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That lawsuit against Steam’s 30% cut of game sales is now a class action, meaning many other developers could benefit
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this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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That's pretty anti-competitive, unless I'm misunderstanding it.
If Epic takes a smaller cut, a developer might be willing to sell it at a lower price than on Steam. But if Steam says that the sale on Steam needs to be the same, then that means the developer can't put out the same sale on Steam (since Steam takes a bigger cut).
So instead, they'd have to make the sale price equal to the price they'd be willing to accept after taking Steam's cut into consideration...which would be higher than the price they'd be willing to sell for on Epic.
That's bad for developers AND consumers.
it's only applicable if you sell steam keys.
They say that for legal reasons, but their actions are different. If you look at the actual Wolfire complaint, they say they were pressured regardless of steam keys.
I would absolutely agree if it were limited to steam keys, but it's not. Steam can deprioritize your game in more ways than one. Even just not putting your AAA quality $60 game in the featured games list is a big deal.
If you all just give them a pass, they'll keep doing this. If they get criticism for it, they'll likely sweep it under the rug and pretend it was just the Steam key thing the whole time. In the second case, you should expect to see games beginning to sell on Epic (or on their own site) at a lower price than on Steam. There's a reason you don't see this now, and it's not because of steam keys.
I haven't seen anybody else except the litigants included in the class action make these claims. Nobody seems to be able to substantiate them. I'm actively following this because I want to know if it's true. I'd welcome any proof someone can provide that these claims have been elsewhere substantiated.