base prices almost always go down over time. I assume Steam is more steep discounts. But you can absolutely get by without paying full price on consoles if you wait.
You can usually snag items for 75% or more off about 1-2 years after launch on Steam (and by extension all other PC game sales platforms) and it’s consistent enough that you can count on it (and I do!). I’ve never seen discounts go that deep on consoles, at least not for games I actually play.
Also GOG will just decide at random that a game is infact 1 dollar for no reason.
Nintendo doesn’t tho
Epic also does this
You’re poor but have possibly spent hundreds of thousands on games?
No, I’ve saved hundreds of thousands. Between Steam sales and Humble Bundle, always being a patient gamer, I’ve amassed over 300 games id like to play but haven’t spent more than $500 on Steam over my entire life. I’m poor but $500 over a couple years I can do.
For comparison, at $60 a game, that would buy me 8 console or Nintendo games at full price plus a little DLC.
It’s the best price, bar none.
You’ve saved hundreds or thousands, but you’ve not saved hundreds of thousands.
Is that in American dollars?
If those 300 games were even US $70 each which is exceedingly generous, you’d only scratch $21,000 as the cost of everything. Unless Steam was literally giving you $180,000+ for using their store, you’ve not saved hundreds of thousands.
Unless you’re referring to hundreds of thousands of pennies.
It’s possible they have more games in their library as they did say 300+ games they want to play, but yeah the numbers they gave don’t add up to hundreds of thousands. Unless they were taking phrases like “a $700 Demon Souls machine” very literally.
My mistake, I thought you’d literally saved thousands from sales pricing
Different guy but I’ve got over 2,700 games on Steam thanks to sales… So I’ve probably saved at least one thousand… Maybe not two, unless we count not buying for Star Citizen as a savings!
Which is totally reasonable, but 100x that raises an eyebrow
yen
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.
Wow, you’re starting to get it, maybe we should start doing something about it instead of defending those who profit, right?
the solution to that is taxes, not suing successful business one at a time.
Or breaking them or nationalization so profit goes to everyone instead of a single guy.
And you want to start with Valve, which is one of the smaller game companies and is one of the few players not guilty of buying up their competition, instead of Sony, Microsoft, other Big Tech players, media conglomerates like Disney, ISPs like Comcast or AT&T, or meat distributors who are price fixing algorithmicly?
Who said I want to start with them?
Why even buy games period? Why risk giving money to any of them since things that become popular risk making the people selling them to become wealthy? Not like indies are immune to it looking at Minecraft becoming too popular that too many people wanted to buy it making one person then a corporation wealthy, so why not just not buy period to prevent the issue from even becoming a possibility?
The best solution is prevention. Don’t buy anything.
Who said I do?
If there was no method by which people could ever profit from a system like Steam, why bother building it?
There’s a difference between making profit and becoming one of the richest person in the world, in the second case it means you clearly made too much profit by selling for a higher price than required.
As evidenced by games costing less on stores where the cut is lower!
Oh… wait…
That is addressed by the lawyer:
According to Shotbolt, the developer and digital distribution company is “shutting out” all competition in the PC gaming market as it “forces” game publishers to sign off on price parity obligations - supposedly preventing them from going on to offer lower prices on other platforms.
But I thought those are only for steam keys? That’s always been what devs found out when trying to vary their prices on storefronts: Sell the game standalone, Valve sleeps. Sell a steam key or use the steam backend, real shit.
Epic is good at making it sound like it applies to sales in general though, while technically not being wrong from how they word it: You do sign a price parity obligation, yes. And it does prevent you from offering lower prices on other stores. For, well, steam keys. But they’re not mentioning that last part as that makes it sound like Epic just sells stuff for the same end-user price because they can.
I’ve seen some comments agreeing with you and others citing examples of individual developers being told not to sell at lower prices. Don’t know if the prosecutor is citing those cases or they’re just a chancer who hasn’t done their research properly.
They’re also the prosecutor, they can word it like that if they so desire. It’s on the opposing attorney to correct them.
And possibly demand sanctions if they can convince the bar that it was willful omission of details.
Why would they lower their price if the same game needs to be sold for more on another platform in order to see a RoI?
But it doesn’t need to be sold for more? As evidenced by not being sold for more despite the cut Valve takes? If that were an issue the games would cost say 70 on Steam but 60 elsewhere?
It needs to be sold for 70 on Steam in order to bring in the revenue per copy they need for their RoI, why would they go and sell for less elsewhere if Steam with their 30% share sets the bar? People won’t feel ripped off, the price is the same, what they don’t realize is that the only reason the price is that high in the first place is that Valve gets 21$ from each sale! The company needs 49$/copy in their pockets, if the distributor’s share had always been 15% instead of 30% we would be buying games for 58$ instead of 70$ right now.
I find it absolutely wild that you seem to think Steam’s 30% cut is the sole reason AAA games cost $70. Have you ever looked into how much it costs to sell a game at a retail store? From what I’ve seen Steam takes roughly the same cut as most retailers do and then the publisher still has to produce the physical copies and distribute them. They would make the same amount on Steam if and only if they printed, burned, packaged, and distributed their physical copies for free, not to mention the promotional materials they’re sending out to retailers.
Everything I’m seeing indicates that compared to a physical copy (which is given for a majority of AAA games) a major publisher would earn far more money per copy on Steam than at GameStop, Target, Walmart, or any other retailer where they’re charging the same $70 price at. But Steam is the real problem that’s hurting their RoI, apparently.
I’ll agree I think Steam’s cut is high and they could earn a lot of favor by turning it down a bit, but your argument seeming to insinuate that their 30% cut is the sole reason games cost $70 is absolutely wild to me.
This discussion is about Steam, they have control over the market, all distributors are in the wrong and take too high of a cut, I’ll talk about the other distributors when we have a discussion about them.
In a world where Sony and Embracer are running around saying we need to be paying $70+ for games (while tipping the devs and buying micro transactions like a good like wallet)… You’re mad at the storefront?
Yeah, go into Walmart and demand they take less of a cut so… The publisher can take more from the devs?
Gabe is rich because he spearheaded a good service (which I’ll admit I thought was a scam back when I was forced to make an account way back when I had dial up) but… 30% is standard. For the price of games? Be mad at Embracer. Be mad at EA. You’re free to not like or use Steam but they let the publishers set the price. Their cut is a drop in the bucket. The whole ‘cut’ debate is just EGS propaganda.
…(which I’ll admit I thought was a scam back when I was forced to make an account way back when I had dial up)…
Oh man, I cursed Valve and Steam back then. It effectively made LAN parties of the time impossible since you could no longer share media and needed Internet access to play. Back then, only business had the “fast” Internets while everyone else had 56k baud modems. Hard to do much when your max download speed for the entire connection was 5kb/s.
saying we need to be paying $70+ for games
On which Steam gets $21 or more so in reality they need to sell games for $50.
Epic with a lower cut has the same game prices. Additionally Valve lowered their cut ahead of a launch of Epic Games Store
By default, as per the old rules, Steam takes 30 percent off the top of any revenue that a given title generates on the storefront. In the new system, once a game earns $10 million in sales, Steam will adjust its share to 25 percent. If a game proceeds to hit the $50 million mark, Steam’s share further declines to 20 percent. The total revenue includes any and all income sources for a given game, such as package deals, add-on packs, in-game transactions, and fees applied to trading on the Steam Community Marketplace.
According to Steam’s post on the subject, “Our hope is this change will reward the positive network effects generated by developers of big games, further aligning their interests with Steam and the community.”
In other words, this is meant to encourage big developers not to take their games elsewhere by rewarding them with a bigger slice of the income. $10 million may sound high, but at a $60 price point, that’s around 167,000 sales. As a glance at SteamSpy can tell you, that’s nothing special for a mainstream PC game. Conversely, even a successful indie game may not reach $10 million in revenue over the course of its entire operational lifetime. In practice, the terms of the new revenue system appear to mean that a big “triple-A” mainstream title is being rewarded with a more favorable income split by Steam simply for showing up on the market at all.
BuT vAlVe DoEsN’t UsE aNtI cOmPeTiTiVe TaCtIcS!
They lowered the cut for people who didn’t need it. Massive publishers selling tons of games. Arguably indie games that only sell a few copies need a larger cut than EA on their latest blockbuster.
There isn’t much in the way of scale here. Their bandwidth isn’t monitored on a per game basis, and if that was a factor in the cost they’d be basing the cut on the size of your game. Some 1 gb indie game pays the same cut or larger than a 100gb mammoth from EA. Valve is also way more strict with that indie game in getting itself published than they are with the EA game as well.
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.
Companies are never your friend.
Valve is like any other company. They’re as good as your money is good.
Its still going after the LEAST shitty company and expecting your life to get better when the competition is FAR WORSE
Fair, but not-shitty companies eventually become shitty companies in almost every circumstance. I hate making the argument that someone is fine because they only hurt a few people compared to the guy who hurts lots.
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.
Even if you believe that all privately owned capital is intrinsicly evil, you still ought to go after companies from most to least problematic within a specific category, no?
That is, for digital storefronts, start with the likes of Epic or in a broader digital gaming space in general, Microsoft or Ubisoft. Go after Steam when you’ve cleaned up the rapists, backroom dealers and collusionists.
You think humanity is unable to take care of two things at once?
You think Epic is worse when Valve has 70% of the market so they’re in a position to ruin everything in a second? You realize that the PC gaming market is dependent on the goodwill of a single guy?
Shame you’re getting so downvoted. People are so determined to believe in good philanthropic billionaires that they forget the system that allows the accumulation of such ridiculous wealth doesn’t work for nice philanthropic people. It was like this with Elon musk, before he sacked his publicists (my guess) before the cave diver thing. People were saying he was going so save humanity or some shit. All he’s done is fuck up twitter. Same with this guy. I use steam and I think my steam deck is a cool little machine but that doesn’t inspire me to tongue the sweaty arsehole of an obscenely rich guy.
At least there’s a few people that get it
Such a simplistic view of the world.
Emptying the bank accounts of billionaires and redistributing the wealth would save more lives then any philanthropy.
Stop trying to defend the people at the top of the food chain, you’re the prey they feed on.
“Charges 30% fee” “That’s too high! You’re ripping us off”
“Charges 10% fee” “That’s too low! No other platforms could hope to compete against you with that!”
This is nothing but people bitching about nothing for the price gouging. I will give merit to the anti competitive nature if game makers aren’t allowed to have their games listed for less at other stores. As far as add on game packages locking you in goes…that might be a technical minefield to ensure compatibility.
Conspiracy theory here…
Maybe this is an initiative by competing platforms? Epic? Ubisoft?
Stir some shit, hope to get valve in legal issues so that they’re legally forced to become less competitive and therefore creating a chance for these other platforms?
Of course it is.
All those large online action/claim sites are commercial in underlying nature. When you saw all the small farmers protest in Germany it was primarily driven as an action by about 5 large farming conglomerates because they are the ones getting ~85% of the grant money that was being cut. The whole point of the cut was to not funnel money that was supposed to go to small farmers to large megacorps after all. Who in turn instrumentalized the small farmers to protest it.
Probably what’s going on here, too. You can bet somewhere deep deep down, this is something Tim Sweeney cooked up.
Of course it is. There is a similar case in the US right now, or was, by the dude behind the fighting rabbits game and parts of the humble bundle that was being bankrolled in his lawsuit by epic games.
This of course. Any reduction in fee would not go the people. Studios would raise their prices.
Yes, if Valve limited the price games could have in other stores that would be anti-competitive, but that’s not the case. Their price parity clause is just for selling steam keys.
Then the entire lawsuit hope is pretty much bs.
This lawsuit being funded by a Epic Games shell company would not be surprising in the least. They have done so much and stooped so low to try to not have to actually do work and create a good platform.
How can this be? All the games I buy on Steam are cheaper than on other platforms. Where are these cheaper games?
That’s exactly what they’re trying to say. It could have been cheaper if Valve didn’t have pricing clauses that doesn’t allow developers to price things cheaper elsewhere.
Which is deceptive, at best. Steam doesn’t have pricing clauses for developers’ games. The devs are free to sell their games anywhere they want, at whatever prices they want. But Steam does have pricing clauses for Steam keys. Basically, what allows you to register a game to your Steam account.
You can sell your game for whatever price you want, as long as it’s not the Steam version of the game. They don’t want you giving away Steam keys for cheaper than you can often buy them on Steam. And this makes sense; Steam has a vested interest in protecting their own game keys, and encouraging players to shop on a storefront that they know is reputable; Lots of steam key resellers are notoriously shady, for instance.
Basically, the dev can go sell it cheaper on GoG, or Epic, or their own storefront if they want. As long as they’re not selling Steam keys, they’re fine. But players like having games registered to their Steam accounts, because it puts everything in one place. So devs may feel shoehorned into selling Steam keys (which would invoke that pricing clause) instead of selling a separate version that isn’t registered to Steam. But that doesn’t mean Steam is preventing publishers from selling elsewhere, or controlling the prices on those third party sites. It just means Steam has market pull, and publishers know the game will sell better if it’s offered as a Steam key.
Yep, I was only summarizing their angle. Here are the specifics for anyone who wants to read the source documentation: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys#3
The only thing that doesn’t sit right with me is developers stating Steam threatened to delist the game when they expressed wanting to sell elsewhere. I haven’t seen any proof except just the statements, but it would be weird for a developer to lie about that stuff. If anyone has any more sources on that, it would be appreciated
The one example I can think of is the Remnant games, at least for Remnant 2 on release it was cheaper on Epic Store than on Steam, by like 10 USD if I recall correctly
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.
Seems like that’d be hard to track with so many stores selling steam keys just looking at isthereanydeals.
Weird thing is it is the publishers themselves that are able to set the price so they are choosing not to put the game on sale same as it is elsewhere. Probably to not devalue the price of their game like the Nintendo strategy when it comes to certain storefronts.
Probably operates closer to corporate software licensing deals, i.e. “we might not catch you but if we do it’s over”
Just for clarity: how would it do a disservice to players if a dev can sell their steam keys for any price, no matter which platform?
Just think about how this works.
Steam currently allows you to generate keys and sell them for free, only stipulating that they must be sold for the same price as on steam.
Let’s say they are told that stipulation can’t be enforced.
Valve, will probably go with 1 of 2 options.
1 - you can no longer generate keys. So all the great key sites(GMG, Fanatical and so on) no longer exist, because no steam keys.
2 - Valve charge an upfront fee for keys generated. Now smaller pmdevs and publishers can no longer supply keys to sites, because they can’t afford the upfront costs.
What incentive does valve have to continue offering this free service? If it can be exploited for the detriment of steam, they will stop providing it.
Let me try and understand this by altering the product.
Valve now produces cars and the devs are people who make these cars inside factories. Same as is currently the case, these employees get cars cheaper and are asked to not undercut the seller by holding onto the cars for a certain amount of time before selling them used.
It does make sense for me to view it that way. One could argue that the couple cars that get sold by employees doesnt do anything to hurt the brand and that pressuring them to keep the price high manipulates the market.
Also, doesnt the work of steam accumulate to hosting mirrors of a game and hosting a large website they get billions in revenue for?
This analogy is so bad, it is not even close to what is happening.
I will try and adapt to cars for you(I dont know why), but this is just really really bad.
Say you have designed a car, you can produce them on a very small scale, but you have come to valve(they make cars now) to mass produce. They do so, for a 30% cut(that reduces the more they sell) for everything they sell from their direct sales at the price you have set. There is no material costs or labour costs, just that cut of the price you have set.
Now valve have a sales page and are selling, and you decide that actually I would like more people to see the car, and so you consider selling it at other dealers. Valve says, sure, you can even have the cars for free from us(no 30% cut) and you can have basically an unlimited supply of free fully built cars to sell else where. We only ask that you sell the car at the same price you have set with us if you are selling a car we made.
You want to go sell it new cheaper? You are more than welcome too, but you cant sell the car we produced.
Such a bad analogy, but that is closer to what is actually happening.
First of all, people sometimes use analogies that dont make sense to you. No need to be a dick about it. You could just make a better example.
Staying with cars, I see my mistake. Valve is not producing the cars in this example, valve is doing the car sales for the (small) manufacturer. They dont provide any part of the car, only the exposure and surrounding community. Its not nothing but has zero to do with the product.
What they are asking is „you can sell cars from our showroom, just dont sell them for cheaper than we do“. Which does make sense.
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.
I actually was sort of on board after I read the article. Why should a publisher be penalized if they offer a lower price on a different platform?
They don’t really though. They’re talking about selling steam keys in a different platform, not selling the game on a different platform (like Epic Games for instance). You can sell the game for cheaper on Epic or GOG if you want to.
When new video game stores were opening that charged much lower commissions than Valve, I decided that I would provide my game “Overgrowth” at a lower price to take advantage of the lower commission rates. I intended to write a blog post about the results. But 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.
From the source cited by the article.
https://overgrowth.wolfire.com/buy-now/
Buy Overgrowth On humble bundle
So why is the game still on steam then if that “cited” information was accurate? The humble bundle sells the game without DRM.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/25000/Overgrowth/
Something stinks here… and it’s not Steam.
So why is the game still on steam then if that “cited” information was accurate?
Because Steam is the largest storefront with the biggest userbase and forfeiting those sales is a death sentence for developers.
The source makes a claim that selling off platform without DRM would get them delisted from Steam.
I found you a link showing they do exactly that.
So the developer is either lying… or the source is lying… or the article writer is lying.
The source makes a claim that selling off platform at a lower price than Steam would get them delisted. You linked the Steam page ($19,50) and the Wolfire.com page ($19,99), so what’s your point? Reread the post.
[…] they [Steam] 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.
Do they? Haven’t felt like that s the case as a long time user of /r/gamedeals and isthereanydeals which is all focused on game sales.
They don’t. The thing most people who have never published a game on steam don’t know is that valve gives you infinite steam keys (for free) that you can give or sell as you wish. This is to allow studios/publishers to give keys to whoever they want, and also allows them to sell those keys on their own or third-party websites. This is a HUGE deal, Valve is letting studios/publishers sell games on a separate site without charging anything while hosting the game themselves. The only condition to those keys is that they can’t be sold cheaper than on Steam.
That’s a completely different thing from what you’re claiming. This means that games can be cheaper on GoG, Epic, etc as long as they don’t give you a steam key together (which they could, for free).
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.
The thing is when people put games on Steam they account for the fee that they take. So in a sort of way the lawsuit is right, Valve are effectively causing players to get overcharged for games.
But if I put the same game on both Steam and GoG And make the gog one 20% cheaper, I still get more sales on the Steam page. If I only have it on GOG people actually complain even when you point out that it’s cheaper that way.
So Valve are causing players to get overcharged but players are forcing publishers to put their games on Steam. So players are causing players to get overcharged, so what can you do?
Alright, I don’t have the data nor time to research it now. But just try to check the pricing on EGS when a game was exclusive there AND after the exclusive deals run out AND the game is then sold on steam. Did the price increase? Or if that feels flawed (which I get it, maybe the dev has no intensive to change the price), try to get the average cost of those exclusive AAA games from other stores and compare it with average AAA games on steam. See how different it is.
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.
deleted by creator
If games on Steam were 30% more expensive than anywhere else, you (and the lawsuit’s plaintiffs) might have had a point.
deleted by creator
Steam also enforce a strict key price parity.
Do they?
https://isthereanydeal.com/game/helldivers-2/info/
if you think a 30% cut doesn’t reflect on the cost a player is paying, you’re out of your mind. This is business 101.
Isn’t business 101 charging as much as possible and not passing on savings to customers, and trying to capture as much high paying consumers as possible before being forced to start capturing price sensitive consumers with discounts?
Price of games that didn’t release on Steam seem to reflect that. Even games released by platform owners like Sony or Nintendo first party exclusives and the beloved Blizzard. Isn’t that pricing strategy business 101 as opposed to this belief that savings pass onto consumers? Lowering price right away doesn’t seem like good price maximizing strategy when goal would be to increase retail price consumers are willing to pay over time.
As far as I know, they do - for Steam keys. If you’re selling your game through other stores, not just a Steam key, there aren’t any demands placed upon you. The OC might’ve been talking about that.
Those are steam keys.
I’ve bought most of games through other sites because the games would be discounted lower and sooner than Steam. So it’s more personal experience than theory in my case.
Humble bundles on the even more extreme end of like 8 games sometimes being cheaper than a single title has ever been discounted.
Huh, interesting… You know, I’ve never really wondered about Humble Bundle specifically, but you’re right, they seem to be selling your run-of-the-mill Steam keys, or at least you can activate them effortlessly in Steam. Maybe it’s a case of Steam themselves handing out keys (instead of the publishers) to increase user retention? I honestly don’t know, this is all just speculation.
I actually didn’t click on your link at first, because I assumed it would just show other stores where you could purchase the whole game instead of a key, so I’m sorry that you had to clarify that.
Yes. You understand how pricing works. The stores charge what the market will bear. That’s why games had been stuck at $60 since the 360/PS3 era.
Steam also enforce a strict key price parity.
No it doesn’t. The price parity thing is only if you are selling the game on Steam platform, i.e. selling a steam key, it’s essentially a way to allow publishers to sell the game on their own website, without paying the 30% to steam, but don’t allow them to undercut steam entirely while still taking advantage of their platform.
Games on GoG, itch, Epic store, etc, can have any price they want, as long as they don’t give away a steam key valve doesn’t care what price you sell your game elsewhere.
This is one of the most annoying fake news out there, Valve are going above and beyond what any other store is doing, and they get bad rep from people who have never read their policy, published a game there, or talked to anyone who has.
They do prevent you from linking to your own store within your Steam game though. Even though they don’t provide a complete solution for things like microtransactions and DLC.
How it works on Steam:
- User makes an in-app purchase using the steam wallet integration
- Steam processes the payment taking 30% and gives you a reference number for that transaction
- You query that transaction every time the player logs in to see if they’ve refunded it or not. That transaction doesn’t actually contain any information about what they bought though.
- You then maintain a separate purchasing server whose whole job it is is to keep a record of what the player purchased in reference to that transaction number.
For that Valve wants 30% of in-app/DLC purchases. At that point it’s stripe and nothing more. Unlike standalone DLC Or expansions, these unlock purchases don’t come with serving any additional content in the form of downloads.
If you make your own service to handle these transactions (with only a 3-4% transaction rate) Valve will prevent you from linking to it, or mentioning it anywhere on your page, forums or within the game itself. You need to direct players elsewhere and then mention it. Even for cross-platform games where having Steam maintain a transaction list for a portion of the users is just a needless additional layer.
I know how Valve’s publisher API works, others are similar in case you didn’t know. But that is only true for games that need online validation of some sort, DLCs for offline games don’t need to implement this.
Valve is hosting the game, providing the storefront and bringing in a lot of customers. If you didn’t think those 30% were worth it you would not have put your game on steam.
Plus all of this is irrelevant to the point that Valve doesn’t enforce price parity.
For the base game, which I think 30% is still more, I think it certainly makes sense. Because they’re providing a complete solution.
For in-app purchases or unlock purchases, whether or not the purchase is in-app, the solution isn’t complete, and not worth the 30% they charge on those transactions. It would be trivial for every transaction to have a custom field where you could store an array of what was purchased in in that purchase and have it returned when the transaction was checked. Boom, complete solution. Specifically for in-app purchases if they wanted to take 5% since all they’re doing is the job of Stripe and nothing more, then I’d consider that fair.
Certainly not the players, given current costs - where Steam is virtually always cheaper than elsewhere.
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)
Console prices aren’t really relevant to Steam. Consoles always tend to run higher.
Yes, but they sue Steam that has competitors selling games for the same price instead of literal monopolies. Even Apple was forced to open up to other app stores.
What a load of rubbish.
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
Suing them because they’re making too much profit isn’t the way to go to make it so they’re prevented from making too much profit in the future…
Eh…
Ok
yes you’re right this is a lawsuit about too much profit and it will directly set a precedent where companies aren’t allowed to have too much profit.
Pretty smart, as a leftist maybe I’ll sue every corporation for being privately owned, this is a whole new avenue for systemic change. You opened my eyes
Wealth is not money.
That’s why I included both numbers, but if you know how to deal with your finances, at some point wealth is pretty much the same as money.
You have confused the two numbers. Again, what is NOT money.
Check my comment
I talk about wealth then I talk about income, compare both, then I compare wealth to net worth (which is how you measure wealth)
If you have enough wealth, it’s used to get money as your wealth is used as collateral, you don’t need to be rich to do that, you just need to own stuff that is paid for. I know people who only own a house that isn’t worth a fortune, the got a mortgage on it when the rates were down to 1% to invest it at a higher interest rate, their not rich, they just have wealth that can be used as collateral to get money.
I saw some stats the other day that if you remove the top 1000 incomes in the united states the average drops to around 35k. So that average of 75k is bullshit.
Median != Average.
The median is an average. But it isn’t the mean, which is presumably what the other comment was using.
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yay billion dollar lawyer paycheck
