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?
I don’t get it. Steam does not have a chokehold on supply of servers, hardware, software, personnel, investments, nothing. Steam has a huge base because people like their platform.
If the big publishers would pull out of Steam, you think it would survive? If Ubisoft and EA and Rockstar and all of the others decide hey, we’re just gonna sell on our own platforms from now on, you think Steam would prevail anyway? Counter-Strike is not THAT profitable.
The CORE ISSUE is not Steam having a 30% fee, it is THE OTHER PLATFORM ARE CRAP and people rather not play your game than install Uplay.
And again, Valve are not setting any prices. They do 2 things,
Set their fee
Won’t accept you using Steam as a free advertisement window
Look, I don’t like the 30% fee either. They could lower it drastically and probably still be fine.
But make no mistake; if, say, EA had launched an equivalent to Steam in the early 2000s, today it would be common practice to have Ads in the launcher, Subscriptions for “better deals”, Fees for adding more games to your library, Spyware, and don’t think they would have more generous fees for developers. If anything, they would have a HIGHER fee than 30% and if anyone tried to launch a competing game launcher they would buy it up and shut it down.
Stop acting like Valve isn’t the best we could ask for out of all the alternatives.
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.
None of that first paragraph is in the article OP linked lmao, at least not the one I can see.
Why would Steam put your game on their site for free, giving it exposure to potential buyers, just for the buyers to turn around and buy it cheaper somewhere else? Steam only takes a cut on sold copies.
Xbox, Ubisoft, EA, Blizzard/Activision, Epic, Rockstar, all have launchers. Hell, even Amazon has got a game launcher.
Had any of them been better than, or at least as good as Steam, people would probably buy a game there if it was not listed on Steam.
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.
“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?
I don’t get it. Steam does not have a chokehold on supply of servers, hardware, software, personnel, investments, nothing. Steam has a huge base because people like their platform.
If the big publishers would pull out of Steam, you think it would survive? If Ubisoft and EA and Rockstar and all of the others decide hey, we’re just gonna sell on our own platforms from now on, you think Steam would prevail anyway? Counter-Strike is not THAT profitable.
The CORE ISSUE is not Steam having a 30% fee, it is THE OTHER PLATFORM ARE CRAP and people rather not play your game than install Uplay.
And again, Valve are not setting any prices. They do 2 things,
Look, I don’t like the 30% fee either. They could lower it drastically and probably still be fine. But make no mistake; if, say, EA had launched an equivalent to Steam in the early 2000s, today it would be common practice to have Ads in the launcher, Subscriptions for “better deals”, Fees for adding more games to your library, Spyware, and don’t think they would have more generous fees for developers. If anything, they would have a HIGHER fee than 30% and if anyone tried to launch a competing game launcher they would buy it up and shut it down.
Stop acting like Valve isn’t the best we could ask for out of all the alternatives.
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.
None of that first paragraph is in the article OP linked lmao, at least not the one I can see.
Why would Steam put your game on their site for free, giving it exposure to potential buyers, just for the buyers to turn around and buy it cheaper somewhere else? Steam only takes a cut on sold copies.
Xbox, Ubisoft, EA, Blizzard/Activision, Epic, Rockstar, all have launchers. Hell, even Amazon has got a game launcher.
Had any of them been better than, or at least as good as Steam, people would probably buy a game there if it was not listed on Steam.
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