Sharing the link to the source story that is being referred to by most mainstream gaming sites but oddly enough not GOL.

https://boilingsteam.com/steam-deck-the-start-of-a-golden-age-for-linux-gaming/ [External Link]

View this comment - View article - View full comments

There’s already a subscription service on Steam and it’s a great value. EA Play gives you access to about 50-60 games and costs about $30 per year. It also gives you a 10% discount on new game purchases and 10 hours of free trial gameplay on most new games. It’s a great service. It would seem that Valve’s model is to allow other publishers to provide their own subscriptions.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Grazen

Quoting: Purple Library GuyHuh. Well, I guess if the allegation is true, that Valve's secret contracts involve making developers not sell their games cheaper anywhere else as a condition of being able to sell on Steam, that's kind of anti-competitive in that it stops other stores from trying to gain market share by underselling Steam. And if you foreclose on the whole concept of competition on price, that's likely to be bad for consumers.

Given the high hurdles in US antitrust law, even if the allegation is true that might well not be enough for Valve to actually lose the lawsuit, as noted by EagleDelta etc. But it's still a practice I'd find somewhat annoying--sure, you can understand why they'd want to do it, but then it's easy to understand why any company would do any anti-competitive practice . . . no company wants to be successfully competed against.

Of course if it ain't true then the filers are just assholes. And whether it's true or not, the filers could have questionable motivations and backing.

Anti-competitive means there needs to be harm to consumers (that's a brief legal description) not to competitors. Steam requiring that you keep prices LOWER so that their customers can benefit from LOWER PRICES on other platforms is a plus for consumers. I know it's a plus for me. It means that when I see a sale for a game on another platform, I can go to my platform of choice to get the same price. I win. That's a good thing.

I think you're mistaken on two levels here. First, on what "anti-competitive" is. Lots of tactics are anti-competitive without being anti-consumer. So for instance, if there are four airlines, one of them has more money than the other three, and so the one starts offering airline tickets at below cost in hopes that it will drive the others out of business before it runs out of money itself, that tactic gives consumers cheap airline tickets, at least in the short term. But it is certainly anti-competitive; it's an attempt to establish a monopoly. It also happens that in the long run it's probably not good for consumers, because that one airline did not start the price war just to return to the status quo prices afterwards--the point is that after there's no competition it can jack prices up and reap far more profits than it lost. Once it has the monopoly, jacking the prices up will not be anti-competitive (there already is no competition), but it will sure as hell be anti-consumer.

Second, on what this policy (if it exists) does. The arrow of causation goes in the opposite direction to what you're saying. It does not mean Steam has to match other platforms' sales (actually, it doesn't seem as if it's alleging that sale prices are involved at all, only the regular price or prices which are "on sale" for so long they are in effect the regular price). If it included sales in the first place, what it would mean is that no other platform could mount a sale unless Steam was doing it first.
More generally, Steam is the big player, the main marketplace. And, it charges a large cut, 30%. If a game publisher wants to make $14 per game, it must charge $20 on Steam. But on Itch.io, say, it could make $14 per game while charging $16, or even less if the publisher wanted to be a jerk to Itch. So normally, platforms that took a smaller cut than Valve does could undersell Steam and potentially gain market share via their lower prices, potentially forcing Steam to in turn lower its cut to compete, lowering game prices across the board.
The kind of agreement alleged would mean the publisher must instead charge at least $20 on Itch and other such platforms. At the immediate level that means you can never get a price break on another platform. I don't see any way in which it reduces prices to consumers, quite the reverse, even in the short term. In the longer term, by making competition on price impossible, it reduces pressure for Valve to reduce their cut, so that would keep prices higher in the longer term.

So yeah, I don't see where you get the idea that such agreements would lower game prices in any way shape or form.

Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree on both points. On your first point, selling below cost, that’s called dumping and that is clearly not what Valve is doing and your example is completely irrelevant.

On your second point, it is (apparently) a term of service for Steam that publishers NOT sell their games for a lower price on a competing platform. They can of course choose not to sell their game on steam (or not to sell it for a while) as many do when they go on the Epic Game Store. In fact many or most publishers sell their games through their own online stores, including EA, Ubisoft and CDPR - cool, they can do that... BUT BUT BUT... if you want the benefit of selling your game on Steam you can’t position it as a higher priced store to make your own store look better in comparison. Can’t have your cake and eat it too... this cake is no lie! Publishers can also choose to sell games exclusively on their own platform like Blizzard or Riot or Epic does... in fact there’s lots of competition... because Valve keeps Steam’s rules simple and expansive.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Interesting... I’m using Gnome 40 now and tbh see this as a step back or at best a sideways step. I’d definitely give it a shot if it’s released for Arch or Fedora... don’t see myself ever switching to an Ubuntu based distro...

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Purple Library GuyHuh. Well, I guess if the allegation is true, that Valve's secret contracts involve making developers not sell their games cheaper anywhere else as a condition of being able to sell on Steam, that's kind of anti-competitive in that it stops other stores from trying to gain market share by underselling Steam. And if you foreclose on the whole concept of competition on price, that's likely to be bad for consumers.

Given the high hurdles in US antitrust law, even if the allegation is true that might well not be enough for Valve to actually lose the lawsuit, as noted by EagleDelta etc. But it's still a practice I'd find somewhat annoying--sure, you can understand why they'd want to do it, but then it's easy to understand why any company would do any anti-competitive practice . . . no company wants to be successfully competed against.

Of course if it ain't true then the filers are just assholes. And whether it's true or not, the filers could have questionable motivations and backing.

Anti-competitive means there needs to be harm to consumers (that's a brief legal description) not to competitors. Steam requiring that you keep prices LOWER so that their customers can benefit from LOWER PRICES on other platforms is a plus for consumers. I know it's a plus for me. It means that when I see a sale for a game on another platform, I can go to my platform of choice to get the same price. I win. That's a good thing.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: KohlyKohl

Quoting: omer666Well, maybe they realised AMD's hardware was competitive again, and they need to better their software to stay on top. In any case, I'm still waiting for Nvidia's promises to materialise, but that's very good news at last.

From what I've seen, AMD is still a bit behind NVidia in terms of hardware. NVidia is also way ahead in software so I don't think they are that worried.

This is so true. I aspire to one day moving to AMD but I'm not going to do it strictly because they offer "open source" drivers... frankly that's the least valuable item on my list of wants (considering that I'm using proprietary software in Steam and the games themselves!). AMD needs to catch up on the hardware front, particularly on RT and supersampling technologies like DLSS (which apparently will never work via proton, but alas). The AMD drivers also generally lag behind the Nvidia proprietary drivers in my experience. I'm hoping that the 7000 series cards solve the hardware issues when i'm looking to upgrade from my 2000 series Nvidia cards.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

This won’t succeed because Valve isn’t a monopolist and they don’t have any restrictions on game sales on other platforms (Xbox, PlayStation, Android, iOS). The fact of the matter is that mobile plus console combined is a significantly bigger market than PC gaming and publishers have the flexibility to publish their games across all of these platforms. A court would agree that all of those competing platforms are more restrictive than Valve’s requirements (and they clearly are since Microsoft, Sony, Google and Apple don’t have any competition at all on their platforms and are actual monopolists). Finally - on PC there’s also Epic Game Store, Origin, Ubisoft Connect, GoG, Xbox for PC) so there’s plenty of alternatives, Epic and Microsoft have been able to sign exclusives that are not on Steam and there’s new competition emerging from Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Now, Stadia, Amazon Luna etcetera.

So yeah, this isn’t going anywhere. Calm down.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: DribbleondoYou own games you purchase via stadia.

You *own* the games as much on Stadia as you do on Steam - in fact the licenses are similar across Steam / PlayStation / Xbox etcetera. People in the Linux community seem to be confused about what "owning" a game means... users are licensing games... big difference. The fact that you can't store every game that you license locally on Stadia is a different issue - but then I don't store every game I license via Steam or any other platform locally either. TO do so would be a tad... anal.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Good points, couldn't agree more.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: callcifer

Quoting: stretch611when a game has pre-planned expansions it usually is incomplete, if development on a certain feature will not be complete by a deadline, they just skip adding the feature until the next expansion. And this can happen easily.

I'll wait for the game is done before I consider buying.

You'll be waiting a long, long time then. Paradox games are known to be updated for many years after release. CK2, for example, is 6 years old and is still getting major updates regularly.

Finally, it's not like they are holding back existing content just so they can charge you more later. Somebody comes up with an idea, stuff nobody even thought of, and it becomes a major update years down the line. Again, for example, Stellaris is getting it's 2.0 update in just a few days which is basically a whole new game. They could easily release it as "Stellaris 2" and charge full price for it, but personally I much prefer this continuously updated development approach that keeps a game alive for a decade or more.

The game is early access. I buy games when they're finished.

View this comment - View article - View full comments