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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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Steam Deck
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A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.
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I thought the lawsuit was about overcharging, but what you just described would make sales available to more people?
It wouldn't make them available to more people, it would make deeper sales available to certain storefronts. Right now, Valve says that if you want to do business with them, and you offer a discount on another storefront, that same discount must be reflected in the Steam price when it sold for a discount on Steam. What the lawsuit says is that Publishers should be allowed to publish whatever discount they want on whatever site they want. That sounds like a better deal to consumers, but what it does is open the door for anti-competitive loss-leaders.
It's the same strategy that companies like Wal-Mart have employed to gain marketshare. They come in, sell everything at a loss to drive out competition, and then raise the prices to the same price the competition was charging. They haven't given the consumers a better option, they've only ensured that they don't have another choice. If you look at Valve and you look at Epic, you can easily see who has the deeper pockets: Valve is worth a little over $3 Billion from what I can tell, while Epic is worth over $40 Billion. If Epic wants to sell at a loss to drive Steam out of business, they can, easily. As a matter of fact, they've already tried this by offering the free weekly games that they do.
I'd wager that if this goes through and Steam loses, we'll see that free weekly game go away, and then large doorbuster sales of everything on the site just to undercut every steam sale as it happens. Where are you gonna buy that new game at? Steam where it's full price, or Epic where it's half price? What about the Steam Winter Sale? Will you buy the game for 80% off, or go over to Epic offering it at 90% off with a $10 coupon for another game on the site? Pretty soon you'll only be shopping on Epic, and once Steam is gone, Epic can charge whatever they want. It's the long game. They don't need to be profitable today. They just need to show their shareholders the path.
Valve just doesn't allow cheaper prices from other storefronts if it's a steam key being sold, where valve is the one footing the bill for the server costs. There are games for sale on epic all the time that are better deals than what's on steam. But when you buy a game on epic, you're using epics servers/bandwidth.
You could very well be right, I haven't read the full suit or done a lot of research on it, so I'm just going off the scraps I've read. I did check out isthereanydeal to look at price differences between Steam and Epic on some major titles, and all of them had even pricing. I don't have a huge sample size, so if you want to look for some that have different prices, I'd be interested to see how much difference there is, and if, say, the lowest price on Epic has had a Steam sale after it where the game was priced higher on Steam.