I don’t want to simp for a corporation, but what is Valve doing that’s anticompetitive?
Like, don’t they need to be doing something to limit competitors’ access to the market to be anticompetitive?
Steam requires base price/same price parity for selling Steam keys, but they’re literally giving their services away to developers for free in those cases, so that’s pretty clearly not anticompetitive, right? And there’s no requirements that I’ve seen written anywhere that they require price parity for non-Steam-key sales.
And, based on the massive numbers of bundles of games I’ve bought with Steam keys with total historical-low game prices below best-ever Steam sale prices, they pretty clearly don’t even enforce this rule strictly (it seems like so long as the total bundle price is in line with individual title sale prices, they’re fine, even if consumers get other games as well.)
So I’m not sure what the basis for this suit is. Not saying it’s healthy for the market to have an effective monopoly in this space, but the reason Valve is maintaining its marketshare is because they’re consistently offering the best value to consumers compared to other storefronts, which isn’t illegal.
/Insert “prove me wrong” meme
The big argument here is that, according to them, Steam won’t allow them to sell their game on other stores for less than what they sell it for on Steam. But as far as I can see from the actual agreement with Valve on that, it’s Steam keys that cannot be sold for less than they cost if you buy through Steam. IE, if you sell a game that will be on a Steam library, but somewhere other than Steam, it has to have price parity with Steam. If you want to sell the game on EGS, without it being added to a Steam library, you can price it at whatever you want.
The only example of this not being the case, comes from the developer of Overgrowth; who is a known liar. Their game was delisted from Steam for violating this rule, and I’ve never seen the game being sold anywhere that wasn’t as a Steam key.
