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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Oh well that's totally fair, honestly.
It locks out real competitive pricing.
It only applies to steam keys though. Like if you want to sell on other storefronts (like Epic) for cheaper, it’s perfectly fine. You simply can’t sell steam keys on other storefronts for cheaper. It’s not really “price fixing” as much as it is “Steam ensuring their servers aren’t used to download the game unless the dev has properly paid them for the key”…
Like imagine a company wants to sell more copies of their game. So they set up their own site to sell directly to consumers, and it’s cheaper than buying on Steam. This is totally fine. Consumers can still choose to add the standalone version as a non-Steam game to be able to launch it via Steam.
It’s only a breach of contract if they start offering steam keys for that same (cheaper) price, which allows the game to be downloaded via Steam, includes achievement integrations, includes Steam’s friend list “join game” multiplayer, includes Steam Deck/Steam Machine optimizations, etc… If they want all of those nice Steam integrations, they need an official Steam key. And that Steam key can’t be sold cheaper than on Steam’s official store.
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I don't know if valve are or aren't abusing their monopolistic position. I am not a lawyer and i don't have a horse in the race.
I was just answering to someone who said "if you don't like valve policies, dont publish your games there", which would be true for a normal business, but specifically not true of a monopoly, which steam is, unquestionably
Epic can do things much more freely, because they dont hold a monopoly on pc games
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Seems like buying games to remove them from your competitor is a scummier thing to do.
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?
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I don't know if valve are or aren't abusing their monopolistic position. I am not a lawyer and i don't have a horse in the race.
I was just answering to someone who said "if you don't like valve policies, dont publish your games there", which would be true for a normal business, but specifically not true of a monopoly, which steam is, unquestionably
Epic can do things much more freely, because they dont hold a monopoly on pc games
It's hard to really call Valve a monopoly when, there is competition. If there's no competition, then Valve would clearly be a monopoly.
It's not like back in the 90s when Microsoft bundled their Windows OS with Internet Explorer that edged out Netscape back then. Because there really wasn't a lot of browser alternatives available to have made it where competition was there. Microsoft was considered a monopoly back then because competition was very little during their peak then.
In the digital PC gaming landscape, it's entirely different. There are numerous marketplaces for digital games. And they're big enough to where Valve is just simply an alternative and can go without if someone chooses.
Valve doesn't force anyone to use Steam or strong-arms people to buy games from them. They just exist, the people have spoken both by their own loyalty and their wallets. And that made companies like Epic mad and jealous. They just came late into the game when Valve was developing itself.
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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.
