87
Amazon's previous VP of Prime Gaming said they "tried everything" to disrupt Steam
(www.gamingonlinux.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
87 points (98.9% liked)
Gaming
2810 readers
7 users here now
The Lemmy.zip Gaming Community
For news, discussions and memes!
Community Rules
This community follows the Lemmy.zip Instance rules, with the inclusion of the following rule:
- No NSFW content
You can see Lemmy.zip's rules by going to our Code of Conduct.
What to Expect in Our Code of Conduct:
- Respectful Communication: We strive for positive, constructive dialogue and encourage all members to engage with one another in a courteous and understanding manner.
- Inclusivity: Embracing diversity is at the core of our community. We welcome members from all walks of life and expect interactions to be conducted without discrimination.
- Privacy: Your privacy is paramount. Please respect the privacy of others just as you expect yours to be treated. Personal information should never be shared without consent.
- Integrity: We believe in the integrity of speech and action. As such, honesty is expected, and deceptive practices are strictly prohibited.
- Collaboration: Whether you're here to learn, teach, or simply engage in discussion, collaboration is key. Support your fellow members and contribute positively to shared learning and growth.
If you enjoy reading legal stuff, you can check it all out at legal.lemmy.zip.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I'm not a native English speaker.
Steam does set the prices, in that they use their dominant position to force the best price always being on Steam, whether it's 5 bucks or 100. This is pretty well established in recent lawsuits, whether US courts end up deciding that Steam is doing so legally or not.
In any case, I don't care about price pressure. Games are way too cheap as it is (partially thanks to Steam leaning hard on seasonal sales developers and publishers can't afford to ignore, incidentally).
The stuff that does bother me is Steam telling developers and publishers what to do, what the consequences of not doing it will be and how much of their money they will take afterwards with no recourse. I've seen them do this with my faceholes.
So yes, Steam has a dominant position that harms competition and yes, they do leverage it to do harm. Not to end users, where they're still competing with consoles and effectively with Microsoft, but certainly on the developer marketplace where content creators can't afford to not be in the platform.
Steam uses a Uberified UGC gig economy system on PC game devs where it sets the rules because there's no alternative. And that's bad. More competition makes that less sustainable. And that's good.
Source? All I can find is lawsuits about the 30% cut, none about forcing the same price on steam as elsewhere.
Normally I tell people to do their own googling, but man, this is woefully underreported. For some reason when this came out the press latched on to some of the emails containing Valve employees trolling Tim Sweeney behind the scenes and that leak about how many employees they had and they barely mentioned this.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F778bbf05-f937-4f50-a8a5-90de4185172e_1000x677.jpeg
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bwajZMNAof74mSNRMcTAVlF8m0fplHkA/view
I don't know if there's some reason for it, but I saw it get reported in real time when it came out and the sources that remain online seem to be legit. It's not particularly surprising, either. Valve is not shy about giving developers marching orders in general.
Thank you. I did search myself but like I said, different lawsuits kept popping up.