Spedwell
@Spedwell@lemmy.world
- Comment on Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit 11 months ago:
I’m at my wits end trying to explain this. I guess I can just recommend reading articles and legal briefs that summarize the matter.
Maybe I’ll think about it later and make a more complete write up with concrete examples. I really hate to see the confusion here. Wolfire is doing us a favor, we should not be handing Valve the keys to the market just because they act like Mr. Benevolent.
- Comment on Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit 11 months ago:
Oh ok
- Comment on Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit 11 months ago:
As I said, no need for us to argue further. The lawsuit has grounds, even if you don’t understand why. Read articles and legal briefs on the matter if you would like to learn more.
- Comment on Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit 11 months ago:
What Wolfire wants to happen is flr game marketplaces and game services platforms to be separated. Right now Valve is vertically integrated on that. You buy the game, and they offer peer multiplayer, social, workshop, etc.
If those services were charged separately, or rather the cost of those services was not forced into the pricing of other marketplaces that don’t offer those services, you open the market to more competition.
- Comment on Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit 11 months ago:
Note that the main argument Wolfire is making is that game marketplaces (buy/download the game) and game platforms (online features, mod distribution, social pages) need to be decoupled. By integrating the two, Steam is vertically integrating, amortizing the cost, and then forcing every other marketplace to bear the cost of a platform in their pricing.
If you bought a game and paid for platform services separately, then competition can better exist for both of those roles. Which is good for consumers.
- Comment on Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit 11 months ago:
Steam has a large userbase, which offers a lot of consumer inertia to prefer games on Steam. They also have a policy where game pricing on other platforms cannot undercut Steam.
The main complaint is that this pricing policy coupled with the consumer inertia makes it difficult for other gaming marketplaces to enter the market. You cannot undercut steam unless a publisher wants to not put their game on Steam at all (which would be suicide for anything but the largest titles), so you have to sell at Steam’s price point. Few platforms could match Steams’ established workshop, multiplayer, streaming, and social services; all of which benefit from costs at scale and the established user content.
Imagine trying to convince a user: “Buy you game here instead. It will cost the same as on Steam. No, you won’t have access to the existing Workshop. No, you won’t have in-platform multiplayer with your Steam friends.” Even if you had feature parity, people would prefer Steam since that’s where their existing games a friends are.
- Comment on Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit 11 months ago:
As I said, Steam would be in their rights to enforce that pricing policy for Steam keys, because they provide distribution and platform services for that product after it sells.
But as @Rose clarified, it applies to not just Steam keys, but any game copy sold and distributed by an independent platform. Steam should not have any legitimate claim to determining the pricing within another platform.
- Comment on Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit 11 months ago:
This… misses the point? Of course the can not sell on Steam. That’s always an option.
The antitrust aspect of all of this is that Steam is the de-facto marketplace, consumers are stubborn and habitual and aren’t as likely purchase games less-known platforms, and that a publisher opting not to sell on Steam might have a negative influence on the games success.
If that consumer inertia gives Steam an undue advantage that wouldn’t be present in a properly competitive market, then it there is an antitrust case to be made, full stop. The court will decide if the advantage is significant enough to warrant any action.
But I really don’t like seeing Wolfire—which is a great pro-consumer and pro-open-source studio—having their reputation tarnished just because Lemmyites have a knee-jerk reaction to bend over and take it from Valve just because Steam is a good platform.
- Comment on Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit 11 months ago:
Valve offers a great service, and I enjoy it a lot. But it’s very difficult for a competitor to enter the market because they won’t be able to match Steam’s services immediately. Typically in a market the approach is then to undercut Steam, but that is exactly what this policy is designed to make impractical by forcing publishers to overprice, on penalty of losing Steams’ userbase.
I mean I don’t know what else to say. It is anti-competitive. It doesn’t take too much to see why. There are many good articles and legal briefs on the matter. It hurts you and me, the consumer, and it hurts publishers. It enriches Valve, benevolent though they may appear. You shouldn’t like this type of strong-arming the market when Amazon does it, and you shouldn’t roll over and take it from Valve either.
Doesn’t even matter, the court is going to sort it out for us. But I hate to see the reputational hit Wolfire is taking here. I like their studio, I believe their developers are operating in genuine good faith, and I think they are doing consumers a favor.
- Comment on Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit 11 months ago:
The Platform Most Favored Nation policy employed by Steam is the one at issue in this case. And yes, it is anticompetitive. It abuses userbase size to prevent alternative marketplaces from providing fewer services for smaller cuts
- Comment on Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit 11 months ago:
Yes, that is problematic. Not by itself, but coupled with a large captive userbase it is. As an example:
Let’s say you want to start a game marketplace, which simply runs a storefront and content distribution—you specifically don’t want to run a workshop, friends network, video streaming, or peer multiplayer. Because you don’t offer these other services, you keep costs down, and can charge a 5% fee instead of a 30%.
With Steam’s policy, publishers may choose to:
- List on your platform at $45, and forego the userbase of Steam
- List on Steam and your platform at $60, and forego the reduced costs your platform could offer
Obviously, pricing is much more sophisticated than this. You’d have to account for change in sales volume and all. Point is, though, that publishers (and consumers!) cannot take advantage of alternate services that offer fewer services at lower cost.
The question the court has to answer is whether the userbase/market share captured by Steam causes choice (2) to be de-facto necessary for a game to succeed commercially. If so, then the policy would be the misuse of market dominance to stifle competition.
And I think Wolfire might be able to successfully argue that.
- Comment on Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit 11 months ago:
Steam has such a policy. Valve may remove any games from Steam which are sold on other marketplaces for less than they are on Steam.
- Comment on Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit 11 months ago:
…unless you have a policy that requires other marketplaces to sell at the same price as on Steam, undercutting the ability for “better deals” to exist at all.
Which is what the lawsuit is actually arguing is going on.
- Comment on Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit 11 months ago:
Thanks, that clears it up. So yeah, I think Wolfire has a case to make, then.
- Comment on Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit 11 months ago:
It’s a certain policy publisher’s have to agree to in order to list on Steam, called a Platform Most Favored Nations (“PMFN”) clause.
Similar thing is used by Amazon, for equally monopolistic reasons.
- Comment on Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit 11 months ago:
I was under the impression that the policy required a game’s price to be the same on all marketplaces, even if it’s not a steam key being purchased. I.e. a $60 game on steam must sell for $60 off-platform, including on the publisher’s own launcher.
I just went to double check my interpretation, but the case brief by Mason LLP’s site doesn’t really specify.
If it only applies to steam keys, as you say, then I agree they don’t really have a case since it’s Steam that must supply distribution and other services.
But, if the policy applies to independent marketplaces, then it should be obvious that it is anticompetitive. The price on every platform is driven up to compensate for Steam’s 30% fees, even if that particular platform doesn’t attempt to provide services equivalent to Steam.
- Comment on Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit 11 months ago:
Wolfire originally operated Humble Bundle, and they have a very legitimate case. Steam uses anticompetitive pricing policies that makes it difficult for other marketplaces to compete.
- Comment on Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit 11 months ago:
I believe it is in the Steam marketplace agreement, and applies to all games. Are you referring to sales on other platforms, or to the full listed price?