“That person isn’t being robbed. Sure, there’s a gun to their head, but the person is only saying to hand over their money or they can choose to die. They don’t have to obey them!”
They aren’t even saying that. They’re saying, you can’t sell steam platform keys outside of steam for cheaper than you would on steam. Because a steam key provides all of the services and quality of life of buying a game in the steam store (downloads, cloud saves, workshop, multiplayer, etc.). If you sell keys outside of steam for a consumer to use on steam, steam still has to treat that consumer like everyone who bought the game on the marketplace. Also, when you sell a steam key, valve doesn’t take the usual 30% cut of the sale. In fact they take no cut of the sale and STILL provide distribution and services for that sale.
That’s not what the article says. It’s about UPlay keys sold by Ubisoft through UPlay that have nothing to do with Steam, and Valve threatening to remove a game from Steam unless the UPlay keys sold through UPlay became the same price as the Steam keys sold through Steam.
Whether or not that’s true at the moment (obviously, the status quo has changed because in 2020 UPlay changed to Ubisoft Connect, so the alleged incident happened years ago, and it’s alleged that Ubisoft were forced to stop selling something, so they wouldn’t still be selling it), the article specifically says:
Uplay featured a $15 USD Rainbow Six Siege Starter Pack, but this version was not available on Steam, making the cheapest option on Valve’s platform much more expensive.
The obvious way of parsing that is that it was the UPlay version of the game, but even if not, it’s generally not viable to sell Steam keys for things not available on Steam. The only time you can is when a game’s delisted but you’ve already generated keys for it, and then Valve can just wait for Ubisoft to run out rather than making the alleged threat.
This is what they allegedly do coming out of this article. Until court resolves the problem, it is only a speculation. Ubisoft and WB have bad reputation in gaming and gamedev circles compared to Valve, so I would take their word with a grain of salt.
They aren’t “forcing” anyone to do anything. All they are saying is saying that you can’t sell on our store if you sell cheaper elsewhere.
Then you say:
Steam is the dominant player in PC gaming, by a large margin. Not being in Steam is like not being on the Internet.
How is this not “forcing” someone to do something?
“That person isn’t being robbed. Sure, there’s a gun to their head, but the person is only saying to hand over their money or they can choose to die. They don’t have to obey them!”
They aren’t even saying that. They’re saying, you can’t sell steam platform keys outside of steam for cheaper than you would on steam. Because a steam key provides all of the services and quality of life of buying a game in the steam store (downloads, cloud saves, workshop, multiplayer, etc.). If you sell keys outside of steam for a consumer to use on steam, steam still has to treat that consumer like everyone who bought the game on the marketplace. Also, when you sell a steam key, valve doesn’t take the usual 30% cut of the sale. In fact they take no cut of the sale and STILL provide distribution and services for that sale.
That’s not what the article says. It’s about UPlay keys sold by Ubisoft through UPlay that have nothing to do with Steam, and Valve threatening to remove a game from Steam unless the UPlay keys sold through UPlay became the same price as the Steam keys sold through Steam.
The version of Rainbow 6 Siege on the Ubisoft store says its version is PC(digital), Steam.
Whether or not that’s true at the moment (obviously, the status quo has changed because in 2020 UPlay changed to Ubisoft Connect, so the alleged incident happened years ago, and it’s alleged that Ubisoft were forced to stop selling something, so they wouldn’t still be selling it), the article specifically says:
The obvious way of parsing that is that it was the UPlay version of the game, but even if not, it’s generally not viable to sell Steam keys for things not available on Steam. The only time you can is when a game’s delisted but you’ve already generated keys for it, and then Valve can just wait for Ubisoft to run out rather than making the alleged threat.
Obligatory big if true
This is what they allegedly do coming out of this article. Until court resolves the problem, it is only a speculation. Ubisoft and WB have bad reputation in gaming and gamedev circles compared to Valve, so I would take their word with a grain of salt.