That’s not multiplayer.

Your asserted that

Their only problem is with distributing the steam keys yourself for less.

Which is not true.

From the Bloomberg article:

Emails indicate Valve employees once threatened to delist all editions of Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege “by end of day tomorrow” after they learned the publisher was marketing a separate $15 “starter pack” exclusively on its in-house Uplay store. In 2017, Kassidy Gerber, who works in business development at Valve, wrote to Warner Bros. executives that preorders for its new Middle-earth: Shadow of War game had been deleted from Steam because the price was “significantly higher than what was available at other retailers for the same version of the game.”

From the lawsuit itself, point 16:

Valve also requires game publishers to agree to give Valve veto power over their pricing in the Steam Store and across the market generally (the “Price Veto Provision”). Valve selectively enforces this provision to review pricing by game publishers on PC Desktop Games that have nothing to do with the Steam Gaming Platform at all. Through this conduct, prices set in the Steam Store serve as a benchmark that leads to inflated prices for virtually all PC Desktop Games.

English is hard, amirite?

This article describes allegedly that that is happening.

Of course these are “claims”. That point is made in the Eurogamer article, and the Bloomberg one, and the lawsuit. If your point is that whatever journalists write should be summarily dismissed unless there’s a final and binding judgement from a court of law, I don’t know what to tell you other than that is not how journalism works.

Yes, but if its not sold on Amazon, they don’t do these logistics.

Right, exactly like Steam.

Their only problem is with distributing the steam keys yourself for less.

The act of reading is something only the fewest people can do, apparently

Perhaps you should read the Bloomberg article first: https://archive.ph/YvHxF

If you speak to actual developers who use steam, they’ll point out that with a few lines of code, they can turn a game into multiplayer, and add features which allow them to compete against larger publishers, whose business models are often just buying other gaming studios.

No. SteamWorks only provides matchmaking and listing, not hosting.

I don’t know where you got this but it’s very wrong.

The reason that people are claiming this is about Steam Keys is because the original lawsuit filed by Wolfire says that it is.

If you go through the comments in this very same thread, you’ll see that most people didn’t even read the article. I highly doubt that they read through court filings instead.

One of the most notable discrepancies between what Wolfie claim and what is legally proven to be true thus far is that Steam does not make a 30% commission on Steam Keys. In point of fact, Valve do not claim any percentage of sales figures from Steam Keys at all. Only sales made directly on the steam e-shop are charged the 30% fee.

That’s not what the filing says.

What it says is that, since Valve doesn’t allow publishers to sell a meaningful amount of Steam Keys, and these Keys cannot be sold at a discount, it creates a situation where consumers, not publishers, are screwed by higher prices. This is very explicitly stated under point 12:

Even if a rival game store were to charge game publishers a lower commission than Valve’s high 30% fee, the distributor would not gain more sales because the game publishers could not charge a lower price in its store.

Whether bypassing the Steam tax is fair to Valve or not, is a completely different topic.

I do wish we could stop posting articles with sensationalized claims and horribly clickbait titles that don’t actually providing even a link back to the sources of their information and claims.

The Bloomberg article is right there: https://archive.ph/YvHxF

And tells a more thorough story.

Steam keys are a drop in the bucket.

Regardless, this case isn’t about keys either, but Valve pressuring publishers to set prices of games sold outside of the Steam ecosystem entirely.

Humble Bundle isn’t even mentioned in the article shared my guy.

A few years later, Rosen started his own game distribution program, allowing customers to pay whatever they wanted for a collection of indie games called Humble Bundle. The program, which Rosen ran with his brother, took only a 5% cut but, he says, was still turning a profit. Rosen started looking more closely at Valve in 2018, when it implemented a tiered system that gave rate reductions to large game makers, angering indie developers who were stuck paying the higher rates. Rosen reached out to the company again, this time to see how it would react to him selling Overgrowth, another Wolfire game, at a discount on Humble Bundle’s store. “They replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere,” Rosen wrote in a May 2021 blog post explaining why Wolfire decided to sue Valve. (In its response to Wolfire’s suit, Valve disputed Rosen’s description of what occurred on the call.)

https://archive.ph/YvHxF#selection-1867.0-1879.103

Just… Read it. I pasted this link three times already. It makes no sense for me to keep posting if you willingly ignore every single fact.

I couldn’t care less about Ubisoft or their shareholders. But just so you know, Valve is roughly ten times bigger than Ubisoft, and this suit was filed by the founder of Humble Bundle. So go ahead and wipe your chin now.

They are. Nowhere it says that a publisher cannot sell their games outside Steam at a different price. Valve employees then threatened Ubisoft with delisting the game if they did.

In any case, none of the competing stores have dislodged Steam from its role as the most important sales channel for PC games, and Valve employee testimony and corporate records disclosed in the case illustrate the aggressive ways the company has interacted with the developers that rely on it. Emails indicate Valve employees once threatened to delist all editions of Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege “by end of day tomorrow” after they learned the publisher was marketing a separate $15 “starter pack” exclusively on its in-house Uplay store.

From the Bloomberg article: https://archive.ph/YvHxF

Stop acting like Valve isn’t the best we could ask for out of all the alternatives.

I’m going to stop right here, because this is absolute nonsense.

There are plenty of big tech companies out there that are the “best” at what they do, and still shouldn’t be allowed to do shady and illegal stuff. Simple as that.

If we are going to forgive this behaviour just because “people want games”, then I’m sorry to say, but this society might be more fucked up than I thought. Probably beyond salvation.

Panen et circenses with a side of billionaire cock.

From my previous response: https://archive.ph/YvHxF

I understand that you refuse to read sources, but the comments you are responding to? That’s a new low.

Why would Steam put your game on their site for free, giving it exposure to potential buyers, just for the buyers to turn around and buy it cheaper somewhere else?

Because it’s not their fucking product.

If I go to, say, Amazon, because I want to buy a Samsung TV, and then I go to the Samsung website and find that the same TV at MSRP is cheaper, should Amazon be allowed to force Samsung to raise their prices so they cannot compete?

The answer is no. It’s called abuse of market dominance and is codified in the Sherman Antitrust Act.

“But hurr durr Steam is better I love GabeN”

Who. The. Fuck. Cares. Being better doesn’t mean that you get to bully your suppliers and customers. That’s just insane and such a childish argument.

Steam only takes a share on sold copies. Having YOUR game on THEIR site while selling it cheaper on your OWN site would effectively be leeching free exposure off of Steams front page. How is it not reasonable for Steam to not want that?

Seems that Steam has reach and power that most publishers cannot afford to ignore, whereas in an earlier comment you said that “nobody forces developers to publish their games in Steam”. Turns out, they kind of have to after all.

The question here is, why should Valve be allowed to set the prices of software they didn’t create?

According to you, a developer who gets a better deal in, say, the Epic Store, and thus publishes their game at a lower price there, should be delisted from Steam. Do you really think that’s reasonable? Doesn’t that sound like an abusive business practice?

That “hat” bought outside of Steam, cannot be used by a player in Steam.

but if ubisoft were allowed to set prices like that it would almost certainly count as anticompetitive practices, right?

Are you really saying that Valve should be allowed to set the prices of Ubisoft products, but Ubisoft shouldn’t be allowed to price their own products? What?

Why stop there, then? Why wouldn’t Steam go after, say, Playstation? Someone gets an exclusive DLC for Playstation that some players can “see” during games, what do we do in that case?

See, this is the reason why it is important to read the fucking article.

A few years later, Rosen started his own game distribution program, allowing customers to pay whatever they wanted for a collection of indie games called Humble Bundle. The program, which Rosen ran with his brother, took only a 5% cut but, he says, was still turning a profit. Rosen started looking more closely at Valve in 2018, when it implemented a tiered system that gave rate reductions to large game makers, angering indie developers who were stuck paying the higher rates. Rosen reached out to the company again, this time to see how it would react to him selling Overgrowth, another Wolfire game, at a discount on Humble Bundle’s store. “They replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere,” Rosen wrote in a May 2021 blog post (https://www.wolfire.com/blog/2021/05/Regarding-the-Valve-class-action/) explaining why Wolfire decided to sue Valve.

Emails indicate Valve employees once threatened to delist all editions of Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege “by end of day tomorrow” after they learned the publisher was marketing a separate $15 “starter pack” exclusively on its in-house Uplay store. In 2017, Kassidy Gerber, who works in business development at Valve, wrote to Warner Bros. executives that preorders for its new Middle-earth: Shadow of War game had been deleted from Steam because the price was “significantly higher than what was available at other retailers for the same version of the game.”

Honestly, I’m astonished at the near cultist behaviour I’m seeing here. This is a multibillion operation in a dominant market position, pulling the rug on publishers because of an internal policy that requires “material parity” with prices on Steam, which, given that they get 30% of the sale price, forces higher prices everywhere else where they don’t take such an outrageous cut.

I really hope you folks have the same sympathy for your landlords.

Those requirements being that they cannot price the product lower outside of Steam, even if the specific version of the software doesn’t use Steam at all.

And by the way, this wasn’t on a contract, it’s a non written policy uncovered on email correspondence between Valve and Ubisoft.

Maybe you should try reading the article for real this time.

I hope that, at some point, you get to appreciate the irony of not wanting to accept some cookies because you don’t want to “pay with your privacy”, while you ardently defend Steam, a platform that doesn’t even tell you what they do with your data or who are they selling ads to.

Here’s the archived version from Bloomberg: https://archive.ph/YvHxF

Do yourself a favor and read the article before commenting on it.

Any DLC bought outside of Steam, doesn’t work with a Steam game.

A DLC bought in UPlay, might in some way be used by a third party on a crossplay online game, e.g. a map which both the buyer and their friend on Steam can access to, if the buyer creates a game in such map and invites their friend.

And Steam doesn’t take a cut of such sale and cannot set the price, because it wasn’t sold on Steam. Plain and simple.

They can.

I’m not sure where your questions are leading to. The Steam version either uses the Steam network SDK or UPlay, I don’t know which one. The standalone version uses UPlay alone.

This is nothing new. Crossplay is a thing. Baldur’s Gate 3 allows for crossplay between XBox, PlayStation, and PC, yet it sells on Steam too. But I’m 100% sure the PlayStation version does not use the Steam network.

I’m saying that the non Steam version, which is the one the article mentions, has no Steam features, and proof of it is that anyone with Uplay can play online.