Comment on Steam is basically a PC gaming monopoly, so why isn’t anyone mad?
Rose@lemmy.zip 8 hours agoFunny because they absolutely use those tactics even to this day. Among other things, they go around and tell developers not to set lower prices or discounts elsewhere if they want to be on Steam (see page 160 here).
Most of those conversations seem to be steam asking the vendor to allow them to lower the price it’s being offered on steam to match the lower price it’s being offered elsewhere (or remove the sale from steam). I dont see any threats to kick games off steam (though that could be implied) or demands to remove lower priced sales from elsewhere.
It doesnt look particularly abusive to my eye at least.
How explicit does Valve need to be for you to agree that they make the point clear? In one quote further in this thread, they say “we’d just choose to stop selling [the game]”, in another, on p. 161, they say “we’ll be ready to release [once you match the price]”, prompting the dev to raise the price from $7 to $14 elsewhere. It’s highly anticompetitive because it prevents other platforms from competing on price. Great discounts are instrumental as well, as noted by OP’s very article.
bountygiver@lemmy.ml 8 hours ago
Not if they want to sell on steam, if they want steam to issue steam keys for purchases made outside of steam. Yes they literally let you use all the steam infrastructure for sales that they don’t get to take a cut out of, with the requirement being you cannot undercut them for those sales.
If you want to sell for cheaper outside of steam you can, you just no longer can ask steam to issue extra keys beyond those sold on steam store.
Rose@lemmy.zip 8 hours ago
Did you look at the page I pointed to? It’s done irrespective of Steam key use. Look at the “Type of Product” column.
bountygiver@lemmy.ml 7 hours ago
It seems a lot of those content type are regarding promotion on the steam store, so it means their games won’t get featured on the front page (essentially steam advertising their game) if they are undercutting the sale of the content. On some it seems to be about in game purchases/DLCs, which also could be a problem if someone could buy those outside the system for far lower price and still use the version launched from steam (particularly if it’s a free to play title)
Rose@lemmy.zip 7 hours ago
Their tactics including not only threats to delist but also threats to reduce visibility does not make it any better. If those numerous examples aren’t crystal clear about the former, here’s another quote from Valve (page 18 here):
When you say “undercutting the sale”, I don’t know what you mean. They are talking about developers setting lower prices outside Steam, which Valve obviously sees as a disadvantage to Steam. Your DLC example also does not make sense and I don’t see that on the list. For a few of the quotes on the list, the type of parity is marked as content, but the overwhelming majority are related to price parity.