Just for you, I gave Eurogamer my information to farm and sell of to the highest bidder. And I learned nothing new. Ubisoft want to have their game on Steams store, Steam says “alright sure, these are the requirements”. Ubisoft breaks that agreement, Steam says “then we won’t sell your game”. Okay? So? No one is forcing them to sell on Steam if they don’t like it.
Those requirements being that they cannot price the product lower outside of Steam, even if the specific version of the software doesn’t use Steam at all.
And by the way, this wasn’t on a contract, it’s a non written policy uncovered on email correspondence between Valve and Ubisoft.
Maybe you should try reading the article for real this time.
Steam only takes a share on sold copies.
Having YOUR game on THEIR site while selling it cheaper on your OWN site would effectively be leeching free exposure off of Steams front page. How is it not reasonable for Steam to not want that?
Steam only takes a share on sold copies. Having YOUR game on THEIR site while selling it cheaper on your OWN site would effectively be leeching free exposure off of Steams front page. How is it not reasonable for Steam to not want that?
Seems that Steam has reach and power that most publishers cannot afford to ignore, whereas in an earlier comment you said that “nobody forces developers to publish their games in Steam”. Turns out, they kind of have to after all.
The question here is, why should Valve be allowed to set the prices of software they didn’t create?
According to you, a developer who gets a better deal in, say, the Epic Store, and thus publishes their game at a lower price there, should be delisted from Steam. Do you really think that’s reasonable? Doesn’t that sound like an abusive business practice?
Speaking of God Given Rights, “we want to sell our games on Steam but not on their terms”. Don’t like it? Don’t do it. “but they have the largest market share 😢” , because you keep selling on their platform. I don’t understand how this shit is so hard to grasp.
See, this is the reason why it is important to read the fucking article.
A few years later, Rosen started his own game distribution program, allowing customers to pay whatever they wanted for a collection of indie games called Humble Bundle. The program, which Rosen ran with his brother, took only a 5% cut but, he says, was still turning a profit. Rosen started looking more closely at Valve in 2018, when it implemented a tiered system that gave rate reductions to large game makers, angering indie developers who were stuck paying the higher rates. Rosen reached out to the company again, this time to see how it would react to him selling Overgrowth, another Wolfire game, at a discount on Humble Bundle’s store. “They replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere,” Rosen wrote in a May 2021 blog post (https://www.wolfire.com/blog/2021/05/Regarding-the-Valve-class-action/) explaining why Wolfire decided to sue Valve.
Emails indicate Valve employees once threatened to delist all editions of Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege “by end of day tomorrow” after they learned the publisher was marketing a separate $15 “starter pack” exclusively on its in-house Uplay store. In 2017, Kassidy Gerber, who works in business development at Valve, wrote to Warner Bros. executives that preorders for its new Middle-earth: Shadow of War game had been deleted from Steam because the price was “significantly higher than what was available at other retailers for the same version of the game.”
Honestly, I’m astonished at the near cultist behaviour I’m seeing here. This is a multibillion operation in a dominant market position, pulling the rug on publishers because of an internal policy that requires “material parity” with prices on Steam, which, given that they get 30% of the sale price, forces higher prices everywhere else where they don’t take such an outrageous cut.
I really hope you folks have the same sympathy for your landlords.
I hope that, at some point, you get to appreciate the irony of not wanting to accept some cookies because you don’t want to “pay with your privacy”, while you ardently defend Steam, a platform that doesn’t even tell you what they do with your data or who are they selling ads to.
Please read the article.
“give us your money or let us install cookies” yeah no I’d rather not read the article then.
“I will opine on something I refuse to learn anything about, as it is my god given right”.
Sounds about right.
Okay my guy, whatever you say <3
Do yourself a favor and read the article before commenting on it.
Just for you, I gave Eurogamer my information to farm and sell of to the highest bidder. And I learned nothing new. Ubisoft want to have their game on Steams store, Steam says “alright sure, these are the requirements”. Ubisoft breaks that agreement, Steam says “then we won’t sell your game”. Okay? So? No one is forcing them to sell on Steam if they don’t like it.
Those requirements being that they cannot price the product lower outside of Steam, even if the specific version of the software doesn’t use Steam at all.
And by the way, this wasn’t on a contract, it’s a non written policy uncovered on email correspondence between Valve and Ubisoft.
Maybe you should try reading the article for real this time.
Steam only takes a share on sold copies. Having YOUR game on THEIR site while selling it cheaper on your OWN site would effectively be leeching free exposure off of Steams front page. How is it not reasonable for Steam to not want that?
Seems that Steam has reach and power that most publishers cannot afford to ignore, whereas in an earlier comment you said that “nobody forces developers to publish their games in Steam”. Turns out, they kind of have to after all.
The question here is, why should Valve be allowed to set the prices of software they didn’t create?
According to you, a developer who gets a better deal in, say, the Epic Store, and thus publishes their game at a lower price there, should be delisted from Steam. Do you really think that’s reasonable? Doesn’t that sound like an abusive business practice?
Speaking of God Given Rights, “we want to sell our games on Steam but not on their terms”. Don’t like it? Don’t do it. “but they have the largest market share 😢” , because you keep selling on their platform. I don’t understand how this shit is so hard to grasp.
See, this is the reason why it is important to read the fucking article.
Honestly, I’m astonished at the near cultist behaviour I’m seeing here. This is a multibillion operation in a dominant market position, pulling the rug on publishers because of an internal policy that requires “material parity” with prices on Steam, which, given that they get 30% of the sale price, forces higher prices everywhere else where they don’t take such an outrageous cut.
I really hope you folks have the same sympathy for your landlords.
Feel free to share it, I’m not paying for it.
I hope that, at some point, you get to appreciate the irony of not wanting to accept some cookies because you don’t want to “pay with your privacy”, while you ardently defend Steam, a platform that doesn’t even tell you what they do with your data or who are they selling ads to.
Here’s the archived version from Bloomberg: https://archive.ph/YvHxF
Tell me, what have Valve done that is so evil? In your own words