Valve sued for price gouging and abuse of steam market dominance

Valve has been sued in a Steam deal that forces developers to list the same game price on other platforms, perhaps eliminating competition.

This week, Valve Corporation was subject to a new proceeding accusing game developers and Steam founders of misusing their advantage in the PC gaming market. According to the Steam distribution agreement, developers using Steam will need to sell their games at the same price on other storefronts, effectively competing with other storefronts that they may have been doing in other ways. Eliminate to. This allowed Valve to keep the price of Steam games high.

Valve launched Steam in 2003 as a platform for developers to release automatic updates for their games, but soon became hosting games from third-party publishers. Steam is currently the largest online dogota. A PC game distribution platform with over 30,000 titles available. The platform also continues to break its own record in terms of user numbers each year. Most recently, at the beginning of 2021, Steam set its own simultaneous player record with over 25 million users. That record came just weeks after the platform reached another record for 23 million users on Christmas day alone.

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Of course, the title of the largest online distribution platform for PC games has a lot of power, and Valve is said to be using that power. According to a lawsuit filed by The Hollywood Reporter, “most favored nation treatment” [MFN] The “terms” of the Steam distribution agreement “have the effect of keeping the price high for consumers by lowering the price of PC games sold to consumers due to price competition by the platform.” That is, the Epic Games Store or Microsoft’s game-priced stores need to be the same as Steam, and there’s probably little room for competition.

CD Projekt Red, Ubisoft, kChamp Games, Devolver Digital and Rust LLC have also been nominated as defendants in the proceedings. All of these developers have been said to have “collusioned to illegally contract, combine, or unfairly limit trading” by agreeing not to sell PC games at low prices on other platforms. It was. As pointed out in the proceedings, the Epic Games Store and Microsoft Store have less sales savings than Valve, but Steam MFN needs to keep prices the same on all platforms. If these developers aren’t restricted by SteamMFN, it’s better to lower the price of the game on a platform with lower fees.

Overall, the proceedings seek to prove that Valve is hindering competition and illegally monopolizing the digital PC gaming market. Valve didn’t comment on the proceedings, but it wasn’t always a great week for the studio. Valve is also currently working on a 2014 alleged plagiarism of the Steam controller design.

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Source: The Hollywood Reporter

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