Technology

The amount of people in this thread that are arguing that steam is fully within the right here due to the fact that they have a restriction on steam key pricing blows my mind.

for example with the UbiSoft case, It's clear they have never actually opened or used Uplay because if they had they would realize that Uplay does not use Steam keys period at all. They are their own distribution platform that distributes off of uplay servers.

The entire point of the lawsuits is going one step further, which is that despite steam having a policy that says it's for keys only, they unilaterally enforce it on all platforms regardless of the usage of the keys.

Now whether that's actually true or not is what the lawsuits have to determine. But that is what the claim is. Personally I'm leaning towards it's true because I've seen some screenshots posted about customer service saying that's how it worked and threatening to delist steam games for cheaper first party distribution pricing elsewhere.

I'll be curious where these cases go.

Bloomberg cites two high-profile cases referenced in the ongoing lawsuit, one involving Ubisoft, and another Warner Bros.

First of all, I trust Ubi and WB way less than valve.

Valve allegedly threatened to delist all editions of Rainbow Six Siege after Ubisoft offered a cheaper option on its Uplay store.

Yeah.

Because it violates their policy. That's not a "threat", those are the terms of the contract Ubi and WB agreed to. Terms that everyone has to follow.

Heck, Ubi and WB should be hit with a counter suit for trying to leverage their market position to exert control over valve and getting unusually favorable terms.

Clown suit. Ubi and WB are mad they can't break their contract with valve in a one sided way.

edit: I forgot some context:

The deal between valve and a publisher or dev is: they can sell on steam and elsewhere if steam is at least tied in price, or cheaper, but when they sell somewhere else, that includes the steam key and access to steam and steam's distribution at no cost.

What the devs and publishers wanted to do was leverage other features of steam and the steam ecosystem, while undercutting steam's price.

They are always free to just not sell on steam for a cheaper price. That's not what this is about.

edit2:

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

"Steam Key Rules and Guidelines"

remind me again how Gaben is a GoOd BiLlIoNaIrE?

I love valve as much as the next PC gamer, but I agree their rules should not affect what publishers do entirely on other platforms.

Such a weird stream of comments to be read on Lemmy.

Regardless of what you folks think about Valve, does anyone believe that a marketplace should have this kind of leverage over their suppliers? For instance, should Amazon be permitted to force manufacturers to set the price of a product outside of their marketplace? Should Apple be allowed to force app developers to price match the Google store?