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[–] 101 points 5 months ago (30 children)

I love valve as much as the next PC gamer, but I agree their rules should not affect what publishers do entirely on other platforms.

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  • [–] 10 points 5 months ago (19 children)

    They aren't. If Ubisoft wants to release a game on their own platform steam can do nothing about it.

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  • [–] 21 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Did you even read the article? That is exactly what the to lawsuit is about?? Do you have any insider knowledge or why are you starting this as fact???

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    No, Ubisoft tried to offer a partial game for free, distributed via Steam, but sold paid full access for cheap on Uplay. Basically, a "purchase full access to this Steam game on our storefront so we don't have to pay the fee we'd normally pay to get Steam to distribute the game for us".

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    It's like if I download an app from Google Play Store, and then go to that apps first party website, and pay for your subscription to the app service there , in order to bypass the Google Play Store transaction and thus the developer fee.

    I'm trying to figure out why I'm okay with circumventing this to amazon, apple, and every other publicly traded company offering a platform or marketplace, but feel that my favorite privately owned and operated platform should get a pass and be able to restrict the off network transactions.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Because steam offers steam keys for free if "given away" Pay me $25 and you get a free steam key to game B but I'm going to explicitly charge $30 if you try and buy it on steam direct. Mean while steam is on the hook for hosting and server costs.

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  • [–] 17 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Steam can delist all of Ubisoft's games from their storefront in retaliation to what Ubisoft does on their own independent store

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  • [–] -1 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Sure, and ubisoft can decide to not sell their property on steam at all, that mechanic goes both ways.

    I forgot the issue at hand while writing that, oh bother

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  • [–] 29 points 5 months ago (11 children)
  • [–] 24 points 5 months ago* (8 children)

    Yeah but it's fairly simple.

    You can generate Steam keys using the Steam developer tools. This allows a game key to be purchased on any storefront that supports selling them, which can then be activated on Steam.

    The main requirement? You can't price those steam keys on a 3rd party store cheaper than on Steam itself.

    For that, it means if the 3rd party store takes a smaller cut than Steam itself would take, the developer makes a bit more profit through almost no additional effort. Steam is the system users use to download and update the game, and cloud save syncing, and community guides, forums, workshop, etc.

    The developer is, afaik, more than welcome to also sell a UPlay key if they partner with Ubisoft at any price point they want (regardless of the Steam price) because Ubisoft is the taking on the burden of distribution, etc.

    The only price requirement Valve imposes is on selling Steam keys on 3rd party storefronts. Not UPlay keys. Not Xbox keys. Not Epic Store keys.

    Edit: and I read the article, while albeit short (can't access the linked Bloomberg article sadly), they claim exactly that, that the version on UPlay was significantly cheaper than the version on Steam for essentially the same game. Valve was arguing that Rainbow Six Siege needs to change their pricing on UPlay or they would be delisted.

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  • [–] 40 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    The crux of the case is whether Valve is applying that rule to non-Steam keys or not. Lawsuit says they are, Valve says they aren't. If Valve is telling the truth, they've done nothing wrong. If Valve is lying however that is an anticompetitive practice that should be punished. We won't really know until the trial concludes though.

    Personally I think the most likely answer is that some junior support people at Valve misunderstood the policy and told some people the wrong thing. There's a decent chance that when those accusations first surfaced a decade or so ago (yes this has been a thing for that long) Valve probably sent some internal memos to clarify what the rule actually covers and what it doesn't and hopefully that was that.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago

    Valve probably sent some internal memos to clarify what the rule actually covers and what it doesn't and hopefully that was that.

    Speaking from my company experiences as an employee:
    If it's not written in a clear language (e.g. ONLY keys generated and distributed by Valve need to follow the same price on other storefronts. We do not care about 3rd Party key generator/distributors like uPlays own infra) and somewhere accessible it will be forgotten or misinterpreted by employees.
    I can't even count the amount of "With this email we inform you of policy X and order Y".
    This email will be lost and new employees will never receive it.
    And employees will repeat the rules in a flawed way.

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  • [–] 16 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    This isn't about steam keys, it's about Valve throwing their weight around.

    Valve was arguing that Rainbow Six Siege needs to change their pricing on UPlay or they would be delisted.

    It's the equivalent of Amazon telling a manufacturer that they can't sell their product at a lower price on their own website if they want to sell it on Amazon.

    None of this should be defended.

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  • [–] -2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    No, it would be like Amazon saying that a manufacturer cannot use Amazon to ship goods sold on their own website if they're going to sell at a lower price. That is reasonable. Steam keys are a means of distribution. If steam is going to provide the file transfer, cloud saves, multiplayer server hosting, community page, and workshop page for your game, then don't sell your steam keys for less than the game on steam.

    If you want to sell a key for epic for less than you list the game on steam, they do not stop you from doing so.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Yes it's a very short article and apparently you completely hallucinated a paragraph where it's about steam keys?

    I do not see any mention of steam keys in the article. They wanted to sell a version that wasn't even on steam. Only on Uplay. This has nothing to do with steam keys. And valve was still complaining.

    So yeah. It's fairly simple and you still got it wrong.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Not really no. Ubisoft agreed to these terms in order to sell their game on steam. If they sold their game on any third party platform, they would agree to the same or even more severe terms. They even made their own storefront specifically so they would have the option to not sell on a third party platform.

    They now cry foul because they got all the benefits from selling on steam, but they don't want to pay for any of those benefits.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    Yeah it's particularly weird in this case because Ubisoft and Valve both have publisher, developer, and distributor departments within each company. So the agreements they signed and put into place are probably somewhat complex.

    Looking at the Steam page though it says

    Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

    Publisher: Ubisoft

    So in this case it's whatever Ubisoft as a publisher signed / agreed to with Valve when they accepted their distribution terms. These are probably not the same boiler plate terms an indie dev would sign if self publishing.

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  • [+] -6 points 5 months ago (9 children)

    that's some fucked up logic.

    steam is simply saying, "if you want to sell your product through us you must not sell it elsewhere for cheaper". don't like it? don't sell your product on steam. simple as that.

    valve has a fiscal responsibility to ensure that developers aren't siphoning customers away from the platform and requiring equal pricing for the same product across all platforms ensures a level playing field for both devs and resellers.

    ask yourself, why would Ubisoft sell a game on steam for $60 and then attempt to sell the same game on their platform for $40? I'll give you a hint, it's not out of the goodness of their heart.

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  • [+] 6 points 5 months ago (4 children)
  • [–] -1 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    That’s why Ubisoft could sell their games for 30% cheaper on their own platform

    good for them. they can fuck off and sell their shit on their platform exclusively.

    that 30% that valve takes? that's the cost of business working with valve. that's the fee to have access to their delivery platform, their inventory control system, their large consumer base.

    it melts my brain to attempt to comprehend how anyone can complain that a company is literally charging for their services AND have TOS to back it up.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    A fiscal responsibility to who?

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  • [–] -1 points 5 months ago (1 child)
    • their employees
    • the developers that use the platform to sell products
    • the customers that use the platform to buy products

    Valve has a fiscal responsibility to maintain solvency. if they allow their competition to undercut them while at the same time abuse the system to sell products at a higher price, they risk opening a rift for consumers to flood to a cheaper platform and thus weakening their solvency and profitability.

    if their competition wants to sell from their own platform at a cheaper rate, they need to make their products exclusive to their own platform.

    this is marketing 101.

    tired of people claiming Valve has a monopoly when it's very clear that this is manufactured because competition is unable or unwilling to develop a better solution than Valve. that's not monopolistic, that's just business.

    Nobody said Netflix had a monopoly when they put blockbuster out of business. nobody claimed monopoly when Walmart put your local grocery chains out of business. nobody claimed monopoly when Nintendo put atari and Sega out of business. know why? because a monopoly requires exclusive rights to sell a commodity or service. can you buy games outside of Steam? YES! then it's not a monopoly.

    antitrust my ass. Google had an antitrust suit. why? because the OS they maintained locked down app access to only their delivery platform. THAT'S a monopoly.

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  • [–] 68 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (4 children)

    The amount of people in this thread that are arguing that steam is fully within the right here due to the fact that they have a restriction on steam key pricing blows my mind.

    for example with the UbiSoft case, It's clear they have never actually opened or used Uplay because if they had they would realize that Uplay does not use Steam keys period at all. They are their own distribution platform that distributes off of uplay servers.

    The entire point of the lawsuits is going one step further, which is that despite steam having a policy that says it's for keys only, they unilaterally enforce it on all platforms regardless of the usage of the keys.

    Now whether that's actually true or not is what the lawsuits have to determine. But that is what the claim is. Personally I'm leaning towards it's true because I've seen some screenshots posted about customer service saying that's how it worked and threatening to delist steam games for cheaper first party distribution pricing elsewhere.

    I'll be curious where these cases go.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    The issue with the Ubisoft case was that Ubisoft offered R6S in a free, restricted mode and a full mode. However, Ubisoft allowed you to obtain the free version from Steam (distributed by Steam servers) but offered a cheaper way to access the full game on Uplay only.

    So you could get the full game, distributed by Steam without spending a penny on Steam, as long as you purchase it on Uplay. That's just Ubisoft trying to dodge Steam's policy prohibiting cheaper access to Steam distributed games on other storefronts.

    It's kinda like you providing a free game on Steam, but upon opening it you have to enter your credit card details first in order to access the rest of the game. You're just using Steam's services for free at that point, and that is obviously dodging the policy.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago*

    I wouldn't classify that as dodging steam policy at that point. There is no product to parity. The 15$ starter pack wasn't offered on steam during the exclusivity period. The actual wording for the price parity rule is You should use Steam Keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam. It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers.. If there is no steam key to parity with, then it's not in violation of the policy. They were using the terms given to them by steam, and steam didn't like that and allegedly threatened to delist all of their r6s products if they didn't provide the same product on steam. That's blatant monopolistic behavior in my eyes, especially considering that uplay variants of the game steam has no part in. Steam has no listings that you must sell products on both platforms, they do have a rule that states if there is one on both, you must give steam key purchasers an equivalent or better deal. On items that can use steam wallet/items that are on both platforms they do price parity it seems, but I have to disagree with it obviously dodging the policy.

    Also for your analogy sake, it's important to add that r6s wasn't free to play at the time of this complaint. Free to play wasn't even a thing for the game until mid 2025. While no date was provided, its safe to say these complaints are from at least 2017 (which also coincides with the year provided with the other company complaint) since that's when the starter pack bundle was made to be a uplay exclusive without it being on steam, but this was back when the game was p2p instead of f2p. The 15$ starter pack included the game, a couple operators and some ingame currency, and if memory serves right, in buying it you would need to download and install it via uplay. Since it was a uplay product key and they lacked cross-progression during that time span.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago

    It's interesting though because if I have my game listed on Steam and then have my game listed on GOG for the same price technically the version on GOG is more expensive because they don't take a 30% cut. So developers could still list their games on both platforms and not get in trouble with valve and still make a profit from listing it on other platforms. I know uplay does take a cut but presumably they don't care to cut off their own profits.

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  • [–] 18 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    I like Valve as a company, but this is exactly what antitrust laws are for. I hope the due course of justice is followed and the appropriate consequences result if any impropriety is found.

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  • [–] 55 points 5 months ago (17 children)

    If you can buy from GOG do it. Need to make sure viable competition sticks around plus they actually let you own the game

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  • [–] 33 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    they actually let you own the game

    Let's be clear. Both Steam and GoG sell you the same licence for a game.

    Steam comes with optional DRM that requires you to use the Steam client. Whether or not this DRM is present on a game is the publisher's decision, not Steam's.

    Steam could certainly be criticised for providing the functionality but it's not mandatory.

    Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam for instance has no DRM and can be run without Steam. Even if a game has Steam DRM it's usually trivial to bypass it.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    I don’t know what I have to do to get a game listed on GOG though. I don’t buy a lot of games but I think the last three I tried to buy were all unavailable on GOG. There’s that page where you can wish for a game on GOG but I’ve no idea how effective that is.

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  • [–] 16 points 5 months ago (6 children)

    GOG isn't really competing in the same market as Steam.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    Most importantly, GOG games don't include Steam keys, which is what's the issue here.

    Steam lets publishers include Steam keys if they don't sell them for cheaper than on Steam.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Steam lets publishers include Steam keys if they don’t sell them for cheaper than on Steam.

    Then how come official retailers like GMG are consistently able to sell Steam keys at 10% discount for nearly every new AAA release on launch?

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    These suits have nothing to do with steam keys.

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  • [–] 21 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    I really wanted GOG to be a viable competition, but their years and years of broken promises are not going to make me leave Steam.

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  • [–] 16 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    ...such as...? Whenever I'm shopping for a game, I check GOG (and 3rd party sites for steam keys via ITAD) before I buy from steam. If it's available on gog and drm-free, that's where my money goes.

    The only issue I see with gog is that devs don't give a shit. One and done, one pump chump. Why give customers choice, when you can be jerking it with their money already instead?

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  • [–] 22 points 5 months ago

    They can't even keep their original promise of DRM free games.
    For example, they thought they could get away with selling latest Hitman with its always-online DRM, and only changed their minds after the backlash.

    Also, from the beginning they've been promising to support Linux.
    Nothing but empty promises so far, they didn't even have the decency to publicly admit it's never happening.

    Valve, meanwhile, didn't promise anything, but quietly funded the development of Wine and all kinds of related open source software.
    Thanks to their work I've been able to completely ditch Windows a few years ago.

    For this reason alone I'm glad to buy from Steam whenever I can.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    GOG uses GenAI for marketing.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    Eh, take some leave some. I'm as anti AI as any other, but comparing those negatives with the positives GOG brings it's a little better than a wash. You actually own the game and I'm 99.9999% positive that somewhere in steam's multiple streams of revenue ai is being used regularly and heavily.

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  • [–] 30 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    I want to make something clear about the Valve Anti-trust lawsuit currently making its way through the court system.

    This case is predicted on the idea that Valve's "Price Parity Clause" in its contracts with Game Devs is anti-consumer and anti-competitive.

    The original lawsuit filed by Wolfire before this became a class action Anti-trust lawsuit is available online and it alleges a couple of things.

    1. Steam is two separate services that are lumped together in an effort to maintain its market share.

    2. It uses this market share to enforce a Most Favored Nation Clause.

    3. The Price Parity Clause does not only apply to Steam Keys but to all e-shop sales outside the Steam store.

    4. The Price Parity Clause is actually a Most Favored Nation Clause, aka a Price Veto Provision.

    The reason that people are claiming this is about Steam Keys is because the original lawsuit filed by Wolfire says that it is. This is what most of the articles that are actually written about this exempt from their writeup and since they don't provide source documentation (from the filing), they lack this context.

    The lawsuit is literally about whether or not Valve applies and enforces their Price Parity Clause to not just Steam Keys but also to non-steam storefronts that do not at all use Steam Keys.

    If you are arguing that this isn't about Steam Keys, your information is inaccurate and based not on the court filing but on articles that exclude information from the court filing.

    If you're saying it's solely about Steam Keys your information is contextually right to some small degree but just as incomplete and therefore just as incorrect.

    Because of the nature of the claims in the Wolfire lawsuit (some of which are actually demonstrably false), it does not lend creedence to the other claims being made by Wolfire (on which the class action is relying).

    One of the most notable discrepancies between what Wolfie claim and what is legally proven to be true thus far is that Steam does not make a 30% commission on Steam Keys. In point of fact, Valve do not claim any percentage of sales figures from Steam Keys at all. Only sales made directly on the steam e-shop are charged the 30% fee.

    The second major one is that the clause in their contract with Steam on which this is predicated is specifically about Steam Key availability and use.

    So far as I can tell, there is not a difference in these particular parts of the lawsuit between the class action and the original lawsuit that was dismissed in 2021. So Wolfire's original lawsuit and the Class Action still state that Valve does these things and this lawsuit is as much about Steam Keys as it is about Price Parity/Most Favored Nation type market tactics and clauses.

    I believe they have not changed this wording because they cannot remove their Steam Key argument from the lawsuit because without it they do not have a written Steam Policy on which to rely.

    So far as I can tell Wolfire and the Class Action claim that the Most Favored Nation Clause is only spoken of in person and is not part of the official contract they signed or any such contract that Valve offers for Steam services. It is unclear if this is their own claim or something they point to as being true based on alleged Microsoft Employee statement.

    If I come across more information on this I will try to post it, but I might not remember.

    I do wish we could stop posting articles with sensationalized claims and horribly clickbait titles that don't actually providing even a link back to the sources of their information and claims.

    I believe there is a separate lawsuit happening in Europe and I haven't delved into that one to this degree.

    There's also a separate lawsuit alleging price fixing between Microsoft and Valve. I have not looked into that one at all though I did come across it in my rabbit hole dive.

    If anyone can direct me to a non-account required court filing for the two video game developers that sued Valve I would like to see them. So far it looks like the court filings were originally separate but have been combined into a single court filing and that court filing doesn't use the same language as Dark Catt's singular filing did.

    https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

    https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.298754/gov.uscourts.wawd.298754.1.0_1.pdf

    https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/why-valve-actually-gets-less-than-30-percent-of-steam-game-sales.1450097/

    https://lawfold.com/valve-lawsuit/

    https://www.classaction.org/media/wolfire-games-llc-et-al-v-valve-corporation.pdf

    https://gameworldobserver.com/2024/03/14/sweeney-vs-steam-cut-epic-tirade-gaben-emails-revealed

    https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/p/revealed-tim-sweeneys-epic-rant-to

    https://aftermath.site/gamers-sue-microsoft-valve-steam-antitrust-lawsuit/

    https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.300801/gov.uscourts.wawd.300801.1.0.pdf

    https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/it/ip_21_170

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  • [+] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    From the filing:

    Of those sales, approximately 75% flow through the online storefront of a single company, Valve. Valve’s online game store, the “Steam Store,” dominates the distribution of PC games. And Valve uses that dominance to take an extraordinarily high cut from nearly every sale that passes through its store—30%. This 30% commission yields Valve over $6 billion dollars in annual revenue. For everyone else, it yields higher prices and less innovation. 3. Valve is able to extract such high fees because it actively suppresses competition to protect its market dominance. Many other game stores have tried to charge lower fees, in the range of 10-15%, but they have all failed to achieve significant market share. This is because Valve abuses its market power to ensure game publishers have no choice but to sell most of their games through the Steam Store, where they are subject to Valve’s 30% toll. Steam Key Price Parity Provision. Valve nominally allows game publishers to make some limited third-party sales of Steam-enabled games through its “Steam Keys” program. Steam Keys are alphanumeric codes that can be submitted to the Steam Gaming Platform by gamers to access a digital copy of the purchased game within the Steam Gaming Platform, even when the game is not purchased through the Steam Store. Steam Keys can be sold by rival distributors including the Humble Store, Amazon, GameStop, and Green Man Gaming.
    11. But Valve has rigged the Steam Keys program so that it serves as a tool to maintain Valve’s dominance. Among other things, Valve imposes a price parity rule (the “Steam Key Price Parity Provision”) on anyone wanting to sell Steam Keys through an alternative distributor. Put explicitly by Valve, “We want to avoid a situation where customers get a worse offer on the Steam store.”3 But that is equivalent to preventing gamers from obtaining a better offer from a competing distributor. The effect of this rule is to stifle price competition. 12. Because of this rule, Valve can stop competing game stores from offering consumers a lower price on Steam-enabled games in order to shift volume from the Steam Store to their storefronts. Even if a rival game store were to charge game publishers a lower commission than Valve’s high 30% fee, the distributor would not gain more sales because the game publishers could not charge a lower price in its store. Game publishers and consumers suffer because this rule keeps Valve’s high 30% commission from being subject to competitive pressure. The bolded section in particular makes it sound like Valve is forcing developers to pay 30% commission on Steam Keys sold on rivals shops when in fact it supposedly alleges (when you read the whole thing) that Valve is using its Price Parity Rule (which makes it so steam keys have to be the same price as their equivalent steam e-shop price) coupled with its popularity to force other shops that sell non-steam keys at lesser commission rates to fall inline, or alternatively that the game devs must offer their games for the same price as on Steam's e-shop even when using Keys provided by another supplier.

    It doesn't explain (and I'm fairly sure that's on purpose) that this means that those same devs would charge the same amount on each shop regardless of who supplies the digital keys, and make more money on those other sites which benefits themselves.

    1. This Price Parity Provision is one of the reasons why Valve has been able to continue to charge an inflated 30% commission for many years, even as that commission is plainly above the levels that would prevail in a competitive market. Competition would normally force such an inflated commission to come down to competitive levels—but Valve’s restraints prevent those competitive forces from operating as they would in a free market.
    1. Because of Valve’s restraint, publishers cannot utilize alternative distributors to avoid the 30% tax that Valve has set for the market. Thus, they reluctantly market their games primarily through the dominant Steam Store where Valve takes its 30% fee. While several distributors have tried to compete with Valve by charging lower commissions on Steam Keys, those efforts have largely failed to make a dent in the Steam Store’s market share because publishers using those distributors had to charge the same inflated prices they set on the Steam Store.

    Price Veto Provision. Valve also requires game publishers to agree to give Valve veto power over their pricing in the Steam Store and across the market generally (the “Price Veto Provision”). Valve selectively enforces this provision to review pricing by game publishers on PC Desktop Games that have nothing to do with the Steam Gaming Platform at all. Through this conduct, prices set in the Steam Store serve as a benchmark that leads to inflated prices for virtually all PC Desktop Games.

    1. As explained by the founder and CEO of Epic Games (“Epic”), one company that has tried to compete against Valve, “Steam has veto power over prices, so if a multi-store developer wishes to sell their game for a lower price on the Epic Games store than Steam, then: 1.) Valve can simply say ‘no.’”4 Valve makes every game publisher accessing the Steam Gaming Platform agree to this Price Veto Provision.
    1. Valve uses this provision to further enforce price parity and prevent rival game distributors from gaining volume by competing on price.5 And by inhibiting rival distributors from competing on price—even when selling games that have nothing to do with the Steam Gaming Platform—Valve inhibits potential competition against the Steam Gaming Platform as well, because rival gaming platforms cannot encourage usage by connecting to lower-priced distributors. Valve therefore protects its monopoly position in both of the relevant markets—the markets for PC Desktop Game Distribution and PC Desktop Gaming Platforms—through this provision.

    It doesn't explicitly say that Valve make a commission on Steam Keys but lots of people seem to be of the belief that they do based on statements by Wolfire including in the filing. I would argue that they heavily imply this by leaving that context out of the filing entirely which is why half the comments in this thread have wrong information about it.

    Specifically because part of the filing states that Steam is charging excessive commissions, which is something that is also stated in the Bloomberg article.

    The fact that Steam Keys don't have a commission is integral to the reason why a developer might want to distribute them for a lower price on other retail sites.

    However, I believe you are correct that this is not something specifically worded into the legal filing. The wording might lead people to believe this without specifically saying it.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago*

    As for the Bloomberg article. I have problems with it. The first of which is that it's paywalled which adds a barrier to entry and is one of the reasons it's not listed with everything else in my original comment.

    The second problem is it specifically asserts that Gabe Newell spent an unknown morning in November of 2023 in a meeting talking to lawyers. Who's lawyers? Is this where he asserted that Valve and Steam don't have a policy or dictating prices for other platforms? Or was that a statement made in the court room during deposition as it states later in the same paragraph? Are these two things which appear in the same first paragraph related? If so how? It doesn't really go into anything else he said to these lawyers or anything else said by these lawyers. What is the specific framing of the questions put to him? It claims that he was then presented with written communication of Valve employees that they do in fact have such a policy. But it fails to quote those emails or link to them. Then it switches tac entirely going on about Valve's consumer fan base and how that fanbase view him. That's directly geared to make people think a specific way about the situation instead of simply providing facts. It goes on in that same paragraph to talk about allegations from WB and Ubisoft and their emails but doesn't directly link to or quote those either.

    It goes on about the number of developers who believe Steam is a monopoly but can't be bothered to list the reasons they gave for such a stance.

    I cannot tell you how much I do not care how many hours of DOTA 2 Gaben has. I do not care what their employee handbook has to say about taking advantage of company perks. I do not care about his yacht(s).

    Critics argue that its freewheeling culture masks abusive business practices that make the gaming market worse for developers and consumers. The US lawsuit Newell was deposed in, which has been certified as a class action, alleges that it “is not economically feasible” for game makers to leave Steam in favor of a rival store and that they are effectively “forced to comply” with Valve’s rules and high fees.

    What is the culture and how does it mask the abusive practices? There's so much more in this article but you have to slog through it to find nuggets of substance.

    Additionally it has a lot of random paragraphs of arguably superfluous information comparing it to other companies,
    and makes claims but can't be bothered to reportedly documented which ones are privileged court information or link to the court filings or to anything of substance including pointing people to Valve's own website where they explain the Steam Key program. If people want more context or information about what is going on they can't rely on that article either. It doesn't even actually quote the court filing at all that I can see. I take significant issue with that. But in any case I'm not here to argue the validity of any of the claims made in the filing, in the Bloomberg article or in the IGN/eurogamer article copypasta. Mostly I'm here to provide links to the most credible information I can. Some of the links are just biased in their own right but they do provide links to their sources which I believe is extremely helpful. @mabeledo@lemmy.world

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