Technology

Bloomberg cites two high-profile cases referenced in the ongoing lawsuit, one involving Ubisoft, and another Warner Bros.

First of all, I trust Ubi and WB way less than valve.

Valve allegedly threatened to delist all editions of Rainbow Six Siege after Ubisoft offered a cheaper option on its Uplay store.

Yeah.

Because it violates their policy. That's not a "threat", those are the terms of the contract Ubi and WB agreed to. Terms that everyone has to follow.

Heck, Ubi and WB should be hit with a counter suit for trying to leverage their market position to exert control over valve and getting unusually favorable terms.

Clown suit. Ubi and WB are mad they can't break their contract with valve in a one sided way.

edit: I forgot some context:

The deal between valve and a publisher or dev is: they can sell on steam and elsewhere if steam is at least tied in price, or cheaper, but when they sell somewhere else, that includes the steam key and access to steam and steam's distribution at no cost.

What the devs and publishers wanted to do was leverage other features of steam and the steam ecosystem, while undercutting steam's price.

They are always free to just not sell on steam for a cheaper price. That's not what this is about.

edit2:

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

"Steam Key Rules and Guidelines"

I want to make something clear about the Valve Anti-trust lawsuit currently making its way through the court system.

This case is predicted on the idea that Valve's "Price Parity Clause" in its contracts with Game Devs is anti-consumer and anti-competitive.

The original lawsuit filed by Wolfire before this became a class action Anti-trust lawsuit is available online and it alleges a couple of things.

1. Steam is two separate services that are lumped together in an effort to maintain its market share.

2. It uses this market share to enforce a Most Favored Nation Clause.

3. The Price Parity Clause does not only apply to Steam Keys but to all e-shop sales outside the Steam store.

4. The Price Parity Clause is actually a Most Favored Nation Clause, aka a Price Veto Provision.

The reason that people are claiming this is about Steam Keys is because the original lawsuit filed by Wolfire says that it is. This is what most of the articles that are actually written about this exempt from their writeup and since they don't provide source documentation (from the filing), they lack this context.

The lawsuit is literally about whether or not Valve applies and enforces their Price Parity Clause to not just Steam Keys but also to non-steam storefronts that do not at all use Steam Keys.

If you are arguing that this isn't about Steam Keys, your information is inaccurate and based not on the court filing but on articles that exclude information from the court filing.

If you're saying it's solely about Steam Keys your information is contextually right to some small degree but just as incomplete and therefore just as incorrect.

Because of the nature of the claims in the Wolfire lawsuit (some of which are actually demonstrably false), it does not lend creedence to the other claims being made by Wolfire (on which the class action is relying).

One of the most notable discrepancies between what Wolfie claim and what is legally proven to be true thus far is that Steam does not make a 30% commission on Steam Keys. In point of fact, Valve do not claim any percentage of sales figures from Steam Keys at all. Only sales made directly on the steam e-shop are charged the 30% fee.

The second major one is that the clause in their contract with Steam on which this is predicated is specifically about Steam Key availability and use.

So far as I can tell, there is not a difference in these particular parts of the lawsuit between the class action and the original lawsuit that was dismissed in 2021. So Wolfire's original lawsuit and the Class Action still state that Valve does these things and this lawsuit is as much about Steam Keys as it is about Price Parity/Most Favored Nation type market tactics and clauses.

I believe they have not changed this wording because they cannot remove their Steam Key argument from the lawsuit because without it they do not have a written Steam Policy on which to rely.

So far as I can tell Wolfire and the Class Action claim that the Most Favored Nation Clause is only spoken of in person and is not part of the official contract they signed or any such contract that Valve offers for Steam services. It is unclear if this is their own claim or something they point to as being true based on alleged Microsoft Employee statement.

If I come across more information on this I will try to post it, but I might not remember.

I do wish we could stop posting articles with sensationalized claims and horribly clickbait titles that don't actually providing even a link back to the sources of their information and claims.

I believe there is a separate lawsuit happening in Europe and I haven't delved into that one to this degree.

There's also a separate lawsuit alleging price fixing between Microsoft and Valve. I have not looked into that one at all though I did come across it in my rabbit hole dive.

If anyone can direct me to a non-account required court filing for the two video game developers that sued Valve I would like to see them. So far it looks like the court filings were originally separate but have been combined into a single court filing and that court filing doesn't use the same language as Dark Catt's singular filing did.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.298754/gov.uscourts.wawd.298754.1.0_1.pdf

https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/why-valve-actually-gets-less-than-30-percent-of-steam-game-sales.1450097/

https://lawfold.com/valve-lawsuit/

https://www.classaction.org/media/wolfire-games-llc-et-al-v-valve-corporation.pdf

https://gameworldobserver.com/2024/03/14/sweeney-vs-steam-cut-epic-tirade-gaben-emails-revealed

https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/revealed-tim-sweeneys-epic-rant-to

https://aftermath.site/gamers-sue-microsoft-valve-steam-antitrust-lawsuit/

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.300801/gov.uscourts.wawd.300801.1.0.pdf

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/it/ip_21_170

I love valve as much as the next PC gamer, but I agree their rules should not affect what publishers do entirely on other platforms.

The amount of people in this thread that are arguing that steam is fully within the right here due to the fact that they have a restriction on steam key pricing blows my mind.

for example with the UbiSoft case, It's clear they have never actually opened or used Uplay because if they had they would realize that Uplay does not use Steam keys period at all. They are their own distribution platform that distributes off of uplay servers.

The entire point of the lawsuits is going one step further, which is that despite steam having a policy that says it's for keys only, they unilaterally enforce it on all platforms regardless of the usage of the keys.

Now whether that's actually true or not is what the lawsuits have to determine. But that is what the claim is. Personally I'm leaning towards it's true because I've seen some screenshots posted about customer service saying that's how it worked and threatening to delist steam games for cheaper first party distribution pricing elsewhere.

I'll be curious where these cases go.

I like Valve as a company, but this is exactly what antitrust laws are for. I hope the due course of justice is followed and the appropriate consequences result if any impropriety is found.

Cookiewalled article. Pay with your data or pay with money.

Such a weird stream of comments to be read on Lemmy.

Regardless of what you folks think about Valve, does anyone believe that a marketplace should have this kind of leverage over their suppliers? For instance, should Amazon be permitted to force manufacturers to set the price of a product outside of their marketplace? Should Apple be allowed to force app developers to price match the Google store?

What if we turn it on it's other side and say: In the interest of its customers, Valve prohibits publishers from selling for a higher price on Steam than somewhere else.

If you can buy from GOG do it. Need to make sure viable competition sticks around plus they actually let you own the game

FYI: Eurogamer is owned by IGN who is owned by Ziff Davis.

IGN has been known to write hit pieces against competition for Ziff Davis and their partners.

Ah, I see the valve bootlickers are already here. Lemmings hate companies, unless it’s Valve.

The suit, which is ongoing, centers on what the developers alleged was a tacit company policy designed to punish them for offering discounts at competing online stores. But instead of defending the purported rule, Newell just denied it existed. “Valve does not have a policy or practice of dictating prices to third-party software developers on other platforms,” he said, according to a previously unreported transcript of his deposition. Presented with internal communications in which Valve employees appeared to be enforcing the rule, Newell repeated his denial, at times verbatim, again and again. When an attorney pressed him on how Valve would react if a developer did charge less money for a game on a competing store, Newell demurred. “I’m confused by your question,” he said, before later adding, “Many of our partners and many of our customers are quite happy with the service that we’re providing.”

from the bloomberg article.

Thread number 768 wherin Lemmy users pretend not to know what a monopoly is cause they love Steam so much.