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Why is Valve being sued for almost $900 million, but Epic Games wasn't sued when they bought Rocket League and Fall Guys to remove them from steam? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 week ago by FirmDistribution@lemmy.world to c/games@lemmy.world
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Seems like buying games to remove them from your competitor is a scummier thing to do.

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[-] Grimy@lemmy.world -1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Steams revenue was 16b (edit: it's 4b) in 2025, epics was 1b in 2024. At least click the links instead of pasting what the Google summary tells you. You are mixing up epics store revenue with their unreal engine revenue.

The fact is any game store front is a money printing machine mostly because of the rampant price fixing, hard to enter markets and abuse from those that hold the lion share of that market (Steam, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo).

That money is being sucked out of the companies that are actually making games, and is leading to a reduction in quality, layoffs and bankruptcies.

For regulation, we could easily have limits on the percentage store fronts are allowed to demand for digital media, but each time there's a lawsuit, a bunch of idiots loudly fight it. Lawmakers aren't going to enact laws that go against what the lobbyist want, especially if the majority of the population have been instructed that the boot is for their benefit.

Your list of pros and cons doesn't matter, every player being compared is bad. It's just a defense in favor of Gabens yacht fleet at this point. Exclaiming that steam shouldn't change because you like their product, even though it's clearly having an impact, is the same as defending Amazon because drop shipping is easier than going to the store.

Fyi, I use both, I literally own a steam deck and the sd card came from Amazon. Defending their practices is just fucking weak though.

[-] atrielienz@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago

I can't corroborate that Steam's revenue for the e-shop was $16Bn. The best estimate that I have is that their game sales netted them $4Bn last year. I'm still trying to find a better source for that. However we may both be wrong here.

[-] Grimy@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Ya, I misread it and I'm way off. It's 4bn. Epic also made a lot less, my stats are not for gross revenue but generated revenue before they split it with the devs. Amateur hour over here (me, not you).

I went off in my other comment and was a bit of a dick throughout the convo. It just feels like someone is being robbed here. 4bn is a lot of money and, from the wolffire lawsuit leak, they have less than 100 people working on steam full time.

[-] atrielienz@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

From what I read, that $4BN number could be taken two ways. I don't know if that analyst excluded the games Valve developed, and that $4BN is games sales of everything else, or if that's what they made from their own titles. I didn't want to go through the rigamarole of Xitter to see the direct quote and I haven't had a chance to find it in the internet archive.

I also kind of want a good run down of what steam offers to developers that makes their platform so attractive because my understanding is it's more than just e-shop services and that's one of the reasons I have seen touted as why people feel the service fee is reasonable.

I didn't want to leave you on read, but I also am still looking up all kinds of random information to put together.

Also, my confusion is because there are two different lawsuits involving the 30% cut of game sales.

There's a class action lawsuit in the UK involving all of steams consumers there, predicated on the idea that the 30% service fee makes games more expensive to the detriment if those consumers.

And there's a different class action lawsuit brought by developers Wolfire and Dark Catt representing every developer who uses Steam as an E-Shop platform, also over the 30% service fee and alleged anti-competitve practices (Wolfire say that Steam told them they couldn't sell their game anywhere else for less than it was available on Steam (even if they didn't use steams license keys)).

I know I can come off as really terse, and tone is hard via text anyway. But thank you for addressing it.

Sorry about yet another wall of text.

this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
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