“The internet” in general keep arguing that steam dominant position is not relevant, while they forbid any dev to sell their game on other plataforms for less (don’t even mention the steam keys because they are not part of the equation)
That’s a pretty standard retail agreement clause that’s been around for decades before digital distribution. It’s not unique to Steam at all, letalone them doing it uniquely.
And is abuse of dominant position when you control +80% of the market.
If a dev want a profit of 10us for game sold, it’s has to sell as 13us on steam. But if I open a marketplace and only charge 10% they could sell it for 12, getting a better margin selling for less, but they can’t if they want to use steam too. That affect players because cheaper options are not available, affect devs because they have less option, affect other stores because they can grow up competing on price.
And that’s only possible because of Steam dominant position, because steam can strongarm devs into getting the same price as their competitors without reducing their 30% slice.
Again, this is a standard retail clause that has existed long before Steam. It would apply no matter what combination of retailers they choose to sell at because they all have this. This is why digital games are sold at the same price as physical copies when they cost less to distribute: the brick and mortar retailers have this same clause.
There’s no good reason to treat this like a Steam-specific thing. Every retailer has such a clause, big or small. This entire idea is based on a frivolous class action suit that is not going anywhere because it’s launched on the shaky grounds of the belief that Steam exclusively uses the MFN clause and that they think a 30% cut is too much.
The problem is that Steam have a dominant position on the market, when you do that regulations are different. Some markets with natural monopolies like energy distribution for example can’t raise prices without being approved by a regulator, and so on. Again, the problem is not asking the same price for itself, is doing it while controlling+80% of the PC gaming market.
Which jurisdictions have this regulation? I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as a leading retailer having to implement a disadvantageous sales agreement for the sake of their competition.
It’s doesn’t happen enough as it should be but, for example, it was found that Microsoft abused it’s dominant position on the OS market to stablish IE as the standard on browsers and was forced to ask what browser the user wanted to install between Firefox, chrome, Opera and IE. That stopped once chrome took over.
And it’s not a altogether bad clause, it prevents a bad actor from heavily subsidizing their games and then destroying the market once they’ve run everyone else out of business.
I would argue that is the other way around?
“The internet” in general keep arguing that steam dominant position is not relevant, while they forbid any dev to sell their game on other plataforms for less (don’t even mention the steam keys because they are not part of the equation)
That’s a pretty standard retail agreement clause that’s been around for decades before digital distribution. It’s not unique to Steam at all, letalone them doing it uniquely.
And is abuse of dominant position when you control +80% of the market.
If a dev want a profit of 10us for game sold, it’s has to sell as 13us on steam. But if I open a marketplace and only charge 10% they could sell it for 12, getting a better margin selling for less, but they can’t if they want to use steam too. That affect players because cheaper options are not available, affect devs because they have less option, affect other stores because they can grow up competing on price.
And that’s only possible because of Steam dominant position, because steam can strongarm devs into getting the same price as their competitors without reducing their 30% slice.
Again, this is a standard retail clause that has existed long before Steam. It would apply no matter what combination of retailers they choose to sell at because they all have this. This is why digital games are sold at the same price as physical copies when they cost less to distribute: the brick and mortar retailers have this same clause.
There’s no good reason to treat this like a Steam-specific thing. Every retailer has such a clause, big or small. This entire idea is based on a frivolous class action suit that is not going anywhere because it’s launched on the shaky grounds of the belief that Steam exclusively uses the MFN clause and that they think a 30% cut is too much.
The problem is that Steam have a dominant position on the market, when you do that regulations are different. Some markets with natural monopolies like energy distribution for example can’t raise prices without being approved by a regulator, and so on. Again, the problem is not asking the same price for itself, is doing it while controlling+80% of the PC gaming market.
Which jurisdictions have this regulation? I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing as a leading retailer having to implement a disadvantageous sales agreement for the sake of their competition.
It’s doesn’t happen enough as it should be but, for example, it was found that Microsoft abused it’s dominant position on the OS market to stablish IE as the standard on browsers and was forced to ask what browser the user wanted to install between Firefox, chrome, Opera and IE. That stopped once chrome took over.
And it’s not a altogether bad clause, it prevents a bad actor from heavily subsidizing their games and then destroying the market once they’ve run everyone else out of business.