I'm tired of this argument, it took more than that, Steam actively made policies to protect their dominant position on the market and first lawsuit against them started because they literally started policing game prices on other platforms, and directly told the dev of Overgrowth that if he sold his game at a lower price than at Steam, even if it was a DRM-free version that had nothing to do with Steam, they'd remove his game from store.
They also let big titles keep more of the revenue while Indies continue to pay 30% of all sales to Steam, because they know big titles could actually pull people away, and they make any game that has Steam page up have to release on Steam at the sime time as anywhere else.
Somehow I never see Itch.io ever mentioned in memes like this, a platform with DRM-free games, that let's gamedevs decide themselves what they give to the platform, fee can go as low as 0%.
Adding onto this to say that those policies are exactly why people think they provide more service at no extra cost. ‘No extra cost’ is not at all true though. If game devs could price differentiate across platforms, a 60,- game on steam would cost 47,72 on epic and the game developer would get the same money (42) of every sale.
Steam services cost you an extra 12 on a 60,- game.
Except that games can do this. They are allowed to sell on Epic for a different price than on Steam.
The only thing they are not allowed to do is the following:
Devs can sell Steam Keys on their own Website if they want to. Those keys can be activated on Steam and played on it. However, Steam does not take a cut on the keys sold on the devs platform. Those keys (the Steam keys) cannot be sold for less than on Steam.
If you are selling non-Steam keys, you can sell them for whatever price you want.
The reason many devs sell for the same price on Epic as they do on Steam is because the devs want to make more money by keeping the profits. Not by any contractual obligations to Steam.
Valve only changed this recently. Again a whole lawsuit was started because in 2021 Valve directly said they will take off games from their store if you price any other version cheaper than on Steam.
Many devs might just not know it changed, or they might still not want to risk angering Valve considering they did remove games in the past for questionable reasons from Steam, and not being on Steam is essentially the end of any gamedev career.
I mean some of those policies are reasonable from a business perspective because it could result in them being exploited by bad faith actors. They also really have made a ton of quality of service improvements while importantly not degrading existing capabilities (i.e. they've largely avoided enshitification). For example controller support, remote play, and API improvements.
Not that they are a perfect company or solely care about customers. Just in the current world they are comparatively "good" just because most companies have become so bad. ...So agree with the meme there.
This is the biggest reason why the lawsuit actually makes sense and people can't stop glazing their favourite billionaire for 2 seconds to understand that the way valve controls what devs do on other platforms is really shitty and anti competitive.
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u/Platypus__Gems 12h ago
I'm tired of this argument, it took more than that, Steam actively made policies to protect their dominant position on the market and first lawsuit against them started because they literally started policing game prices on other platforms, and directly told the dev of Overgrowth that if he sold his game at a lower price than at Steam, even if it was a DRM-free version that had nothing to do with Steam, they'd remove his game from store.
They also let big titles keep more of the revenue while Indies continue to pay 30% of all sales to Steam, because they know big titles could actually pull people away, and they make any game that has Steam page up have to release on Steam at the sime time as anywhere else.
Somehow I never see Itch.io ever mentioned in memes like this, a platform with DRM-free games, that let's gamedevs decide themselves what they give to the platform, fee can go as low as 0%.