Why is Valve being sued for almost $900 million, but Epic Games wasn't sued when they bought Rocket League and Fall Guys to remove them from steam?
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Anything by Blizzard, Escape from Tarkov, Minecraft, Roblox, Valorant/LoL/TFT, Genshin Impact/HSR, Fortnite and more.
Notably, almost none of those are indie games, and almost any indie game that you did list came out in the 2000s like Roblox, before Steam was the behemoth it is today. Half of them are games by the same sets of AAA studios like Epic Games, Blizzard, and MiHoYo, and most Blizzard games have an entire franchise of games older than Steam itself to piggyback off of. Speaking of, anything by Blizzard isn't even true... their most recent games like Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 are both on Steam. Tarkov is also on Steam now, but I'll admit I'm splitting hairs here since it spent nearly a decade off of it. Though the fact that it released on Steam with its 1.0 update does say something.
So I really don't think any of those games aside from debatably Tarkov shows that the average modern indie dev can be successful outside of Steam.
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Yes this is a more apt description, sorry, this whole thing has been stupid tbh.
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You prefer Walmart instead of Walmart?
I personal want a store that is native Linux. I have yet to find a store that does it better, no matter your OS. Epic, GOG, Amazon, ubisoft, and Xbox gamepass do not support or have a native Linux programs and require using Wine/proton to access their stores. Having an extra layer on top makes it hard to install games as all of them are expecting a C:/ that is just how any Linux OSes work.
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I believe the problem is that it isn't just Steam keys. There's apparently emails from Valve employees that state that it's all versions of the game, and that seems to be the real crux here. And if that's true it's pretty shitty, and they might actually lose this.
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Oh well that's totally fair, honestly.
It locks out real competitive pricing.
How does it do that?
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That's not true, it only applies if you're selling a steam key. Devs are free to set the price on any platform they want, want proof? Check out the currently free game on epic which has never been free on Steam.
Steam provides developers with infinite steam keys that they can sell outside of steam for 100% profit, however those keys cannot be sold at a lesser price than what it's sold on steam. Which honestly sounds like common sense.
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If Epic spent half as much money as they are suing organisations and instead funded developing their shop into a gaming community platform like Steam, they’d probably have caught up by now.
Sweeney is legit delulu tbh.
He literally said Epic's launcher/store is ready as is, doesn't need more development. It also runs in Unreal Engine, so you get Chromium (CEF) + Unreal Engine running just for one launcher/store.
At least on Linux you can run Unreal Editor without EGS (because it doesn't exist on Linux) and if you've claimed any free games on Epic, you can use Heroic launcher to manage them easily.
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Marketshare, and you have to remember the difference between platform and store. If Epic made them exclusive to the Epic Machine
then there would be a problem but moving from Steam to Epic doesn't remove Windows support.Imagine Target bought Great Value (Walmart brand) and moved it from Walmart to target. Would anyone care?
It does remove easy Linux compatibility. Also you can run any storefront on steam deck, so not sure what your point is about hardware
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Seems like buying games to remove them from your competitor is a scummier thing to do.
Because Valve has more money that someone winning a lawsuit can take from.
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Sweeney is legit delulu tbh.
He literally said Epic's launcher/store is ready as is, doesn't need more development. It also runs in Unreal Engine, so you get Chromium (CEF) + Unreal Engine running just for one launcher/store.
At least on Linux you can run Unreal Editor without EGS (because it doesn't exist on Linux) and if you've claimed any free games on Epic, you can use Heroic launcher to manage them easily.
if you've claimed any free games on Epic, you can use Heroic launcher to manage them easily.
Oooh. This is interesting. I wonder how much of the epic library is Linux compatible.
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If Epic spent half as much money as they are suing organisations and instead funded developing their shop into a gaming community platform like Steam, they’d probably have caught up by now.
I don't understand this I use it for rocket league occasionally and it all just works (tm) ? I prefer Valve 100% to slopnite developers but the launcher seems fine to me. (On Linux Heroic is unironically better than steam which has a bunch of random bugs every few weeks)
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Seems like buying games to remove them from your competitor is a scummier thing to do.
I dunno, killing the idea of ownership of games was pretty bad.
I don't think any amount of Proton patches submitted is going to bring that back.
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if you've claimed any free games on Epic, you can use Heroic launcher to manage them easily.
Oooh. This is interesting. I wonder how much of the epic library is Linux compatible.
Everything except fortnite and a few other kernel level anticheat games
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I believe the problem is that it isn't just Steam keys. There's apparently emails from Valve employees that state that it's all versions of the game, and that seems to be the real crux here. And if that's true it's pretty shitty, and they might actually lose this.
Do you have a source for that? All I can find on their Steamworks site is the rules on Steam keys being restricted, not other versions. Maybe I missed that email part in the news.
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I dunno, killing the idea of ownership of games was pretty bad.
I don't think any amount of Proton patches submitted is going to bring that back.
Apparently a lot of games don’t have DRMs on Steam. The only thing missing is a badge indicating this.
So at least you own these..
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Steam isn't being sued by Sweeny, they are being sued on behalf of 14 million UK gamers.
Also, epic has an estimated 3% to 7% of the market share (not 42 which makes no sense with steam having the other 80%), yet they should be regulated as well. If you stopped bootlicking for half a second, you would realise that this isn't about who's the worst but the fact that they are all bad (except itch, bless them).
Your enjoyment of their product doesn't mean it isn't having a serious and negative impact on the industry. Amazon is really convenient too, can you defend them next please?
I never claimed steam was being sued by Sweeney. Sweeney made a statement about the steam lawsuit saying he agreed with it.
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/epic-games-boss-tim-sweeney-voices-support-for-usd900-million-steam-lawsuit-valve-is-the-only-major-store-still-holding-onto-the-payments-tie-and-30-percent-junk-fee/I was quickly googling market share stuff on break so I misread the Epic e-shop market share vs Epic's full market share outside that.
The fact that Steam only makes double what epic e-shop makes with literally 11 times the market influence?
What regulations are you expecting out of this? How will that have a positive effect on consumers?
I never said this was about good or bad. I pointed out pros and cons of using each service which extrapolated quite literally to why consumers choose Steam over Epic.
A monopolistic corp who uses anit-consumer/anti-competitve tactics to remain a market leader/? monopoly is illegal. And it's regulated.
The only reason steam is being investigated at all is because 2 or 3 out of literal thousands of game developers have made a claim that steam is threatening to remove their game if they try to sell it on other game stores for cheaper than steam (not steam keys, but using another stores licensing keys).
That hasn't been proven and if it is, a further investigation into how wide spread that behavior is would still be needed to prove that Valve or Steam came by their market share illegally.
Also the fact that you brought up Amazon as the foil to your argument at the end is laughable. For multiple reasons.
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Apparently a lot of games don’t have DRMs on Steam. The only thing missing is a badge indicating this.
So at least you own these..
Yes, some of them can be launched directly from the exe without the steam client, or with some modifications to the game files.
Here's a list of DRM free games: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam
Also it's kind of silly how people automatically blame Steam for this, even though Valve does not force you to use DRM to publish to Steam. It is the developers themselves that chose to add DRM or tie themselves to the Steam API so that the game can't run without it.
So for example getting Dorfromantik or Citizen Sleeper from Steam or GOG is virtually equivalent in terms of ownership.
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I never claimed steam was being sued by Sweeney. Sweeney made a statement about the steam lawsuit saying he agreed with it.
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/epic-games-boss-tim-sweeney-voices-support-for-usd900-million-steam-lawsuit-valve-is-the-only-major-store-still-holding-onto-the-payments-tie-and-30-percent-junk-fee/I was quickly googling market share stuff on break so I misread the Epic e-shop market share vs Epic's full market share outside that.
The fact that Steam only makes double what epic e-shop makes with literally 11 times the market influence?
What regulations are you expecting out of this? How will that have a positive effect on consumers?
I never said this was about good or bad. I pointed out pros and cons of using each service which extrapolated quite literally to why consumers choose Steam over Epic.
A monopolistic corp who uses anit-consumer/anti-competitve tactics to remain a market leader/? monopoly is illegal. And it's regulated.
The only reason steam is being investigated at all is because 2 or 3 out of literal thousands of game developers have made a claim that steam is threatening to remove their game if they try to sell it on other game stores for cheaper than steam (not steam keys, but using another stores licensing keys).
That hasn't been proven and if it is, a further investigation into how wide spread that behavior is would still be needed to prove that Valve or Steam came by their market share illegally.
Also the fact that you brought up Amazon as the foil to your argument at the end is laughable. For multiple reasons.
Steams revenue was 16b (edit: it's 4b) in 2025, epics was 1b in 2024. At least click the links instead of pasting what the Google summary tells you. You are mixing up epics store revenue with their unreal engine revenue.
The fact is any game store front is a money printing machine mostly because of the rampant price fixing, hard to enter markets and abuse from those that hold the lion share of that market (Steam, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo).
That money is being sucked out of the companies that are actually making games, and is leading to a reduction in quality, layoffs and bankruptcies.
For regulation, we could easily have limits on the percentage store fronts are allowed to demand for digital media, but each time there's a lawsuit, a bunch of idiots loudly fight it. Lawmakers aren't going to enact laws that go against what the lobbyist want, especially if the majority of the population have been instructed that the boot is for their benefit.
Your list of pros and cons doesn't matter, every player being compared is bad. It's just a defense in favor of Gabens yacht fleet at this point. Exclaiming that steam shouldn't change because you like their product, even though it's clearly having an impact, is the same as defending Amazon because drop shipping is easier than going to the store.
Fyi, I use both, I literally own a steam deck and the sd card came from Amazon. Defending their practices is just fucking weak though.
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Why is Epic insignificant?
They launched with a 12% service fee, dropped that service fee to 10%, and then dropped the service fee entirely for the first $1Mn in sales per year.
In June 2025, they released a new feature enabling developers to launch their own webshops hosted by the Epic Games Store. These webshops could offer players out-of-app purchases, as a more "cost-effective" alternative to in-app purchases.
They provide developers with free to generate license keys, and keyless integration with other e-shop stores including GOG, Humble Bundle, and Prime gaming.
They offer a user review system.
They also added cloud saves in July of 2025.
The thing is, they offer none of the other features Steam offers:
- In-Home Streaming
- Remote Play with Friends
- Family Accounts
- Achievements
- Price Adjusted Bundles
- Gifting Games
- Shopping Cart
- TV/Big Screen Mode
Epic launched their service in 2018. It's been 7 years. The only reason not to offer feature parity (for a company that makes $4.6Bn - 5.7Bn in revenue, and a shop that makes $1.09Bn, you'd think they would be enticing users with the services they want.
What they have done instead is exclusivity deals that plenty of consumers complain about but devs don't seem to care about so long as they're getting paid.
So, the excuse that Steam got there first (as if it's just about that and the reason their market share is what it is is because they have refined, adapted, and improved their service offering over time) doesn't make a whole lot of sense when steam has a significant percent of the market share (79.5% to epic's 42.3%) but is only making twice the revenue of their rival store.
It makes sense for GOG or Itch.io who's market cap is smaller by quite a lot to not offer the same feature parity. Each of those platforms has figured out they can offer other things to devs and consumers to make themselves competitive over time.
Sweeny's attack is basically just a pity party he's throwing for himself because he doesn't want to compete.
Edit
This is a sanity check because I wasn't correct with my numbers by mistake.So, the excuse that Steam got there first (as if it's just about that and the reason their market share is what it is is because they have refined, adapted, and improved their service offering over time) doesn't make a whole lot of sense when steam has a significant percent of the market share (79.5% to epic's 42.3%) but is only making twice the revenue of their rival store.
These numbers are not correct and I was mistaken. In actuality Valve's revenue is approximately 16 times that of Epic e-shop. It looks like an estimate of Steam's game sales is that about $4Bn of their revenue last year was from Steam's game sales. I am trying to corroborate that from other sources.
I'm still looking into and trying to parse out what percentage of steams sales last year were hardware (epic to my knowledge doesn't have a hardware arm of their business), and it's not immediately clear how much they made on the e-shop portion of their business alone so I can get more comparable numbers.
What I have been able to find so far I've posted below, and I'll try to remember to come back and do some math on that after I focus on the first thing.
https://gamalytic.com/blog/steam-revenue-infographic
https://80.lv/articles/valve-earned-over-usd4-billion-on-steam-alone-in-2025-analysts-say
I am definitely not on epic side here, but the reason they had to pay for exclusivity for games is because valve doesn't allow any games on steam to be sold cheaper elsewhere. Which developers follow because steam brings in a lot of revenue.
Without that, epic could try to compete with steam (and its extra features) by offering lower prices, and letting the consumer make the choice of features vs price.
But valve policies effectively make it impossible for any new marketplace to compete.
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Seems like buying games to remove them from your competitor is a scummier thing to do.
Rocket League had a native Linux version, but they also pulled that.
