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?
No company should have that kind of market leverage, no. The issue though is saying this makes them a monopoly. It’s shit behavior but then if that ability makes a company a monopoly, we should be busting down a lot of company doors that do/did the same thing. Looking at Wal-Mart, nearly every major ISP in the USA, there’s a lot of that going on.
Regardless of what you folks think about Valve, does anyone believe that a marketplace should have this kind of leverage over their suppliers?
On principle, no, and Valve should not be above criticism.
I’m cautiously in favour of uniform retail pricing, such that no sales platform could either gouge customers or undercut to win more people over, such that the competition is determined by the available selection of products and other amenities, but my gut says that kind of price fixation would end up a minefield of complications, exceptions and loopholes. Few things are ever as easy as a layperson may think, and I sure am one.
Either way, one retailer dictating the prices for all others definitely seems unfair.
For instance, should Amazon be permitted to force manufacturers to set the price of a product outside of their marketplace?
Aside from the obligatory “fuck Amazon”, that would open the door to a particularly vicious level of fuckery. They would set their own price, sustained by cheap, fucked-up working conditions and the capital to afford selling at a loss, which they already do and which is bad enough, but to also dictate that price to other vendors that definitely can’t afford to operate at such a loss? If they’re currently on the road to monopoly, that would turn it into a bullet train: fast, on rails and with no stop to get off at.
If I manufacture your product from a product version prototype you provided me and give you unlimited access to that product to use outside my manufacturing plant and store front, then say, you can have and sell all this free product I manufactured for you, but you have to price it the same in my store as you do where you sell it elsewhere, that’s makes sense.
What doesn’t make sense and what isn’t right, is if they say "you can’t price your product that someone else is manufacturing for you at a price lower than the one your price my manufactured product of yours at.
But people keep thinking that those two groups are saying the same thing, that Valve should be allowed to do it regardless of who manufactured what when that’s not what they are saying.
If Valve is doing this, they obvious should have the book thrown at them. But we haven’t seen evidence of that that isn’t tantamount to hearsay. So we are doing what you should do when you hear something and can’t determine the veracity of what is being said. You wait for proof and don’t make up your mind based on rumors.
They aren’t even saying that. They’re saying, you can’t sell steam platform keys outside of steam for cheaper than you would on steam. Because a steam key provides all of the services and quality of life of buying a game in the steam store (downloads, cloud saves, workshop, multiplayer, etc.). If you sell keys outside of steam for a consumer to use on steam, steam still has to treat that consumer like everyone who bought the game on the marketplace. Also, when you sell a steam key, valve doesn’t take the usual 30% cut of the sale. In fact they take no cut of the sale and STILL provide distribution and services for that sale.
That’s not what the article says. It’s about UPlay keys sold by Ubisoft through UPlay that have nothing to do with Steam, and Valve threatening to remove a game from Steam unless the UPlay keys sold through UPlay became the same price as the Steam keys sold through Steam.
When steam provides substantially more services for a game with achievements, forums, workshop, etc. And then developer wants to list on steam and then funnel people over to a different platform to buy it cheaper. Steam isn’t getting compensated for the services they provided to boost the game’s popularity.
As others have said there’s already ways to get the game cheaper like humble bundle or Green Man gaming. This is literally just steam doing what they can to see a return on investment and not provide these services for free.
The comparison between Google and apple doesn’t really make sense as steam provides a whole bunch of services while epic provides a purchase button
Valve services do not apply when a game is being sold by Ubisoft in their own platform, with no steam keys included in the purchase. Valve’s infrastructure is not being used. That’s what these lawsuits are about. Not steam key resellers.
So if I go to Amazon searching for a product, read the reviews, check if it’s been returned often, etc., that should be enough for Amazon to set the price of the same product on the manufacturer’s website?
The comparison between Google and apple doesn’t really make sense as steam provides a whole bunch of services while epic provides a purchase button.
Who is talking about Epic here?
Also, both Google and Apple have their own app stores, where they take a cut of the sales, while providing a SDKs for things from push notifications, to payment processing, to analytics. Nowadays they also provide game platforms for things like multiplayer or achievements, among other things. Essentially the same as Steam.
There are other marketplaces to steam. Steam doesn’t prevent you from installing from sources outside of steam. Steam doesn’t regulate your hardware or how you use it. If you want to sell on steam you can still sell elsewhere but it has to be the same price.
This means if you go to steam to find out about a game and then decide to buy it from the manufacturer’s website the manufacturer makes more money because they don’t have to give Valve a cut, and Valve might even authorize you to activate that product on steam.
Expecting valve to offer their marketing and delivery systems without any incentive for you to sell products through it would defeat the purpose of their platform.
Compare that to the other two chuckle fuckers in this mix:
Apple maintains an exclusive platform. Apple has taken specific steps to prevent people from installing software from sources that have not paid them for permission to make software for the hardware you rent from them.
Google maintains an exclusive platform. Google has taken specific steps to prevent people from installing from sources that have not paid them for permission to make software for the hardware you bought from third party vendors and manufacturers.
The ever shrinking accommodation to installing third-party software on your purchased hardware is anti-competitive, and defeats consumer choice.
This means if you go to steam to find out about a game and then decide to buy it from the manufacturer’s website the manufacturer makes more money because they don’t have to give Valve a cut, and Valve might even authorize you to activate that product on steam.
Expecting valve to offer their marketing and delivery systems without any incentive for you to sell products through it would defeat the purpose of their platform.
You can only activate that product in Steam if it’s sold as a Steam key. Also, any game added to Steam from outside the platform has no access to their SDK, so this point is moot.
I’m not defending either Apple nor Google, but their business model is essentially the same, with the exception of the hardware integration, which again, doesn’t even matter that much since Steam is at 75% PC market share. And if you read some of the comments in this thread you’ll find out that for many people, the moat is not the hardware, is the platform itself.
Again, weird to see people defending anti competitive behaviour coming from a multi billion corporation, just because they sympathize with them.
Yeah that doesn’t even vaguely resemble what I’m saying.
Valve isn’t regulating your hardware and they aren’t forcing anybody to do anything.
Valve is not a bully here. They have a contract saying if you sell your product with me you can’t sell it someplace else cheaper just to use me for marketing and delivery.
Apple says you have to pay me to even have the right to sell your product and you can only sell it through me. If you sell it someplace else I want to cut of that too.
Google just keeps changing the nature of what you’re allowed to do with your own stuff and they take a cut.
If you feel bullied by Valve or some developer feels bullied by valve then you have a victim complex.
Based on your take, I agree with you. If valve is providing services, then developers should not be selling steam keys for cheaper elsewhere. It dilutes trust in their business model too if people start assuming that they can get the same services, provided by valve, for cheaper elsewhere.
However, is that what this article is talking about? The games mentioned, specifically R6 Siege and SoM, both appear to run stand alone without steam integration. I’m not intimately familiar with either one, just what I can gather based off the article and a pair of quick online searches.
The article is alleging. We don’t yet have proof of the veracity of the documentation that has been collected. When the trial finishes and the court has determined whether or not those documents and other information gathered during the course of the case have been proven to be true, then and only then do we have something that says that Valve actually did this.
I don’t trust WB and I don’t trust Ubisoft. I’m not sure I trust Valve either but I can say that my distrust for them isn’t as extreme as my distrust for the other two companies.
If Valve did this, throw the book at them. But at the same time, I want to see difinitve proof.
Both games have steam integration, as all games do on steam. They can be run without it, like most games, but that doesn’t change the fact these developers want steam’s audience and integration (since users want steam integration) and thus they voluntarily agreed to this stipulation.
Ubisoft has their own store, if R6S is so good, it should be able to drive traffic and users to that store and they could just set their own price without worrying about what steam is doing. Fortnite proves you don’t need steam integration to make a good game that people want to play. So does minecraft.
So steam isn’t a monopoly, as proven by those two examples, Ubisoft just wants more money without the restriction that comes with that money.
Does R6S use steam integrations if bought through Uplay? Based on what I can find, the answer is no, and therefore valve shouldn’t be setting the price because, at that level, they have no involvement with the product.
It’s the same product. Ubisoft, at any point, can just stop selling on steam and redirect users to their own store and then have full pricing control. Epic did this with Rocket League. This is fully an option a multi-billion dollar company owned by a billionaire can do at any point. Being on steam is voluntary for all parties, because there are alternate streams.
If you want to sell your product in walmart, you will be signing a similar non-compete agreement. If you want to sell your product at any competent store, you will be signing a non-compete agreement.
Because there is no reason for a store to LET you use their platform otherwise. Your product isn’t that good. There’s 3k games released per month. You aren’t that important individually, or even as a developer. If you want to go the easy route, then like literally ALL PRODUCTS SOLD, you will need to sign an agreement like this.
This is the part that is holding me up. Is it actually the same product? The version on Steam comes with server hosting, achievements, voice chat, etc. If I purchased the game through Uplay, would I still have access to those services on Steam? For example, many years ago, I bought “Dungeons and Dragons: Daggerdale” at Walmart, but it basically just came with an asset disc and a code to register the game on Steam. So buying it at Walmart gave me access to the same features as if I’d bought it directly from Steam. Does Uplay do the same thing?
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?
No company should have that kind of market leverage, no. The issue though is saying this makes them a monopoly. It’s shit behavior but then if that ability makes a company a monopoly, we should be busting down a lot of company doors that do/did the same thing. Looking at Wal-Mart, nearly every major ISP in the USA, there’s a lot of that going on.
On principle, no, and Valve should not be above criticism.
I’m cautiously in favour of uniform retail pricing, such that no sales platform could either gouge customers or undercut to win more people over, such that the competition is determined by the available selection of products and other amenities, but my gut says that kind of price fixation would end up a minefield of complications, exceptions and loopholes. Few things are ever as easy as a layperson may think, and I sure am one.
Either way, one retailer dictating the prices for all others definitely seems unfair.
Aside from the obligatory “fuck Amazon”, that would open the door to a particularly vicious level of fuckery. They would set their own price, sustained by cheap, fucked-up working conditions and the capital to afford selling at a loss, which they already do and which is bad enough, but to also dictate that price to other vendors that definitely can’t afford to operate at such a loss? If they’re currently on the road to monopoly, that would turn it into a bullet train: fast, on rails and with no stop to get off at.
I don’t think that’s what people are arguing.
If I manufacture your product from a product version prototype you provided me and give you unlimited access to that product to use outside my manufacturing plant and store front, then say, you can have and sell all this free product I manufactured for you, but you have to price it the same in my store as you do where you sell it elsewhere, that’s makes sense.
What doesn’t make sense and what isn’t right, is if they say "you can’t price your product that someone else is manufacturing for you at a price lower than the one your price my manufactured product of yours at.
But people keep thinking that those two groups are saying the same thing, that Valve should be allowed to do it regardless of who manufactured what when that’s not what they are saying.
If Valve is doing this, they obvious should have the book thrown at them. But we haven’t seen evidence of that that isn’t tantamount to hearsay. So we are doing what you should do when you hear something and can’t determine the veracity of what is being said. You wait for proof and don’t make up your mind based on rumors.
They aren’t “forcing” anyone to do anything. All they are saying is saying that you can’t sell on our store if you sell cheaper elsewhere.
They aren’t even saying that. They’re saying, you can’t sell steam platform keys outside of steam for cheaper than you would on steam. Because a steam key provides all of the services and quality of life of buying a game in the steam store (downloads, cloud saves, workshop, multiplayer, etc.). If you sell keys outside of steam for a consumer to use on steam, steam still has to treat that consumer like everyone who bought the game on the marketplace. Also, when you sell a steam key, valve doesn’t take the usual 30% cut of the sale. In fact they take no cut of the sale and STILL provide distribution and services for that sale.
That’s not what the article says. It’s about UPlay keys sold by Ubisoft through UPlay that have nothing to do with Steam, and Valve threatening to remove a game from Steam unless the UPlay keys sold through UPlay became the same price as the Steam keys sold through Steam.
Then you say:
Steam is the dominant player in PC gaming, by a large margin. Not being in Steam is like not being on the Internet.
How is this not “forcing” someone to do something?
Everyone here blindly defending valve claiming they’re not doing the very thing they’re being sued for doing.
Insanity
I’m not sure you know how lawsuits work. If I sue you for punching me in the face, do you think that automatically means you are guilty?
When steam provides substantially more services for a game with achievements, forums, workshop, etc. And then developer wants to list on steam and then funnel people over to a different platform to buy it cheaper. Steam isn’t getting compensated for the services they provided to boost the game’s popularity.
As others have said there’s already ways to get the game cheaper like humble bundle or Green Man gaming. This is literally just steam doing what they can to see a return on investment and not provide these services for free.
The comparison between Google and apple doesn’t really make sense as steam provides a whole bunch of services while epic provides a purchase button
Valve services do not apply when a game is being sold by Ubisoft in their own platform, with no steam keys included in the purchase. Valve’s infrastructure is not being used. That’s what these lawsuits are about. Not steam key resellers.
So if I go to Amazon searching for a product, read the reviews, check if it’s been returned often, etc., that should be enough for Amazon to set the price of the same product on the manufacturer’s website?
Who is talking about Epic here?
Also, both Google and Apple have their own app stores, where they take a cut of the sales, while providing a SDKs for things from push notifications, to payment processing, to analytics. Nowadays they also provide game platforms for things like multiplayer or achievements, among other things. Essentially the same as Steam.
There are other marketplaces to steam. Steam doesn’t prevent you from installing from sources outside of steam. Steam doesn’t regulate your hardware or how you use it. If you want to sell on steam you can still sell elsewhere but it has to be the same price.
This means if you go to steam to find out about a game and then decide to buy it from the manufacturer’s website the manufacturer makes more money because they don’t have to give Valve a cut, and Valve might even authorize you to activate that product on steam.
Expecting valve to offer their marketing and delivery systems without any incentive for you to sell products through it would defeat the purpose of their platform.
Compare that to the other two chuckle fuckers in this mix:
Apple maintains an exclusive platform. Apple has taken specific steps to prevent people from installing software from sources that have not paid them for permission to make software for the hardware you rent from them.
Google maintains an exclusive platform. Google has taken specific steps to prevent people from installing from sources that have not paid them for permission to make software for the hardware you bought from third party vendors and manufacturers.
The ever shrinking accommodation to installing third-party software on your purchased hardware is anti-competitive, and defeats consumer choice.
You can only activate that product in Steam if it’s sold as a Steam key. Also, any game added to Steam from outside the platform has no access to their SDK, so this point is moot.
I’m not defending either Apple nor Google, but their business model is essentially the same, with the exception of the hardware integration, which again, doesn’t even matter that much since Steam is at 75% PC market share. And if you read some of the comments in this thread you’ll find out that for many people, the moat is not the hardware, is the platform itself.
Again, weird to see people defending anti competitive behaviour coming from a multi billion corporation, just because they sympathize with them.
“Those bullies are meaner, so you’re not actually get bullied” is some abuser-grade gaslighting there, pal
Yeah that doesn’t even vaguely resemble what I’m saying.
Valve isn’t regulating your hardware and they aren’t forcing anybody to do anything.
Valve is not a bully here. They have a contract saying if you sell your product with me you can’t sell it someplace else cheaper just to use me for marketing and delivery.
Apple says you have to pay me to even have the right to sell your product and you can only sell it through me. If you sell it someplace else I want to cut of that too.
Google just keeps changing the nature of what you’re allowed to do with your own stuff and they take a cut.
If you feel bullied by Valve or some developer feels bullied by valve then you have a victim complex.
Do you think all the sellers to whom Amazon put exactly the same ultimatum have a victim complex too?
Based on your take, I agree with you. If valve is providing services, then developers should not be selling steam keys for cheaper elsewhere. It dilutes trust in their business model too if people start assuming that they can get the same services, provided by valve, for cheaper elsewhere.
However, is that what this article is talking about? The games mentioned, specifically R6 Siege and SoM, both appear to run stand alone without steam integration. I’m not intimately familiar with either one, just what I can gather based off the article and a pair of quick online searches.
The article is alleging. We don’t yet have proof of the veracity of the documentation that has been collected. When the trial finishes and the court has determined whether or not those documents and other information gathered during the course of the case have been proven to be true, then and only then do we have something that says that Valve actually did this.
I don’t trust WB and I don’t trust Ubisoft. I’m not sure I trust Valve either but I can say that my distrust for them isn’t as extreme as my distrust for the other two companies.
If Valve did this, throw the book at them. But at the same time, I want to see difinitve proof.
Both games have steam integration, as all games do on steam. They can be run without it, like most games, but that doesn’t change the fact these developers want steam’s audience and integration (since users want steam integration) and thus they voluntarily agreed to this stipulation.
Ubisoft has their own store, if R6S is so good, it should be able to drive traffic and users to that store and they could just set their own price without worrying about what steam is doing. Fortnite proves you don’t need steam integration to make a good game that people want to play. So does minecraft.
So steam isn’t a monopoly, as proven by those two examples, Ubisoft just wants more money without the restriction that comes with that money.
Does R6S use steam integrations if bought through Uplay? Based on what I can find, the answer is no, and therefore valve shouldn’t be setting the price because, at that level, they have no involvement with the product.
It’s the same product. Ubisoft, at any point, can just stop selling on steam and redirect users to their own store and then have full pricing control. Epic did this with Rocket League. This is fully an option a multi-billion dollar company owned by a billionaire can do at any point. Being on steam is voluntary for all parties, because there are alternate streams.
If you want to sell your product in walmart, you will be signing a similar non-compete agreement. If you want to sell your product at any competent store, you will be signing a non-compete agreement.
Because there is no reason for a store to LET you use their platform otherwise. Your product isn’t that good. There’s 3k games released per month. You aren’t that important individually, or even as a developer. If you want to go the easy route, then like literally ALL PRODUCTS SOLD, you will need to sign an agreement like this.
This is the part that is holding me up. Is it actually the same product? The version on Steam comes with server hosting, achievements, voice chat, etc. If I purchased the game through Uplay, would I still have access to those services on Steam? For example, many years ago, I bought “Dungeons and Dragons: Daggerdale” at Walmart, but it basically just came with an asset disc and a code to register the game on Steam. So buying it at Walmart gave me access to the same features as if I’d bought it directly from Steam. Does Uplay do the same thing?