Gabe Newell forced to testify in person in Steam antitrust case [pdf]
cases.justia.com
cases.justia.com
Sure, the plaintiff may not agree with Valve's 30% cut because they find it too steep, but unlike the iOS/Android marketplaces, Valves is not a monopoly marketplace in the PC space. There are other competing marketplaces they can go to like Epic, Windows store, GoG (which most likely also charge 30%)
And plus, on PC you don't even need a marketplace to sell and run your game. Anyone can install software from whatever source. Heck, they can even host their games on google drive and share the link via e-mail to customers who buy their game off their website, or some ghetto solution like that if they wanna save a buck on distribution costs.
Their livelihood is not being gatekept or threatened by Valve or any other marketplace like in the mobile space. So I still don't get their monopoly angle here.
Wait, what? If Steam doesn't sell games it has little value. So while Steam doesn't need some random indie game, singular. It does need games, plural. (Especially since being drunk on easy money, they haven't even managed to finish their founding game franchise.)
Indies need Steam far more than Steam needs any one game. It's that power imbalance combined with Steam's terms (designed to entrench their market position) which are on trial.
That's why game devs feel compelled to list games on Steam.
It is "you can't sell Steam keys elsewhere for less", not that you can't sell the game elsewhere for less.
However I have bought Humble Bundles back in the day, and they gave me a steam key so there must be workarounds.
I think this is the crux of the matter, rather than the 30%.
As much as I enjoy steam and don't care in the slightest that they charge a 30% fee for all they offer, I can't see any general benefit for any of the game companies to be able to dictate how game makers price their goods on other platforms or for direct sales.
If Valve is making access contingent on competitor pricing, I could understand it being seen as anti-competitive behavior. It should be banned across all of the marketplaces if it somehow doesn't fall afoul of some consumer protection law already.
edit:
HideousKojima says below that the pricing only applies if they're selling steam keys. If that's the case, I can't see how this has merit. If you're selling Valve's support of your game to users, pay them what they ask. If you're selling elsewhere and Valve is uninvolved, then there would be an issue.
So if this wasn't in place, Steam would be unable to make money.
That being said, the indie developers could just set the game price to the same everywhere when they want to make a discount (which is what most do)
FWIW I do that anyway whenever I can find a platform that lets me buy and own the game outright, rather than depending on Valve having then good graces to continue allow me to log into Steam.
Not to mention, it needs double the size of the game when patching (with baldur's gate that's like 180 GB)
That only really applies if the other platforms are as good as/better than Steam, which they aren't for most people.
Like every brick and mortar store had to contend with due to the rise of internet shopping? Did any of them have market position to prevent manufacturers from doing it?
I have no idea why people would have physical store in modern days, unless it's one of those spots that shower you with money due to foot traffic.
I'm not sure what else I could ask for as a storefront.
sounds good to me. If people want those advantageousfeatures or to stay in Valve's garden, they will pay more for that even if a cheaper pricing appears. Especially with so many complaining about non-steam releases and even claiming they will pay more just to say "fuck you" to EGS.
People who don't care (like me. I still have my game exe's on my desktop like a boomer) will research and find a better price, if possible. As is, Steam seems to discourage this.
>That being said, the indie developers could just set the game price to the same everywhere when they want to make a discount (which is what most do)
yes...because pricing parity. I'm assuming you can't just have a game on eternal sale on an alternative storefront as a loophole. I don't know the details of the sales period, but if GOG or Itch ever wanted their own fest, devs may be afraid due to risk of de-listing on Steam.
The most dangerous thing is that a lot of Valve is fast and loose behind the scenes. They are generally good enough to know when something is bad PR and let it slide. But there's plenty of old school Nintendo-style blurry lines when it comes to submitting.
Keys are free and 100% profit going to you.
So it's clearly not the way out devs want.
I never gonna to defend Valve 30% cut since it is terrible for anyone in game development, but honestly so far Valve itself have superb reputation as business partner and they never abused their market power.
My bet only trading card generator games ware affected when Valve cracked down on giving out umlimited number of keys.
Wolfire isnt large by any means, but is definitely large enough where it couldn't get away with such obvious abuse. They could be lying, but I can believe with their general company ethos that they do/did legitimately just want an option to self-distribute, but pass on the 30% fee to the customer on Steam.
What I dont agree with is Wolfire case when they want to distribute through Steam, but still give Steam customers worse deal than for Steam keys they directly sell.
It's just doesn't sounds right to me and it's certainly wont make life any easier for other indie developers without dedicated fan base. Only developers who already successful can really benefit from it.
as far as I hear, the threat (they claim) comes from Steam delisting their game even if they don't use steam keys or DRM at all. Which I feel is fair enough.
Ultimately it's their game to distribute and I a dev should have an option to pass the cut on to the customer if it's really that drastic. That way, if customers feel slighted you can point back to steam and they can put pressure on to lower the cut.
In the far future I was thinking of doing a similar thing where I have a build on Itch.io that is cheaper than Steam. Nothing drastic: probably something like $5 for itch (itch's default cut is 10%, but I'd probably bump it to 15% personally. So I take home $4.25) and $6 on steam (where my take home would be $4.20), so I hope I don't run into such difficulty. There's been so many stories with opaque Steam support for devs that I simply want some extra control of the situation (especially since the nature of the work I want to do means I was to make the codebase open source). I don't want to put all my eggs in Valve's basket but also want to balance out any potential cuts where possible.
VALVe has such strong network effects playing in their favour, nobody is gonna buy on those stores if it's also on Steam, except GoG maybe, as it lets you download the games DRM free IIRC
This is a GoG problem which could be solved, but they are uninterested in my money.
Epic gets around this by offering free games all the time, though. Not sure how they can do that for games on steam as well, first I've heard about locked in pricing.
I don't see how the android marketplace is a monopoly, considering you can sideload downloaded apks with one toggle.
Everyone who has steam installed on their PC made a conscious choice to do that. They went out of their way to store.Steampowered.com, downloaded and installed.
Anti-trust regulators take a dim view of building market dominance by bundling. This is why Microsoft was forced to stop bundling some components with Windows back in the day.
except... internet explorer is still bundled with windows to this day?
> The U.S. government accused Microsoft of illegally maintaining its monopoly position in the personal computer (PC) market, primarily through the legal and technical restrictions it put on the abilities of PC manufacturers (OEMs) and users to uninstall Internet Explorer and use other programs such as Netscape and Java.
Also of interest with respect to bundling - Microsoft Corp. v. Commission (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Commissio...)
> is a case brought by the European Commission of the European Union (EU) against Microsoft for abuse of its dominant position in the market (according to competition law). It started as a complaint from Sun Microsystems over Microsoft's licensing practices in 1993, and eventually resulted in the EU ordering Microsoft to divulge certain information about its server products and release a version of Microsoft Windows without Windows Media Player.
Epic charges 12%. Microsoft Store revenue split is, maximally, 100/0. For games, 88/12. Microsoft also, for years, paid you to make apps, even basic ones.
Epic Store isn't profitable, billions of dollars burned since its creation.
GOG split is actually worse in some cases.
The 30% cut is great, in Steam's case.
Like the Android and iOS marketplaces, there's sufficient value add and plenty of alternatives, so there's no reason an antitrust complaint really makes sense. In Android's case, there's the MIUI store, the Huawei store, Baidu's, Samsung's, Tencent's, and VIVO/OPPOs, and that's barely even getting into it. Since the start of the platform, manufacturers have been shipping alternative app stores.
In Apple's case, there's Cydia, AltStore, and I've even seen a few Chinese sideloaded app stores that seem to be able to do some crazy things, like on-device IPA signing. That's not even getting into the most obvious option: PWAs. It's also not getting into the fact that Apple, as a minority vendor of smartphones in America, definitionally has no monopoly. Unless, that is, your definition of monopoly is ridiculously narrow.
You compare alternative app stores on Android devices to apple alt stores requiring rooting an Apple device. Very different and not an equal comparison what so ever.
Then referring to PWAs existence as an excuse for apple not having a monopoly to their device ignoring the fact apple has resisted PWAs in general and has taken a long time to even allow them to do something as basic as permit notifications.
Your attempt at equating the two is very obviously flawed.
If you sell the steam key yourself do you manually pay valve or is that “free” and they assume you’re managing the payment?
That seems pretty high profile for dodgy tactics.
Humble is done under charity and specific bundles (you can't buy any game at any time there for cheaper), so it's not really a good way thing PR-wise for Valve to tackle. And for the most part, it's not an issue anyway since it's still more people getting into Steam.
If you want an actual gray market storefront, look up Kinguin.
If that is actually the case then I don't see the devs' case having any merits whatsoever.
You can sell Steam keys on other platforms. Plenty of developers sell Steam keys on Itch, for example.
You get to keep 100% of the revenue from an off-Steam Steam key sale. 100%! The only limitation is that they don't want you selling the keys for peanuts on other platforms. If your other platform is handling distribution, you can go nuts. Just don't charge 50% less on other platforms if you are depending on Steam for distribution.
As you say, it's basically "if you're selling Steam keys elsewhere, you need to be treating your product on Steam itself generally equivalently". It's written to sound flexible -- you can discount on different storefronts at different times, so long as Steam gets the same discount eventually.
I didn't turn up anything for just selling your game without selling the Steam keys, but it's a big site so I might have missed it. (Or it might be buried in an actual contract somewhere, etc.)
Wolfire (the one suing Valve in this case) is saying Valve threatened to remove their games from Steam if they did this.
http://blog.wolfire.com/2021/05/Regarding-the-Valve-class-ac...
> they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM.
IMO, that's an important distinction. If they were demanding price parity with competing storefronts with their own launchers and DRM and whatnot, there would be a compelling argument for an antitrust case. The reality is not nearly that bad.
Weirdly , it seems to come down to some belief in the courts that lawyers can determine credibility through some combination of face and body language? I didn't realize courts still believed in that kind of thing, but then again, the notoriously mutable eyewitness testimony is still considered a gold standard for evidence apparently.
So first of all, they reject remote because they can't determine credibility over a camera:
> While other courts conclude that a deponent’s credibility can be comparably assessed through remote means, see, e.g., Henry v. Tacoma Police Dept., 2023 WL 5530201, slip op. at 3 (W.D. Wash. 2023), this Court is not of that opinion.
And in that case, it was believed you can determine credibility better over camera with someone not wearing a mask, than you can with in person but wearing a mask:
> attorneys have a better opportunity to observe and assess witnesses who are deposed in person as compared to video depositions—particularly where the witness’ [sic] credibility is an issue.” Dkt. No. 71 at 5. To the extent that statement i s intended to demonstrate prejudice, it fails. To the contrary, “it may be easier for [Defendants] to evaluate the credibility of [a] witness who appears via video conference without a mask than it is to evaluate the credibility of a witness who wears a mask while testifying in person
This court decided no to both, they want the lawyers to be able to exercise their superhuman facial tic analysis skills in person and uninhibited apparently.
But you're leaving out this part, which is quite critical:
> In hopes of alleviating Mr. Newell’s health concerns, the Court mandates the following additional health measures: all participants (including questioning counsel) must wear a tightly fitting certified N95, KF94, or KN95 face mask throughout the deposition. At his discretion, Mr. Newell may provide those certified masks to participants. But Mr. Newell shall remove his mask when responding to questions from Plaintiffs’ counsel.
I.e. everyone else nearby will be required to wear a mask, and will presumably be far enough away to make COVID-19 transmission unlikely.
So I wonder how well everyone will actually comply with this court order after a few hours of deposition!
Your note about his beard is a great example of why it's frankly absurd for a lawyer to claim that they need someone in person, with a mask off, to accurately judge their competency.
So I think this was pretty much a transparent "can't I just do this bullshit over Zoom?", which the court saw through.
I'm pointing out that they are being accommodating to his concerns, if they're taken at face value. I bet if he requested being wheeled in in an airtight plexiglass phonebooth the court would at least entertain it.
I mean, if there's any place I would not want to try my luck, it'd be in an airport, and in the courtroom. Easy way to be throw in contempt of court. I wouldn't compare a courtroom to some non-complier in the checkout line.
Regarding appearing in person, someone appearing on video call could easily have cue cards off-screen or a team of lawyers giving them thumbs up/thumbs down etc.
Doing it this way removes at least some of those doubts surrounding fairness for the plaintiffs.
1. If someone files a suit, is a basic level of sense-checking done before the defendant is served and issued a summons? Basically I'm asking if someone could just file a lawsuit with absolutely no reason just to inconvenience someone else.
2. Can a court summon anyone to appear at any court anywhere in the country, or can the defendant choose to travel to their closest/most convenient court? (If the former, can the defendant claim travel expenses or similar?)
3. Is there a specific reason that in-person depositions are mandated in civil suits like this? It seems you could communicate everything you need to over video conferencing without having to be physically present, regardless of any COVID-type excuses.
Gabe probably just can't be bothered travelling and I don't blame him.
2. In order to compel a person to appear a proceeding, the court must have personal jurisdiction over the person as a defendant, or if the person is a witness and not a defendant, they must be within the subpoena power of the court.
3. The order explains the court’s reasoning on this.
Gabe Newell of Steam is forced to testify, while the CEO of Microsoft is not. Guess who has more people involved in influencing politics? We can certainly debate steam’s fees but what steam does is a far cry from microsoft’s market dominance.
However, AFAIK the final appeal battle at the US supreme court hasn't happened yet.
Epic lost on every other anti-trust fight vs apple except this one - every appeals court has upheld Epic's freedom to direct iOS users who want to buy cosmetics for Fortnite into the Epic store, which violates their agreement with Apple.
That said from other comments here I’m not sure how accurate/true that claim is.
They just aren't as high proile as Epic v. Apple. Probably for good reason given the shitshow that courtroom was.
In a similar vein, I feel it should be up to the dev if they want to charge more for that or not.