Have you ever found yourself in a conversation with people about Valve’s anti-competitive practices? Well, I have. And I defended Valve’s requirement to let customers choose their preferred storefront when buying games, as long as Steam keys were involved. After all, you end up getting to use all of Steam’s features and services when you activate the game on Steam. We can argue about this, but it turns out, that was a red herring!
I’ve spend the better part of today digging through this newest class action lawsuit, again made by Wolfire, against Valve. (This has been going for a while.) I was compiling a response to each of the points in the overview (can’t go through the whole thing, sorry), and there was one thing that stood out after searching for the “Price Veto Provision”. I had heard people make claims to the same effect before, but they were never able to back it up. (And it being conflated with the “Steam Key Price Parity Provision” made it worse.) So here it is:
Valve pressures developers into price parity across different storefronts, even if Steam keys are NOT part of the equation.
We basically see any selling of the game on PC, Steam key or not, as a part of the same shared PC market- so even if you weren’t using Steam keys, we’d just choose to stop selling a game if it was always running discounts of 75% off on one store but 50% off on ours. . . . That stays true, even for DRM-free sales or sales on a store with its own keys like UPLAY or Origin.
When I looked for this quote, I found a podcast episode that I hadn’t listened to (The Hated One, Episode 228 - More evidence of Valve enforcing price parity beyond Steam keys), but that thankfully provided some sources for more related quotes, from earlier lawsuits, such as:
“The biggest takeaway is, don’t disadvantage Steam customers. For instance, it wouldn’t be fair to sell your DLC for $10 on Steam if you’re selling it for $5 or giving it as a reward for $5 donations. We would ask that Steam customers get that lower $5 price as well.”
“If the offer you’re making fundamentally disadvantages someone who bought your game on Steam, it’s probably not a great thing for us or our customers (even if you don’t find a specific rule describing precisely that scenario).”
a Steam account manager, Tom Giardino, reportedly told publisher Wolfire that Steam would delist any games available for sale at a lower price elsewhere, whether or not using Steam keys.
The developer asked, “Regarding the pricing policy, can a non-Steam variant of a game be sold at a different price than on the Steam store page?” Steam’s response was “Selling the game off Steam at a lower price wouldn’t be considered giving Steam users a fair deal.”
These were apparently from 2017 and 2018, so things might’ve changed since then, but it’s reason enough to question Valve. I unfortunately haven’t been able to find much on these other quotes (search engine enshittification, or has this really not been talked about?), and I’m unsure why they’re not also included in this newest lawsuit, but there they are. Hopefully this helps anyone who was misinformed or lacked proof, like myself. Also if anyone has related stories from gamedevs or articles that actually get to the core of the problem, I’d love it if you could share them.
This is called a Most Favored Nation clause and is not exclusive to Steam, or even particularly uncommon.
This is literally how Costco and Walmart keep such low prices. If anyone has a lower price than them they will just drop your contract
And this was only mentioned in a footnote in the complaint document, though I saw it many times when browsing through the earlier lawsuit documents. Interestingly, this sounds like it should already be illegal in the EU, as per the Wikipedia link you gave.
It’s possible (probable, even) but I’m not really sure what the recourse would be there. The EU can’t force Steam to let games onto their platform.
I’m kind of torn on this, really. I do think Steam needs competition, but none of the ones that’ve popped up seem to understand that a lot of the appeal of Steam is the extra features they offer to users, it’s not just a storefront. And to game developers, they offer a lot of free marketing that’s expensive to get outside of Steam. I’d be interested to see studies on how much value the marketing Steam provides brings. If it could be argued that it’s close to the difference in percentage Steam takes vs. other storefronts, I’d have a hard time saying it was unjustified.
Obviously that marketing is so valuable because of the market share Steam has, so if another reasonable competitor who were at least attempting for feature parity for end users, that marketing might come to be worth less, and there’d be a better argument against Steam taking such a large cut.
The EU can and should force Steam to get rid of the MFN clause. All Valve needs to do is to let competing stores price games cheaper than on Steam. (So long as Steam services are not involved with that off-Steam purchase.)
There’s still plenty of benefits Steam provides to customers that many may choose it over a different store even if they could get the game for cheaper. And Steam also provides developers with tools that make Steam worth it, like Steam networking and cloud saves. As Gabe Newell famously said about piracy, but I believe this applies in this case too, it’s simply a service problem.
Don’t they take roughly the same as any other storefront, aside from Epic? And Epic mostly just does it as a marketing tactic, rather than to act in some way ethically.
Itch is lower and would have grown much more by now if people could actually sell games cheaper there. That’s how real competition works.
Itch is less a storefront, or even a social site, and more a developer playground. And real competition is no holds barred, bar-room brawl, knock-out drag-out free-for-all. People think “oh, if we just let people compete, everything will work out splendidly”. But the truth is, the strong will always overshadow and overpower the weak with “real competition”. It’s not fair play and love is the truest standard, it’s king of the fucking mountain. And whoever has the biggest wallet is often the biggest winner. That doesn’t mean Steam, or even Itch or GoG, that means Microsoft and Epic and EA. That means the bullies win.
No one really wants that, they just want a pipe dream that can never exist.