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UK lawsuit against Valve given the go-ahead, Steam owner facing up to £656 million in damages
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this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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At least for humble store, they essentially sell steam keys. Which at least complicates that argument. So it is not really a different distribution channel and the product is available on steam for that price. Just not on the Steam store.
Steam have an effective monopoly here. Even if they have that because all the other platforms are shit. So the argument for just going to another store doesn't really help as that just causes a massive loss in the market share of who you can sell your game to. Plus if you consider the other requirements of if you sell on steam you cannot make your game cheaper via a different distribution method means that you have to eat that feeling and cannot pass it on to customers. Which does not give game Devs much power to negotiate for a lower fee at all.
I get this but, for what I know (I might be wrong tho), steam doesn't get a cut from keys sold externally so they are technically selling them at better conditions elsewhere?
I know that but that's not really steam's fault? I mean, epic offers lower fees, but they are shit so nobody wants to buy from them; however, that's not really steam's fault. You can't blame steam beacuse the competitors are objectively worse.
EA tried to have a launcher, but they are so bad at it that they've come back to steam. That's... EA's fault for sucking so bad, not steam fault for being more convenient.
And I say this fully understanding that they have a de-facto monopoly; but the reason is not because they have the only product, it's because the rest are much wose.
It is a grey area. But I think the key point is that humble bundle at least don't distribute the games in the same way as epic does. They typically offer steam keys which they get from steam probably with a different license or agreement with steam. Valve seems to not care that much about how the game is sold as long as you can activate it on steam. It cares more about people buying games on a competing platform cheaper then they can get a steam key for.
Whos fault it is is irrelevant. If you have effective monopolistic power you are effectively a monopoly. If you abuse that power then that is bad. Does not really matter if you got there because you mostly do things people like or bully your way there. If you abuse the power that is still bad. And they could arguably be abusing that power against game devs by setting a fixed 30% fee with the devs not having much if any power to argue for less.