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this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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Wolfire originally operated Humble Bundle, and they have a very legitimate case. Steam uses anticompetitive pricing policies that makes it difficult for other marketplaces to compete.
If anticompetitive means "it's your choice to enter into an agreement in which we host your game for 30%, and distribute it on our platform, with unlimited patch updates, and unlimited user downloads, and a fuckton of features like community forums, guides, groups etc., also if your game is good we will promote it free of charge"
Then I suppose companies like Epic who choose to run at a loss, as opposed to providing a good service, have no chance, and Steam is anticompetitive.
The counter narrative exists though, Steam is just a good service, and if you want to compete with them, you need to provide a good service, like GOG.
That us all fine. David is alleging that Valve is trying to restrict other platforms wolfire can sell their cases on. Valve needs to compete, not threaten to stop distributing a game if they don't like how it is selling elsewhere.
I've never heard of Valve trying to prevent a developer from distributing their game on other PC store platforms, it's quite an assertion.
Yeah, it will be interesting to see how the case goes.
The Platform Most Favored Nation policy employed by Steam is the one at issue in this case. And yes, it is anticompetitive. It abuses userbase size to prevent alternative marketplaces from providing fewer services for smaller cuts
Again, it just sounds like Valve is offering a good service and other companies don't want to compete. If it's Valves fault for providing a good service and lots of users choose to use their platform instead of others, I fail to see what they could do to rectify that.
Valve offers a great service, and I enjoy it a lot. But it's very difficult for a competitor to enter the market because they won't be able to match Steam's services immediately. Typically in a market the approach is then to undercut Steam, but that is exactly what this policy is designed to make impractical by forcing publishers to overprice, on penalty of losing Steams' userbase.
I mean I don't know what else to say. It is anti-competitive. It doesn't take too much to see why. There are many good articles and legal briefs on the matter. It hurts you and me, the consumer, and it hurts publishers. It enriches Valve, benevolent though they may appear. You shouldn't like this type of strong-arming the market when Amazon does it, and you shouldn't roll over and take it from Valve either.
Doesn't even matter, the court is going to sort it out for us. But I hate to see the reputational hit Wolfire is taking here. I like their studio, I believe their developers are operating in genuine good faith, and I think they are doing consumers a favor.
I still don't see what you're seeing.
Just to play devils advocate, what do you think Valve should do differently?
After learning more about it, I'm understanding the problem is that Wolfire (and every other developer/publisher) has a contract with Valve, in which they aren't allowed to sell their game on another PC market for a cheaper price than Steam.
Though, I wouldn't describe that as anticompetitive, rather, neutrally-competitive. Valve is offering a level playing field, they can take it or leave it. This is a fairly standard practice among businesses (though I understand this does not make it right).
If valve wanted to be anticompetitive they would dictate that games published on Steam are exclusive to Steam on PC.
What Wolfire wants to happen is for game marketplaces and game services platforms to be decoupled. Right now Valve has vertically integrated the two. You buy the game, and they offer peer multiplayer, social, workshop, etc.
If those services were charged separately, so that the costs of those services was not forced into the pricing of other marketplaces that don't offer those services, you open the market to more competition.
So Wolfire's idea of being anticompetitive is to restrict how many features a platform may offer?
Honestly, it just sounds like Wolfire has an axe to grind. Steam doesn't price in the features it offers, their 30% cut existed a long time before most of this stuff was added.
Something like this will never be implemented. Consider the outcome: Steam decouples the marketplace from the extra services, so they create a separate application and offer it as a free service, and creates a link between the two services. There are a hundred ways around this, and all of them inconvenience the consumer.
I'm at my wits end trying to explain this. I guess I can just recommend reading the legal briefs that summarize the matter, or articles that dig deeper than this one.
Maybe I'll think about it later and make a more complete write up with concrete examples. I really hate to see the confusion here. Wolfire is doing us a favor, we should not be handing Valve the keys to the market just because they act like Mr. Benevolent.
Sorry, as aforementioned, I'm just not seeing what you're seeing.
I love this new narrative that undercutting the competition's pricing is anti-competitive and not just winning at the competition because the other teams don't want to improve.
It's not Steam's price to control. It's the developers'.
Not talking about the game prices on the store, which are already set by the developers.
I can't believe that a company that puts out a device running Linux that gives you access to the OS in a few clicks and provides guides for how to install competing distribution platforms is more anticompetitive than Sony, Apple, Nintendo, Microsoft, Google. Valve and Steam aren't perfect. It's difficult to accept that having a store and charging for it is worse than, for example, Sony buying studios and paying millions of dollars for some games to be exclusive on their platform.
You know that court cases are not competitions about who's the most illegal, right?
They should be.
It's a certain policy publisher's have to agree to in order to list on Steam, called a Platform Most Favored Nations ("PMFN") clause.
Similar thing is used by Amazon, for equally monopolistic reasons.