I mean this isn’t ideal, but you can understand why they might make that a lower priority. Probably 90% of my gaming purchases are for 1 item.
And I find it hard to believe that you anti Epic people are arguing in good faith when your first complaint is that you can’t more easily buy multiple games on a platform you seem to dislike so much.
Why does the reason for the exclusivity matter?
You don’t like Epic because their store is not fully featured. I understand that. I’m concerned about Valve because, among other things, certain damning allegations made in their recent class action lawsuit.
You can much more easily avoid Epic because of exclusives than I can avoid Steam.
From a consumer’s point of view, does it matter if the exclusive is de facto or de jure? If I have no choice but to do business with Valve and Steam to play a game on PC, it seems to me that that game is a Steam exclusive. And there are thousands of Steam exclusives, but only a handful of Epic exclusives.
Right, so you’re just conceding you lied about being able to set a price lower than Steam on a reseller.
The main issue is not Steam keys. I personally think the Steam key situation is fine, even with their limitations. The reason they’re included in the lawsuit, is to reveal Valve’s hypocrisy. Valve forces publishers to offer the same price as Steam on Epic, GoG, etc, stores which have nothing to do with Steam’s “software and their multiplayer framework”. Despite those stores being lighter weight and taking smaller cuts.
Also, if your issue is that steam is a monopoly, then go make accounts in other places and stop supporting that monopoly you’re mad about…
I have accounts on several other storefronts, as should all gamers, but the issue is that Valve’s anti-competitive behavior is making every store (including Steam) worse for consumers. I can’t get a lower price on Epic, despite that store taking a 12% cut compared to Steam’s 30% cut. If Steam’s platform is so expensive and awesome and well developed, it’s natural for a game to cost more on Steam. But Valve doesn’t like its competition to be able to compete the best way they can – on price.
I’ve also gotten steam keys through Itch.io.
Cool, but myself and I bet most others don’t bother making accounts on other sites for the same price as Steam.
So you can sell your games at steam sale prices 100% of the time and have a higher price on steam. So you’re literally just wrong.
Source or example of someone doing this (regular price on reseller is lower than regular price on Steam)? The legal documents contain plenty of examples of Valve even complaining when there’s a sale on another platform but no comparably priced sale on Steam recently. I can’t imagine they’d tolerate basically a permanent sale.
If the allegations in the current lawsuit are true, and they are still being tested, then Valve is leveraging its market dominance to keep prices fixed at a higher level. If you have bought more than 0 video games in recent years, this is most certainly interfering with things in your life.
If you don’t like giving money to rich assholes, I have some bad news for you about Valve.
How much does Diablo cost? How much did StarCraft 2 cost? Alan wake 2 ? Every Nintendo game? PlayStation or Xbox console exclusives?
I don’t know. Do you want me to do your research for you? Interesting that you list Nintendo and consoles who take 30% cuts from their monopoly stores.
But checking your example of Alan Wake 2, looks like it launched at $60 on consoles (30% cut) and $50 on Epic (12% cut). Huh, funny how that works.
Here’s an example of a communication from a court document:
A Valve employee informs [redacted] in an email that Valve will be delisting one of its games due to discrepancies between Steam and other platforms. When describing Valve’s decision, Valve states, "Ultimately [redacted] retail strategy is yours to control in whatever way you see fit. However, it is our job as stewards of the platform is [sic] to protect Steam customers and to ensure that they are being treated fairly. We will not knowingly invite customer regret by offering your game at a premium to other retailers.
There are dozens of examples like this. This is not behavior of a company that’s not price fixing. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/59859024/348/1/wolfire-games-llc-v-valve-corporation/
Some games choose to skip steam and use epic. Epic pays them to do so, and the publisher doesn’t lower prices.
Evidence? Even if we went down the list of launch Epic exclusives and somehow determined that the price is equivalent to what it would launch at on Steam, the economics of an exclusive launch on a smaller platform are going to be completely different.
If you’re a publisher, why would you want to offer a lower price elsewhere?
Maybe ask the publishers who got together to sue Valve for the ability to do this, and check their many examples of comms with Valve where Valve was upset that publishers were offering lower prices on other platforms.
The appeal to a lower cut to you is higher revenue, not equivalent revenue.
There is a phenomenon called price elasticity. Example, a 5% price cut might result in 10% more units sold, giving you higher revenue.
they are totally cool with you making the sale elsewhere and giving a steam code out which means steam makes nothing on that sale
And they can afford to do this because they still require price matching, so all it does is create an inconvenience for the user to sign up for another site (something Steam fans don’t have a problem noticing in other contexts). They still get the game at the same price. I personally have hundreds of games on Steam and I don’t think I have ever purchased a Steam code this way, and I expect it’s the same for the majority of Steam users.
Steam is single handedly the most pro-consumer and pro-developer platform on the market
The lawsuit wants to create a world where a new game can come out for $60 on Steam and $55 on Epic. Valve doesn’t want this. Valve wants you to be required to pay the same price on Epic and Steam. This doesn’t seem very pro consumer.
It’s great that Steam is investing in their platform and Proton and Steam Deck. But they shouldn’t be requiring publishers to pretend that that stuff is free, to make consumers pay other storefronts like Epic as though Epic is also investing in these things.
It’s not illegal to have a better product, only to use your market position to keep other products from trying to compete.
That’s exactly what the lawsuit alleges though. The only way smaller featured storefronts have to compete with Steam is on price. Valve uses its market dominance to prohibit offering a better price on smaller stores. If you offer a better price on Epic, Valve will kick you off Steam.
If it’s only on Steam and no other PC platform, it’s exclusive. I don’t see the relevance from a consumer’s point of view whether money changed hands for that exclusivity. You could even argue that no money changes hands, Epic just doesn’t take its cut from the game’s sales is how I believe that works.
If Steam has the better store, then it should have no need to require publishers to match their prices. Of course if you’re buying a game on a fully featured, 30% cut store, it should cost more than on a less fully featured 12% cut store. Steam is using their large market share to bully publishers into not passing on savings to consumers from lower cut stores.
Steam keys can be generated, but the product can’t be discounted, ie again the 0% cut savings cannot be passed on to consumers. So all this does is create an extra inconvenience for the consumer to sign up to some publisher’s storefront to get the same product at the same price.
But why should this matter to a consumer? If you don’t like Steam or Valve’s business practices, it’s much more difficult to avoid Steam because of its exclusives.
There’s a class action lawsuit against Valve now, over Steam’s practices similar to price fixing. Part of the reason Epic has to pay for exclusives is that Steam prohibits publishers from offering lower prices on lower cut stores like Epic. If publishers could pass on part of the savings to consumers from the smaller cut, Epic could be more successful without exclusive contracts. Anyway, hopefully what comes out of the suit will be better for consumers in the end.
You’re parroting the line of dumb conspiracy theories known as Gamergate 2 pushed by a bunch of grifters farming engagement on YouTube.
Narrative consultancy companies like SBI don’t force you to hire them, and if you choose to hire them, you don’t have to follow all of their advice.
If you’re interesting in curing yourself of the mindworms the YouTube algorithm has planted in your brain, please check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGmESJM6BFQ
SoTN is available on ps4 in a collection called Castlevania Requiem (with Rondo of Blood). It often goes on sale for 5 bucks or so. Though I understand the frustration of gamers without a ps4 or ps5.
It’s good that they have this, but there are a lot of situations involving cops where it’s not going to be safe to stick your hand in your pocket. I’ll just leave the biometrics off on my devices.
However, the panel said the evidence from his phone was lawfully acquired “because it required no cognitive exertion, placing it in the same category as a blood draw or a fingerprint taken at booking…"
If the precedent is that unlocking the phone is the same category as fingerprint taking, well, what happens if you refuse to be “coerced” into having your prints taken? Even if the legal precedent isn’t fully understood, it looks like the reasoning here isn’t based on whether there was physical force applied, but whether the search required the contents of the person’s mind.
“The general consensus has been that there is more Fifth Amendment protection for passwords than there is for biometrics,” Andrew Crocker, the Surveillance Litigation Director at the EFF, told Gizmodo in a phone interview. “The 5th Amendment is centered on whether you have to use the contents of your mind when you’re being asked to do something by the police and turning over your password telling them your password is pretty obviously revealing what’s in your mind.”
So he was “only” coerced, ie likely verbally abused and lied to (which cops are allowed to do) about the consequences of refusing to unlock, instead of being physically forced. Such freedom.
If the allegations were just about steam keys, that would be one thing, but it looks like they’re leveraging their large market share to essentially fix prices on other stores, even outside keys. For example, even though Epic charges a much smaller cut, 12% vs Steam’s 30%, publishers are prohibited from selling at a lower price on Epic (or Steam will delist their game, blocking the vast majority of the game’s potential audience).
I personally don’t find buying a publisher to make some game exclusive to be all that scummy. Is it really so different from Warcraft being exclusive to Battle.net ? But I’m not to try to convince you that my reasons are more valid. I respect your reasons, I just ask you to also respect mine.