I'm pretty sure that that only applies to steam keys being sold on other sites. If it's being distributed in some other form, it can be cheaper.

This “most favored nation” clause in contracts is huge! It means that even if another store takes half of Steam’s cut (say, 15% vs 30%), the game can’t be sold for less, meaning other rival stores can never compete on price. In other words, Steam drives up prices for games economy-wide. Amazon does something similar, and this was part of the basis the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against them.

By this logic Google isn’t a search monopoly because DuckDuckGo exists, despite Google buying default placement in Safari, Firefox, Chrome, etc to make sure no other search provider can compete, with their bribe to Apple alone totaling $20 billion a year to maintain their search dominance. What do you think monopoly power is if not that?

GoG has, like, 1/5th the market share of Steam. It's not nearly big enough to prevent Steam from having monopoly power. If Steam came out with a policy saying that games could not be on both Steam and GoG, the vast majority of devs would release on Steam. That's monopoly power which Steam has, regardless of whether they are currently abusing it or not.

It's true that I am not a lawyer, so feel free to not take what I say as what the law says. I think that the law certainly should consider Steam to be a monopoly with its level of market power, even if it doesn't currently.

From what I have heard from actual lawyers, monopolies are not currently illegal under US law anyways. They're only illegal when combined with anticompetitive practices. That's my best understanding as a non-lawyer, anyways.

Gabe Newell is a man with a red button on his desk that, if pressed, will immediately grant him 11 figures to distribute as he pleases. It's labeled "sell Valve to Microsoft/go public". Newell hasn't pressed the button. Newell and his employees are satisfied with "making shitloads of money" and don't need to "make more shitloads than last year, forever".

I can reasonably say that Newell probably won't press that button during his lifetime. Similarly, I'd trust anyone with that button to hold onto it no matter what, because "if it's getting pressed, it should be me pressing it."

Once Newell dies, many bets are off. That's a really, really tempting button to press. There are very few humans likely to not press it.

Yep, exactly.

They don't have a board of investors demanding LINE GO UP FASTER, the way that say, MSFT did, demanding their games division hit a 30% profit margin for the last 5 years, and then I guess being surprised that that level of short term thinking blew it all up.

But, on the flip side... who the fuck knows what's gonna happen when Gabe either passes the torch or quits.

Hooray capitalism, lol.

Well they are certainly the exception, not the rule. I'll take it, but we definitely got cosmically lucky to have steam exist in this timeline the way it does. 99/100 times it's a soulless shit factory that's entirely reflective of the AAA industry as a whole.

heroic launcher to the rescue!

I believe the clause applies to any storefronts as it operates on the MFN pricing principle.

But let’s say it doesn’t, and you’re correct and you could buy the same game on itch, gog, humble, epic, M$ store, ubi store, whatever else.

Did you ever actually see any of the stores promote better pricing on their first party platform? I haven’t.

Did you ever see assassins creed games being 5$ cheaper if you buy them on the ubi store as an example?

Same as the above for humble, epic, EA, Microsoft?

That’d be a pretty effective way to drive people to your storefront and drive first party sales with additional profit to the first party… and yet for some reason that practice apparently doesn’t exist.

I am almost 100% sure that’s not done out of the goodness of the shareholders hearts and has more to do with the legal spaghet of it all.

But at the end of the day the above is speculation, I have no concrete way to prove it one way or the other besides the limited observations that I’ve made over the years.

Compare to lowest all time price on steam, not current price. Pretty sure it’s going to come out to the same.

Price parity doesn't mean no discounts. All games in all platforms are the same fucking base price, each store front applies different discounts for different products based on their metrics. The other guy is right, EGS doesn't get 30% cut like steam but their games is not 15%-20% cheaper, if they give you a 15% once in the blue moon doesn't mean shit.

... Am I still on lemmy?
The whole thread is a corporate talk and Apple Steam fan mix. Your first paragraph...

We're discussing a monopoly, and all I am reading is how good a product they're making.

Shouldn't the discussion also be about their costs, margins?
Is the market difficult to enter by its nature? How much would the users and developers benefit from more competition?

And I still dont know their cut.