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Comment on New Steam Agreement gets rid of forced arbitration and waivers for class action lawsuits

ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

Valve just doesn’t allow cheaper prices from other storefronts if it’s a steam key being sold, where valve is the one footing the bill for the server costs. There are games for sale on epic all the time that are better deals than what’s on steam. But when you buy a game on epic, you’re using epics servers/bandwidth.

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bassomitron@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
This is the correct interpretation and the crux of the matter in Valve’s view. Why should they be forced to allow other retailers to sell Steam keys at whatever price they want, effectively taking money out of Valve’s pockets, when it’s Steam providing all of the actual services for said key to function?

This should not be confused with gray market key resellers, by the way (e.g. G2A, Kinguin, etc) . Those aren’t the same as retailers like Fanatical or GreenManGaming.

There was another case in 2021 that originated this complaint and some of these plaintiffs in the 2024 case actually broke off from that one to start this one. We’ll see what evidence they actually end up bringing to court to argue their case and how legitimate it is. All I know, is this will likely end up with Valve stopping third-parties from selling steam keys entirely.

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- FlowVoid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  
  Why should they be forced to allow other retailers to sell Steam keys at whatever price they want
  
  Because those other retailers already paid Steam for those keys.
  
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  - ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
    Which is all that would happen if third parties decide they don’t like the terms that valve and them agreed to.
    
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chemical_cutthroat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
You could very well be right, I haven’t read the full suit or done a lot of research on it, so I’m just going off the scraps I’ve read. I did check out isthereanydeal to look at price differences between Steam and Epic on some major titles, and all of them had even pricing. I don’t have a huge sample size, so if you want to look for some that have different prices, I’d be interested to see how much difference there is, and if, say, the lowest price on Epic has had a Steam sale after it where the game was priced higher on Steam.

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