They absolutely could. If only there was any serious competition and not just some quick cash grabbers like EA and others. As long as Steam is providing most value to users (=players) without even restricting competition like other tech companies do in other areas (cough Apple), they are able to take the 30% cut without a complaint.
The only reason EA and others aren’t serious competition is because of their lack of effort.
Every time the topic comes up, PC gamers don’t bother with their services because they’re shoddily written and slow. The complaint of “They don’t have millions of games on there to amass in one library” is a minority one.
I mean, if Epic actually did what shills like @Kecessa@sh.itjust.works promote - that is, reflect lower cuts in a cheaper price to consumers, then we would all be flabbergasted how big their market percentage is.
But they’re not doing that, that’s the thing. Because Tim Sweeney does not want storefronts to take a smaller cut. Quite the opposite. His problem is that the cut is only 30%, and worse, does not go into his pockets!
But there is always an excuse. Epic tried that. Companies complained.
Their sales used to give you a reusable $10 off coupon. That didn’t change the amount the companies got when someone bought their game. It only changed how much they paid. When one of the Witcher games had that coupon applied to it, the developer got pissed off and changed the price of the game so that it was a cent or two below the threshold to activate the coupon, and then fans of the dev were excusing it claiming that they couldn’t let the price be lower because it would ‘devalue’ the game.
if a game was $30 on Steam and $25 on Epic (as a regular price), or some other service, you’d undoubtedly hear the same rhetoric.
Epic’s cut is 12% not 30%. They also waive the 5% royalty fee over $1 million for sales on the Epic Store if you use Unreal. Epic doesn’t control the prices. Devs set the prices. They leave the price the same on Epic so that they can actually get a little more for each sale.
What the should do on a $60 game though is to set the price at like $56 on Epic, it would encourage people to save a couple bucks there, while still getting them more than steam after the cuts.
I do, and I feel like the real intent is something completely different here than what is said out loud.
E: So Epic Games Store is actually giving out games for free and they still can’t gain traction because their platform sucks so bad otherwise. My guess is someone just wants to try and get a tough competitor driven out of one country so that they could bring their own, worse, service there instead and take the market share without actually competing.
Epic isn’t involved in that lawsuit so I don’t know why you’re them into the conversation.
If a company charges X$ for a product and the CEO ends up being able to own six yacht I fucking hope someone will wake up and say “Hold on buddy, you’re clearly ripping people off.”
What’s crazy is that if the lawsuit was against Apple or a grocery chain you guys would all be cheering, but you made yourselves believe that Steam was a good guy when all they do is make sure they get more money from more people, they don’t do shit for free.
I brought Epic just as an example of an actual competitor actually trying to compete against Steam, sorry if I I was a bit unclear about that.
So lots of entrepreneurs get rich when they make a product that solves people’s problems in one way or another and it sells with a profit - let it be a small profit or a large profit. The thing with capitalism is, if you make your profit too large, eventually a competitor will come and provide an equal or better product with slightly smaller profit or they figured out a way to make the product cheaper and still maintain the same profit margin with a lower price gaining a market share.
The problem with Apple, other large tech companies or some grocery chains in some parts of world (this is the case where I live actually) is that they are not allowing a healthy competition in the first place. If a competitor appears on the market, they will buy them before gaining too much traction, or if that’s not possible, they will do everything they can in their power to drive them out of the market by lobbying politicians, or if they control some valuable aspect of the market, restrict access to said market.
Valve hasn’t practiced any of those shady tactics as far as I know of and that’s why people actually think of them as one of the “good guys” even if it is somewhat unhealthy. You shouldn’t try to beat down the people playing with a friendly rule set of capitalism because they are the ones driving the competition forward.
Valve has enough of the market that they don’t need to do that because they’re the default option, just like Microsoft doesn’t need to fear macOS or Linux or anyone that would try to jump in the game and create a new OS (hell, they even had up finance Apple in order to create competition). They don’t practice these shady tactics (although that’s disputable and they’re getting sued for it) because they don’t have to to win, they can just wait it out and let potential competitors ruin themselves. Even if someone came and offered everything Steam offers and more, people wouldn’t switch because their games are already on Steam. Just like people who are used to Windows and have bought programs compatible with it won’t abandon everything and start over with another OS.
I don’t know if you lived through the Internet Explorer era, but that was exactly the same situation in browsers back in the day. Internet Explorer was preinstalled in every Windows computer, so in pretty much every computer, and it was deemed as “unbeatable” because people were too lazy to install anything else. In retrospective, it didn’t take too long for Google Chrome to beat IE market share and nowadays pretty much the whole world uses Chrome and nothing else. Now, with IE, EU had to step in and force Microsoft to present their users a dialog to choose their browser in a fresh Windows installation which did have a role in that market share change. With Steam there isn’t a need for that, because every user has to go and explicitly install Steam client to their computer before using it. Same goes with Chrome.
Although, vendor lock really is a real issue, and I do agree with you that if one has thousands of euros/dollars worth of games in their Steam account, it’s purely convenient to keep on buying their next games on Steam as well. What I don’t agree with is, that if there was a new competitor that was better in every way imaginable and they were able to sell the games on their platform for, let’s say, -5% constantly, people wouldn’t start using their service. You have to remember, that there is also a constant stream of new gamers (young people) that haven’t even created a Steam account, and nothing is preventing them from choosing another service for their first game purchase. It’s just that there isn’t a real alternative to Steam currently.
According to Shotbolt, the developer and digital distribution company is “shutting out” all competition in the PC gaming market as it “forces” game publishers to sign off on price parity obligations - supposedly preventing them from going on to offer lower prices on other platforms.
But I thought those are only for steam keys? That’s always been what devs found out when trying to vary their prices on storefronts: Sell the game standalone, Valve sleeps. Sell a steam key or use the steam backend, real shit.
Epic is good at making it sound like it applies to sales in general though, while technically not being wrong from how they word it: You do sign a price parity obligation, yes. And it does prevent you from offering lower prices on other stores. For, well, steam keys. But they’re not mentioning that last part as that makes it sound like Epic just sells stuff for the same end-user price because they can.
I’ve seen some comments agreeing with you and others citing examples of individual developers being told not to sell at lower prices. Don’t know if the prosecutor is citing those cases or they’re just a chancer who hasn’t done their research properly.
But it doesn’t need to be sold for more? As evidenced by not being sold for more despite the cut Valve takes? If that were an issue the games would cost say 70 on Steam but 60 elsewhere?
It needs to be sold for 70 on Steam in order to bring in the revenue per copy they need for their RoI, why would they go and sell for less elsewhere if Steam with their 30% share sets the bar? People won’t feel ripped off, the price is the same, what they don’t realize is that the only reason the price is that high in the first place is that Valve gets 21$ from each sale! The company needs 49$/copy in their pockets, if the distributor’s share had always been 15% instead of 30% we would be buying games for 58$ instead of 70$ right now.
I find it absolutely wild that you seem to think Steam’s 30% cut is the sole reason AAA games cost $70. Have you ever looked into how much it costs to sell a game at a retail store? From what I’ve seen Steam takes roughly the same cut as most retailers do and then the publisher still has to produce the physical copies and distribute them. They would make the same amount on Steam if and only if they printed, burned, packaged, and distributed their physical copies for free, not to mention the promotional materials they’re sending out to retailers.
Everything I’m seeing indicates that compared to a physical copy (which is given for a majority of AAA games) a major publisher would earn far more money per copy on Steam than at GameStop, Target, Walmart, or any other retailer where they’re charging the same $70 price at. But Steam is the real problem that’s hurting their RoI, apparently.
I’ll agree I think Steam’s cut is high and they could earn a lot of favor by turning it down a bit, but your argument seeming to insinuate that their 30% cut is the sole reason games cost $70 is absolutely wild to me.
This discussion is about Steam, they have control over the market, all distributors are in the wrong and take too high of a cut, I’ll talk about the other distributors when we have a discussion about them.
So companies made due with the same cut from retailers for decades, Steam comes along and offers the same cut with none of the other expenses associated with those retailers (thereby giving them a better RoI than the same retailers they made due with for decades) and suddenly Steam is the reason games are so expensive.
For all of your talk that Steam’s awful cut sets the bar for the price or else they won’t make their RoI on games sold there, you suddenly don’t seem to care very much about the very many retailers these AAA publishers still regularly sell through that cost them a significantly larger percentage per game sold than Steam does.
In a world where Sony and Embracer are running around saying we need to be paying $70+ for games (while tipping the devs and buying micro transactions like a good like wallet)… You’re mad at the storefront?
Yeah, go into Walmart and demand they take less of a cut so… The publisher can take more from the devs?
Gabe is rich because he spearheaded a good service (which I’ll admit I thought was a scam back when I was forced to make an account way back when I had dial up) but… 30% is standard. For the price of games? Be mad at Embracer. Be mad at EA. You’re free to not like or use Steam but they let the publishers set the price. Their cut is a drop in the bucket. The whole ‘cut’ debate is just EGS propaganda.
There’s a difference between making profit and becoming one of the richest person in the world, in the second case it means you clearly made too much profit by selling for a higher price than required.
Let’s play ball here too. So by definition there’s always going to be a richest person in the world - let it be with a difference of 100 dollars to the median or a billion dollars or 100 billion dollars. Who gets to decide who is the richest person and by what means? Clearly it shouldn’t be a business person so would it be a politician, a dictator, a president or who? And how should we restrict entrepreneurs getting there without destroying every company and therefore making everyone unemployed because there’s no incentive to run a business anymore? How would we balance risks with gains if we are not allowed to make a profit?
A richest person will always exist, there’s no reason why that richest person couldn’t have
500k in their bank account while the median is at 250k though.
The fact you’re setting an arbitrary limit of cash in a bank account shows how little you’ve thought about this. Rich people have money in the bank, sure, but the vast amount of their wealth is in stocks, property, and other assets. Also, assuming rich people have one bank account they keep all their money in is foolish. You have to spread your cash around to multiple accounts and even banks in order to not exceed the amount the government is willing to insure.
I dumbed it down to the level of the people who are defending billionaires. No one should be allowed to have multiple millions or billions in wealth while people are starving even in rich countries.
The 1 was a typo and in a perfect world where wealth is distributed equally, 500k would be a whole lot.
Heck, even today in rich countries, 500k in savings is an anomaly. 78% of US citizens live paycheck to paycheck, having 10k in saving is something they can’t fathom, 500k is a whole fucking lot.
And you want to start with Valve, which is one of the smaller game companies and is one of the few players not guilty of buying up their competition, instead of Sony, Microsoft, other Big Tech players, media conglomerates like Disney, ISPs like Comcast or AT&T, or meat distributors who are price fixing algorithmicly?
Why even buy games period? Why risk giving money to any of them since things that become popular risk making the people selling them to become wealthy? Not like indies are immune to it looking at Minecraft becoming too popular that too many people wanted to buy it making one person then a corporation wealthy, so why not just not buy period to prevent the issue from even becoming a possibility?
The best solution is prevention. Don’t buy anything.
Not on Steam and not in ways that enrich billionaires. If devs don’t make their game available another way then too bad, they chose to deal with the devil, I don’t have to encourage them, won’t keep me from playing their games through other means or by getting them through giveaways.
Yeah bud Steam having decent game sales is literally like a corrupt government contract boss gets a pay rise at a corpo dumping sewage into rivers and polluting drinking water and making people sick.
Stop defending a billionaire and his company, you’ll never be one of them, all billionaires need to go, none of them became one by being moral, if it was any other company you would be talking about guillotines.
They get a 30% cut and make enough money that Gaben is a billionaire so yeah, games prices could be much cheaper.
They absolutely could. If only there was any serious competition and not just some quick cash grabbers like EA and others. As long as Steam is providing most value to users (=players) without even restricting competition like other tech companies do in other areas (cough Apple), they are able to take the 30% cut without a complaint.
The only reason EA and others aren’t serious competition is because of their lack of effort.
Every time the topic comes up, PC gamers don’t bother with their services because they’re shoddily written and slow. The complaint of “They don’t have millions of games on there to amass in one library” is a minority one.
I mean, if Epic actually did what shills like @Kecessa@sh.itjust.works promote - that is, reflect lower cuts in a cheaper price to consumers, then we would all be flabbergasted how big their market percentage is.
But they’re not doing that, that’s the thing. Because Tim Sweeney does not want storefronts to take a smaller cut. Quite the opposite. His problem is that the cut is only 30%, and worse, does not go into his pockets!
But there is always an excuse. Epic tried that. Companies complained.
Their sales used to give you a reusable $10 off coupon. That didn’t change the amount the companies got when someone bought their game. It only changed how much they paid. When one of the Witcher games had that coupon applied to it, the developer got pissed off and changed the price of the game so that it was a cent or two below the threshold to activate the coupon, and then fans of the dev were excusing it claiming that they couldn’t let the price be lower because it would ‘devalue’ the game.
if a game was $30 on Steam and $25 on Epic (as a regular price), or some other service, you’d undoubtedly hear the same rhetoric.
Epic’s cut is 12% not 30%. They also waive the 5% royalty fee over $1 million for sales on the Epic Store if you use Unreal. Epic doesn’t control the prices. Devs set the prices. They leave the price the same on Epic so that they can actually get a little more for each sale.
What the should do on a $60 game though is to set the price at like $56 on Epic, it would encourage people to save a couple bucks there, while still getting them more than steam after the cuts.
“without a complaint”
Eh… You realize what this discussion is based on?
I do, and I feel like the real intent is something completely different here than what is said out loud.
E: So Epic Games Store is actually giving out games for free and they still can’t gain traction because their platform sucks so bad otherwise. My guess is someone just wants to try and get a tough competitor driven out of one country so that they could bring their own, worse, service there instead and take the market share without actually competing.
Epic isn’t involved in that lawsuit so I don’t know why you’re them into the conversation.
If a company charges X$ for a product and the CEO ends up being able to own six yacht I fucking hope someone will wake up and say “Hold on buddy, you’re clearly ripping people off.”
What’s crazy is that if the lawsuit was against Apple or a grocery chain you guys would all be cheering, but you made yourselves believe that Steam was a good guy when all they do is make sure they get more money from more people, they don’t do shit for free.
I brought Epic just as an example of an actual competitor actually trying to compete against Steam, sorry if I I was a bit unclear about that.
So lots of entrepreneurs get rich when they make a product that solves people’s problems in one way or another and it sells with a profit - let it be a small profit or a large profit. The thing with capitalism is, if you make your profit too large, eventually a competitor will come and provide an equal or better product with slightly smaller profit or they figured out a way to make the product cheaper and still maintain the same profit margin with a lower price gaining a market share.
The problem with Apple, other large tech companies or some grocery chains in some parts of world (this is the case where I live actually) is that they are not allowing a healthy competition in the first place. If a competitor appears on the market, they will buy them before gaining too much traction, or if that’s not possible, they will do everything they can in their power to drive them out of the market by lobbying politicians, or if they control some valuable aspect of the market, restrict access to said market.
Valve hasn’t practiced any of those shady tactics as far as I know of and that’s why people actually think of them as one of the “good guys” even if it is somewhat unhealthy. You shouldn’t try to beat down the people playing with a friendly rule set of capitalism because they are the ones driving the competition forward.
Valve has enough of the market that they don’t need to do that because they’re the default option, just like Microsoft doesn’t need to fear macOS or Linux or anyone that would try to jump in the game and create a new OS (hell, they even had up finance Apple in order to create competition). They don’t practice these shady tactics (although that’s disputable and they’re getting sued for it) because they don’t have to to win, they can just wait it out and let potential competitors ruin themselves. Even if someone came and offered everything Steam offers and more, people wouldn’t switch because their games are already on Steam. Just like people who are used to Windows and have bought programs compatible with it won’t abandon everything and start over with another OS.
So “too big to fail” or something?
I don’t know if you lived through the Internet Explorer era, but that was exactly the same situation in browsers back in the day. Internet Explorer was preinstalled in every Windows computer, so in pretty much every computer, and it was deemed as “unbeatable” because people were too lazy to install anything else. In retrospective, it didn’t take too long for Google Chrome to beat IE market share and nowadays pretty much the whole world uses Chrome and nothing else. Now, with IE, EU had to step in and force Microsoft to present their users a dialog to choose their browser in a fresh Windows installation which did have a role in that market share change. With Steam there isn’t a need for that, because every user has to go and explicitly install Steam client to their computer before using it. Same goes with Chrome.
Although, vendor lock really is a real issue, and I do agree with you that if one has thousands of euros/dollars worth of games in their Steam account, it’s purely convenient to keep on buying their next games on Steam as well. What I don’t agree with is, that if there was a new competitor that was better in every way imaginable and they were able to sell the games on their platform for, let’s say, -5% constantly, people wouldn’t start using their service. You have to remember, that there is also a constant stream of new gamers (young people) that haven’t even created a Steam account, and nothing is preventing them from choosing another service for their first game purchase. It’s just that there isn’t a real alternative to Steam currently.
As evidenced by games costing less on stores where the cut is lower!
Oh… wait…
That is addressed by the lawyer:
But I thought those are only for steam keys? That’s always been what devs found out when trying to vary their prices on storefronts: Sell the game standalone, Valve sleeps. Sell a steam key or use the steam backend, real shit.
Epic is good at making it sound like it applies to sales in general though, while technically not being wrong from how they word it: You do sign a price parity obligation, yes. And it does prevent you from offering lower prices on other stores. For, well, steam keys. But they’re not mentioning that last part as that makes it sound like Epic just sells stuff for the same end-user price because they can.
I’ve seen some comments agreeing with you and others citing examples of individual developers being told not to sell at lower prices. Don’t know if the prosecutor is citing those cases or they’re just a chancer who hasn’t done their research properly.
They’re also the prosecutor, they can word it like that if they so desire. It’s on the opposing attorney to correct them.
And possibly demand sanctions if they can convince the bar that it was willful omission of details.
Why would they lower their price if the same game needs to be sold for more on another platform in order to see a RoI?
But it doesn’t need to be sold for more? As evidenced by not being sold for more despite the cut Valve takes? If that were an issue the games would cost say 70 on Steam but 60 elsewhere?
It needs to be sold for 70 on Steam in order to bring in the revenue per copy they need for their RoI, why would they go and sell for less elsewhere if Steam with their 30% share sets the bar? People won’t feel ripped off, the price is the same, what they don’t realize is that the only reason the price is that high in the first place is that Valve gets 21$ from each sale! The company needs 49$/copy in their pockets, if the distributor’s share had always been 15% instead of 30% we would be buying games for 58$ instead of 70$ right now.
I find it absolutely wild that you seem to think Steam’s 30% cut is the sole reason AAA games cost $70. Have you ever looked into how much it costs to sell a game at a retail store? From what I’ve seen Steam takes roughly the same cut as most retailers do and then the publisher still has to produce the physical copies and distribute them. They would make the same amount on Steam if and only if they printed, burned, packaged, and distributed their physical copies for free, not to mention the promotional materials they’re sending out to retailers.
Everything I’m seeing indicates that compared to a physical copy (which is given for a majority of AAA games) a major publisher would earn far more money per copy on Steam than at GameStop, Target, Walmart, or any other retailer where they’re charging the same $70 price at. But Steam is the real problem that’s hurting their RoI, apparently.
I’ll agree I think Steam’s cut is high and they could earn a lot of favor by turning it down a bit, but your argument seeming to insinuate that their 30% cut is the sole reason games cost $70 is absolutely wild to me.
This discussion is about Steam, they have control over the market, all distributors are in the wrong and take too high of a cut, I’ll talk about the other distributors when we have a discussion about them.
So companies made due with the same cut from retailers for decades, Steam comes along and offers the same cut with none of the other expenses associated with those retailers (thereby giving them a better RoI than the same retailers they made due with for decades) and suddenly Steam is the reason games are so expensive.
For all of your talk that Steam’s awful cut sets the bar for the price or else they won’t make their RoI on games sold there, you suddenly don’t seem to care very much about the very many retailers these AAA publishers still regularly sell through that cost them a significantly larger percentage per game sold than Steam does.
Oh, is it other retailers the article is talking about? No, it’s not.
In a world where Sony and Embracer are running around saying we need to be paying $70+ for games (while tipping the devs and buying micro transactions like a good like wallet)… You’re mad at the storefront?
Yeah, go into Walmart and demand they take less of a cut so… The publisher can take more from the devs?
Gabe is rich because he spearheaded a good service (which I’ll admit I thought was a scam back when I was forced to make an account way back when I had dial up) but… 30% is standard. For the price of games? Be mad at Embracer. Be mad at EA. You’re free to not like or use Steam but they let the publishers set the price. Their cut is a drop in the bucket. The whole ‘cut’ debate is just EGS propaganda.
On which Steam gets $21 or more so in reality they need to sell games for $50.
I mean literally everything could be cheaper. Welcome to a capitalist society.
Wow, you’re starting to get it, maybe we should start doing something about it instead of defending those who profit, right?
If there was no method by which people could ever profit from a system like Steam, why bother building it?
There’s a difference between making profit and becoming one of the richest person in the world, in the second case it means you clearly made too much profit by selling for a higher price than required.
Let’s play ball here too. So by definition there’s always going to be a richest person in the world - let it be with a difference of 100 dollars to the median or a billion dollars or 100 billion dollars. Who gets to decide who is the richest person and by what means? Clearly it shouldn’t be a business person so would it be a politician, a dictator, a president or who? And how should we restrict entrepreneurs getting there without destroying every company and therefore making everyone unemployed because there’s no incentive to run a business anymore? How would we balance risks with gains if we are not allowed to make a profit?
A richest person will always exist, there’s no reason why that richest person couldn’t have 500k in their bank account while the median is at 250k though.
The fact you’re setting an arbitrary limit of cash in a bank account shows how little you’ve thought about this. Rich people have money in the bank, sure, but the vast amount of their wealth is in stocks, property, and other assets. Also, assuming rich people have one bank account they keep all their money in is foolish. You have to spread your cash around to multiple accounts and even banks in order to not exceed the amount the government is willing to insure.
I dumbed it down to the level of the people who are defending billionaires. No one should be allowed to have multiple millions or billions in wealth while people are starving even in rich countries.
1.5 million is not a lot of money when you’re talking about the richest person.
The 1 was a typo and in a perfect world where wealth is distributed equally, 500k would be a whole lot.
Heck, even today in rich countries, 500k in savings is an anomaly. 78% of US citizens live paycheck to paycheck, having 10k in saving is something they can’t fathom, 500k is a whole fucking lot.
the solution to that is taxes, not suing successful business one at a time.
Or breaking them or nationalization so profit goes to everyone instead of a single guy.
And you want to start with Valve, which is one of the smaller game companies and is one of the few players not guilty of buying up their competition, instead of Sony, Microsoft, other Big Tech players, media conglomerates like Disney, ISPs like Comcast or AT&T, or meat distributors who are price fixing algorithmicly?
Who said I want to start with them?
Why even buy games period? Why risk giving money to any of them since things that become popular risk making the people selling them to become wealthy? Not like indies are immune to it looking at Minecraft becoming too popular that too many people wanted to buy it making one person then a corporation wealthy, so why not just not buy period to prevent the issue from even becoming a possibility?
The best solution is prevention. Don’t buy anything.
Who said I do?
You don’t buy games?
Not on Steam and not in ways that enrich billionaires. If devs don’t make their game available another way then too bad, they chose to deal with the devil, I don’t have to encourage them, won’t keep me from playing their games through other means or by getting them through giveaways.
Average sh.itjust.works IQ be like
Oh will you look at that, an hypocrite
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/11183086
Yeah bud Steam having decent game sales is literally like a corrupt government contract boss gets a pay rise at a corpo dumping sewage into rivers and polluting drinking water and making people sick.
Stop defending a billionaire and his company, you’ll never be one of them, all billionaires need to go, none of them became one by being moral, if it was any other company you would be talking about guillotines.
Pretty freaking high to realize that you must be an idiot to defend the people who are the opposite end of the food chain.