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Valve will be facing an antitrust lawsuit soon, according to US District Judge John C. Coughenour. The road to this decision started in April of last year when Overgrowth developer Wolfire Games sued Valve, claiming anti-competitive practices. The lawsuit came down to two things: Valve's controversial 30% fee on all game sales, and their Steam Key Price Parity Provision, which prohibits publishers from selling games for a lower price on any other platform, under threat of removal from Steam. Wolfire claims that Valve has not earned the 30% fee, and can freely implement it because publishers need to sell through them due to their market dominance. They believe this has resulted in prices rising across the industry as publishers need to raise game prices to account for the fee. They also allege that the Steam Key Price Parity Provision prevents fair competition as competing stores cannot entice publishers with a lower fee, and cannot build a customer base because they cannot offer lower prices.

The most notable competitor to Steam, the Epic Games Store, has notoriously lost quite a bit of money for Epic while they're securing their place in the market. It was reported in August 2021, based on court documents made public during their lawsuit with Apple, that Epic has sunk nearly $500 million into the EGS and does not expect to turn a profit until 2027.

Valve filed for the suit to be dismissed in July, claiming that the policy is only in place to protect Steam users and that "seeking the best price for your customers is not harm to competition; it is competition."

The suit was dismissed without prejudice in November 2021, but Wolfire was given 30 days to issue another complaint addressing the dismissal and providing additional context. They have, and now parts of the lawsuit have been dismissed with prejudice, while other motions will go ahead. Wolfire has claimed that they were told by a Steam account manager that Valve would delist any games from Steam that were being sold for a lower price elsewhere, whether or not it was a Steam key. Noting that Valve's policies affect the way even “non-Steam-enabled games are sold and priced,” Judge Coughenour concluded "these allegations are sufficient to plausibly allege unlawful conduct."

Judge Coughenour was initially dismissive of the criticism towards the 30% fee as that has always been Valve's policy, even when they were not a dominant force in the market. With their latest appeal, however, Wolfire pointed out that Valve acquired the World Opponents Network in 2001 and shut it down in 2004 as Steam gained popularity, forcing users to migrate to Steam, making it "a must-have platform." Judge Coughenour also claims that Steam's lack of market share versus brick-and-mortar stores at this time is irrelevant, as it "did not need market power to charge a fee well above its cost structure because those brick-and-mortar competitors had a far higher cost structure."

Source

 

[SG854]

This lawsuit will ruin Valve amd they'll have to change the way they do things to match Epic Gamestore so that they won't get sued again.

 

[kevin corms]

Makes no sense, on pc you can sell games any way you want. On consoles things are actually closed off, maybe someone should look into that.

 

[kevin corms]

This lawsuit will ruin Valve amd they'll have to change the way they do things to match Epic Gamestore so that they won't get sued again.

Only if they lose…

 

[kevin corms]

TBH, I wasn't paying attention to whether Steam was anti-competitive or not. Now that I think about it, there's not a lot of other places for PC games, so... should I add Valve to GAMMANT?

There are other places to buy games for pc, gog, epic, direct from publisher, Ubisoft, ea etc.


Only thing that was annoying, are the people who freak out when a game isn’t on steam and get mad about having to install epic games store. I hope they aren’t bots…

 

[urbanman2004]

Wolfire has claimed that they were told by a Steam account manager that Valve would delist any games from Steam that were being sold for a lower price elsewhere...

I think devs should have the option to promote the sale of their games on the platform of their choice outside of Steam w/o risk of the dev's game being delisted especially if the devs feels they can offer a more viable purchase option for the consumer. However, I think the "30% fee" (Valve's commission) for allowing a dev to host their game to be sold on the Steam platform is a nonargument since that's industry standard protocol across the board for all e-retailers (e.g., Sony, M$, Apple, Google, etc.) on a variety of devices, consoles, and OSes. If I'm not mistaken, I believe Valve lightened up a bit on their terms and conditions by allowing small dev teams to not be charged a 30% fee until their game reaches a million dollars in sales revenue and a lot of grievances Wolfire made to substantiate their complaint is common practice across the industry as a whole which were also moot points.

 

[urbanman2004]

There are other places to buy games for pc, gog, epic, direct from publisher, Ubisoft, ea etc.


Only thing that was annoying, are the people who freak out when a game isn’t on steam and get mad about having to install epic games store. I hope they aren’t bots…

#Facts

 

[KennyAtom]

oh no, I have to pay 30% of revenue for valve to host my game, host my servers, create a forum for me, handle all sales and refunds, add trading cards, add micro transactions and let them handle the payment, allow me to sell in game items on other sites, and more! oh, the humanity! how is this allowed!!

though the banning sales off store thing sounds weird and partially untrue.