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?
-
They are being accused of price fixing with the whole "can't sell games for cheaper on other store fronts compared to the steam listing" thing
warm@kbin.earth explains it better below:
It only applies to Steam product keys though, so developers cannot sell cheap Steam keys on other platforms while still taking advantage of Steam’s services.
I’m pretty sure that Amazon also says that you can’t sell things on Amazon for more than you sell the same item elsewhere.
I’ve certainly seen a video claiming that.
-
This would be like if someone sued Walmart for letting their local store go out of business.
Walmart didn't let local stores go out of business, it deliberately undercut local stores in order to drive them out if business.
-
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 wish they'd just focus on fixing Unreal. It's a shit show.
-
Because it's a patent troll who has attempted this a few times before.
Exactly.
And she's one of those who is doing it "for the children". So, one of those disgusting beings who hides behind children to get anything she wants done.
-
I wish they'd just focus on fixing Unreal. It's a shit show.
Always has been
-
There are laws that say that abusing a monopoly is illegal. Steam is objectively a monopoly in pc games. Sure, you don't have to use it, but it is basically impossible for indie developers to make a living without it.
Now, the question is if valve's actions are actually abusing the monopoly, or normal business practices.
I would say they aren't.
Because, they aren't like Epic, who has been going around and locking games behind exclusivity deals. Name me one game by one developer, who Valve went to and was like "hey, I'm going to give you a $5 Million exclusivity deal. I'd like for your game to be available on our Steam platform for 2 years before you're allowed to sell anywhere else!"
I'm sure nobody can find that game. Meanwhile, Epic has done this to Metro: Exodus, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 for the PC and outright buying studios going "hey, delist your game on Steam and only be available to our platform."
How the fuck can that broad be so stupid to not notice that? But it's all Valve's fault, somehow.
-
Because Steam is the world's biggest games store on PC while Epic is statistically insignificant. What's the question?
Epic is irrelevant because Epic has not given anyone a single solitary reason to use their launcher and platform. Tim Sweeny loves the smell of his own shit in the morning after he takes a big wet dump in the toilet. So much so, he doesn't even flush for a while.
That launcher of theirs has a knack of sucking out all of your system resources, namely bandwidth and CPU, just to download games. Meanwhile, Valve gives you so many options to work around that.
-
He's also Tencent's bitch too.
-
Walmart didn't let local stores go out of business, it deliberately undercut local stores in order to drive them out if business.
It's not a perfect analogy, but you get my point.
-
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.
its not about making better product for epic. its about removing competition so they dont have to.
-
hey, I'm going to give you a $5 Million exclusivity deal
This isn't something they need to.do, as they have a monopoly.
-
Got any other modern examples than just the one game that had a massive following for the last 7 years of development?
Star Citizen I guess. If by "well" it is meant "making lots of money"
But yeah it's not realistic at all for 99+% of devs/games
-
hey, I'm going to give you a $5 Million exclusivity deal
This isn't something they need to.do, as they have a monopoly.
...Okay?
-
Because Steam is the world's biggest games store on PC while Epic is statistically insignificant. What's the question?
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 wish they'd just focus on fixing Unreal. It's a shit show.
You dont like games that look like you have grease smeared over your monitor?
-
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
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?
-
No one gives a flat fuck about epics launcher.
Everyone does the moment steam gets sued by consumers. It's like the bar is set by epic or something and we can't expect better things from any of them because of it.
-
Got any other modern examples than just the one game that had a massive following for the last 7 years of development?
Anything by Blizzard, Escape from Tarkov, Minecraft, Roblox, Valorant/LoL/TFT, Genshin Impact/HSR, Fortnite and more.
-
Yeah, it's no longer for sale. If you bought it before it was delisted, you can still download/play it through steam. What is fucking atrocious is that I had to go and make an account with epic to play. Well, they can spam and sell my 'nannerbanner'sfakeemailforepiccunts@proton.me' all they want. Fucking cunts. .
Yeah, I bought my own domain specifically so I could set up a catch-all email service. Everything sent to my domain hits the same inbox, but I can easily see who has sold my info. If I start getting spam addressed to “walmart@example.com” then I know Walmart sold my info. And I can easily set a rule to automatically mark anything addressed to that burned account as spam.
Lots of websites quickly caught onto the “just add a + after your regular email” trick, and set up an internal rule to remove any of the + tags. So that old trick is largely useless.
-
They are being accused of price fixing with the whole "can't sell games for cheaper on other store fronts compared to the steam listing" thing
warm@kbin.earth explains it better below:
It only applies to Steam product keys though, so developers cannot sell cheap Steam keys on other platforms while still taking advantage of Steam’s services.
Which isn’t accurate and is more nuanced involving Steam keys like another user said. For instance, Prey is on sale for $6 on the PlayStation store but still $30 on Steam.
