Humble Bundle sues Steam over alleged monopoly practices | Hacker News Reader

Humble Bundle sues Steam over alleged monopoly practices

theverge.com

24 pointsfrob11 comments

Remember that Humble bundle sold out to a mega corp that is known for their evil practices. This is just that mega corp using HB's name for sympathy.

The title seems to be incorrect. Wolfire Games, the original creator of Humble Bundle, is the plaintiff: https://www.scribd.com/document/505496523/COMPLAINT-filed-by...

If anything the article is using HB for clicks.

What mega corp?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziff_Davis

A lot of these arguments seem disconnected with reality. Of cause you can’t both sell on steam and sell cheaper elsewhere as you would be undercutting their market, but that doesn’t make it impossible for someone else with better margins to take over, you could put your game up for same price on steam and whatever EAs game store is, and you’d make a bigger cut if people bought it from EA.

Also, the argument that they are similar to Apple because they supposedly abuse a maonopoly on where the game runs… I simply can’t take them seriously, so they are trying to argue that all games are running on steam-pc’s that come wi the steam preinstalled and that they can’t install games outside of it? Come on. If anything the obvious store matching that description is the Microsoft store, which doesn’t even seem to want to try to compete with steam.

> you can’t both sell on steam and sell cheaper elsewhere as you would be undercutting their market

Wait, why not? That’s literally the point of a free market.

Steam (as the platform) should offer better terms to the game makers, and entice them to sell on their platform. Banning them from selling elsewhere, and forcing a 30% tax on top of it, is antithetical to both the creators’ and users’ needs.

You can sell your game on other platforms for less, you just can't sell steam keys for less (steam will generate free keys for you to sell off platform).

Steam isn’t a free market, neither is Walmart. They are private market places operated on a free market. And that market doesn’t become any less free by them having terms for the suppliers who want to use their market places to sell their products.

"you can’t both sell on steam and sell cheaper elsewhere"

Actually you can, this clause only applies to steam keys which is understandable especially since when selling those you keep 100% of the profits while still using steam features. However nothing keeps you from selling your game both on steam and epic games store while having it cheaper on egs, as any copy sold on egs will not be a steam key and therefore will not use steam features / bandwidth.

apple, google, steam etc need stop whipping the cash cows(taxing on profits). their stores can be sustained with just ads

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