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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

>accuse it of abusing its market power by charging a 30% commission fee and preventing them from offering lower prices on other platforms.

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.

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>and preventing them from offering lower prices on other platforms

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.

I thought about that and realized they have a good reason. If they didn't do that, people would use Steam as a storefront to find games and then buy them on a different platform.

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)

Valve dont actually demand of developers to run the same discounts everywhere at the same time. You can still for instance sell game cheaper on other store, but eventually you have to run the same discount on Steam.

> people would use Steam as a storefront to find games and then buy them on a different platform

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.

I would do that (I was doing that with GoG), but the Steam Deck bought me back

I also have a Steam Deck and still prefer buying games from GOG, when possible. Heroic Launcher is a nice GUI that let's you easily install GOG+Epic store games, sets up the proton stuff and gives you the option to add the games to Steam as non-Steam games.

I tried, but it doesn't seem be anywhere near the simplicity of buying games on Steam.

Not to mention, it needs double the size of the game when patching (with baldur's gate that's like 180 GB)

Why is this comment being downvoted? It's reasonably interesting point, and a fair off-the-cuff stab at a spot of second order thinking.

Thank you!

How do you know it’s being downvoted? I thought scores for comments were not visible

Comment gets grayed out?

People would still buy on Steam to have it all in one place, and for the features that steam provides, like achievements and multiplayer with your steam friends.

That only really applies if the other platforms are as good as/better than Steam, which they aren't for most people.

that is not a lot considering they get a 30% cut off of every sale.

> use [store] as a storefront to find [products] and then buy them [elsewhere]

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?

It is a serious problem for them too and I have no answer to that. I understand their position too. It sucks, and it sucks for steam store.

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.

Does Steam provide anything as a storefront? I thought it only shows that a game exists and not more.

Reviews, discovery queues, search, crowdsourced tagging, minitrailers, events, splash ads, wishlist, an entire overlay to support controller configuration (and any controller) for any videogame that's accessed through steam (even non-steam games). Discussions, mods, leaderboards, market. I suspect I can continue. You could argue some of this features are not necessary "storefront", but the line is blurry. The point is when I want to discover new games, I go to Steam.

I'm not sure what else I could ask for as a storefront.

>If they didn't do that, people would use Steam as a storefront to find games and then buy them on a different platform.

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.

If you selling Steam keys you paying Valve nothing for these sales.

Keys are free and 100% profit going to you.

And if you abuse it they take it away. Steam already had to stomp down on it.

So it's clearly not the way out devs want.

I am co-founder of game studio and I have lots of friends in gamedev too. I know people who sold under 100 copies of their game on Steam and got 10,000 keys for sales elsewhere no problem.

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.

My bet is that, like many things for Steam, it's inconsistent. Some will get a warning. Others slip through the cracks. Some may even slip but get rejected after that. But relatively few legit are companies want to take a risk to their merchant profile to begin with.

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.

Personally I totally agree that Steam fee should be way below 30% because gamedev is tough enough to the point where actual indie studio get only 20-30% of gross revenue. Especially now when Steam dont provide any value of "organic" marketing.

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.

>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.

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.

I think the argument is that Steam is sufficiently dominant in the PC-games marketplace that small publishers like this feel that they absolutely have to list their games there, and so have no option other than to accept Valve's terms. (With Valve's apparent "you can't sell your game cheaper anywhere else" term serving to lock in this state of affairs for Steam, by making it really hard for another store to compete on price.)

Well, people want to be on the Steam store because many eyes look at it. That's what Valve built over time, their store has a lot of value even without selling the games.

> their store has a lot of value even without selling the game.

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.

Sorry I used confusing terminology. Steam provides a lot of value without selling the game, but just listing the game: their are extremely well known, have amazing systems for game discovery.

That's why game devs feel compelled to list games on Steam.

> With Valve's apparent "you can't sell your game cheaper anywhere else" term serving to lock in this state of affairs for 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.

> Epic, Windows store, GoG

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

I would buy on GoG, but after the steam deck, I buy again only on steam. They know their stuff at Valve.

If it's any consolation, Valve also makes it pretty easy to play GoG games on Deck. You can run GoG installers in Proton and set them up with their own virtualized C:/ drive like other Steam games. They do a good job ensuring that even if a competing store came out, users would have proper access to it. That's commitment to customer satisfaction worth supporting, but don't be afraid to support devs outside Steam either!

Kinda? You then have to figure out the correct graphic settings. I have BG3 on GoG (backed on kickstarter way back) and unfortunately it runs terribly on the Deck, to the point I'm not playing it right now

tbh, Baldurs Gate 3 runs pretty terribly on my Ryzen desktop also.

The issue is that GoG does not support Linux.

This is a GoG problem which could be solved, but they are uninterested in my money.

Absolutely this, steam still wins on ux by a mile. Windows store still has shitty drive management (try moving a game to a different drive... Good luck!) and download management. Epic is full of scam crypto games and in general just has a cruddier UI. GoG is awesome though.

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 use those features, so I'll take the lowest bidder. GoG galaxy groups them all together for me anyway (and I only play single player games really, outside of like, the rare fighting game. So I don't need to worry about servers).

Steam has an outsized share of the PC gaming market. They don't have to be the literal only option to violate the public trust.

>but unlike the iOS/Android marketplaces, Valves is not a monopoly marketplace in the PC space

I don't see how the android marketplace is a monopoly, considering you can sideload downloaded apks with one toggle.

One major difference - windows PCs don’t come with Steam pre-installed. Android phones do come with the Play Store. Defaults matter, because the vast majority of people don’t change defaults. That’s why Google pays Apple tens of billions to be the default search engine.

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.

>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?

Here’s what you could have googled, but didn’t - United States v. Microsoft Corp. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_C....)

> 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.

> Sure, the plaintiff may not agree with Valve's 30% cut berceuse 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%)

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.

Wow,that's a huge reach on the apple side of things.

Apple's market share in the US is 39%. Even if they were the primary source of applications for that 39%, 39% of a market does not a monopoly make.

Yeah that's not the part I'm referring to.

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.

AltStore doesn't require "rooting" (which is the wrong term in the iOS ecosystem, too, which is jailbreaking) anything. The Chinese stores definitely didn't: You could grab them from Safari, and they installed themselves using enterprise certificates.

The problem is not the 30%, the problem is that you apparently can’t sell on steam for a higher price than you do on other market places (or directly): e.g steam is abusing its market position to get a higher royalty payment because from the end users point of view every other store costs the same, but they already have steam because it’s dominant in the market.

To be clear, this clause only applies to Steam Key sales. You can't sell keys to redeem on Steam for less than the Steam price, or Steam could get tricked into eating distribution service costs for nothing.

Yeah, I subsequently saw that restriction in other comments, and that seems to significantly impact how "reasonable" the complaint is. The problem is I'm unclear what part of steam "steam keys" are for - some comments imply it's the steam DRM mechanism? but you're implying there's ongoing operating costs so is it the cloud syncing or similar?

When you buy a Steam key for a game on a site other than Steam, you have to redeem it through Steam. The download of the game (and any future re-downloads, updates, and potentially multiplayer services) will be hosted by Steam.

Ah so it’s the mechanism you’d use if you made a game and wanted to let people buy directly from your own site (say) without just saying “look for us on steam!”?

If you sell the steam key yourself do you manually pay valve or is that “free” and they assume you’re managing the payment?

If you sell a Steam key on another site you actually get 100% of the revenue, no 30% cut to Steam. It's actually extremely generous

Thanks for the answer that’s what I was curious about, and yeah that does kind of make it seem reasonable to me tbh. “You get to use our download and syncing infrastructure but not pay us anything for that” is a good deal.

I'm not even sure how that works in practice since I've obtained a bunch of Steam keys for cheaper than the price on Steam. If you browse gg.deals, you can find Steam keys on legitimate third-party sites for cheaper. For example: https://gg.deals/game/horizon-zero-dawn-complete-edition/

You probably got gray market steam keys which were cheaper than what you see when you log in from home, because they were gotten from more developing countries with high piracy, like Russia, Argentina, etc.

I didn't, hence the phrase "legitimate third-party sites".

Is that how Humble Bundle works?

That seems pretty high profile for dodgy tactics.

Humble, no. They are talking more about storefronts like Green Man Gaming.

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.

Green Man Gaming is not gray market and they get their keys directly from publishers, not by getting them from Argentina, Russia etc.

If you want an actual gray market storefront, look up Kinguin.

https://rgamedeals.net/store/5e70c

https://rgamedeals.net/store/y8rkz

Woflire seems to claim otherwise. So I wouldn't be surprised if this is another under-the-table rules that many devs hit. Some can get away with it, others can't.

The lower price part is probably more relevant? Honestly, I would pay 30% more for a game on steam than a download link on some website, but I definitely wouldn't use the website for the same price, right? The discount is the only way it could compete with steam at all.

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