They don’t have to. You don’t need to abuse your monopoly to be a monopoly (although Valve does in different way). Valve enforces same pricing on all stores a game is available on so EGS can’t compete on price despite having lower cut. In the end customers and developers lose.
There’s also the question of what happens when Gabe dies or retires. Unless he’s a secret communist and has plans in place to make it into an employee coop it’ll be sold by his estate to private equity.
Your screenshot doesn’t support your text, and from what I recall they say that:
if you put your game on sale cheaper elsewhere (but are selling steam keys), you need to have a similar (not even identical) sale on Steam at some point.
You can’t undercut Steam’s price and sell the freely generated CD keys that add the game to a steam account elsewhere for a lower price.
That’s it. It’s actually about the CD keys, not the game itself. There’s no rule about selling the game on another store, using that store.
Found the doc I was thinking of. They actually just say “a worse deal”, so it’s not even about a lower price.
Your screenshot there seems to be quoting this page, in fact.
My point is that they absolutely don’t enforce pricing, that was something one dev said in a lawsuit and you’ll notice they didn’t get agreement from people. You’re welcome to check the documentation out, or find any other source that isn’t bad reporting based on a lawsuit that wasn’t successful?
Valve is a private company. Are they going around buying out competition like an end game capitalist?
They are where they are at is because they do what they do well and people have voted with their wallets.
One of the few times capitalism has “worked” and all because it’s not a publicly traded company.
I really wonder where we would be if most big companies were not on the stock market as opposed to being on it.
They don’t have to. You don’t need to abuse your monopoly to be a monopoly (although Valve does in different way). Valve enforces same pricing on all stores a game is available on so EGS can’t compete on price despite having lower cut. In the end customers and developers lose.
There’s also the question of what happens when Gabe dies or retires. Unless he’s a secret communist and has plans in place to make it into an employee coop it’ll be sold by his estate to private equity.
He’s definitely not a communist, but there are other ways to choose a successor for a company.
Obvious falsehood. Did you just choose to omit relevant nuance? The post is literally about games which are free on EGS and non-free on Steam.
It’s the first point of agreement Valve signs with a dev publishing on Steam.
Your screenshot doesn’t support your text, and from what I recall they say that:
That’s it. It’s actually about the CD keys, not the game itself. There’s no rule about selling the game on another store, using that store.
Found the doc I was thinking of. They actually just say “a worse deal”, so it’s not even about a lower price.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys#3
Your screenshot there seems to be quoting this page, in fact.
My point is that they absolutely don’t enforce pricing, that was something one dev said in a lawsuit and you’ll notice they didn’t get agreement from people. You’re welcome to check the documentation out, or find any other source that isn’t bad reporting based on a lawsuit that wasn’t successful?