Here:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/overgrowth-developer-felt-he-had-no-choice-in-filing-antitrust-suit-against-valve

Forcing devs not to sell cheaper on other platforms is very scummy.

Uh, huh.

Oh, this is a redundant thread; they're the ones who created the Humble Bundle, according to themselves.


There should be a "Valve antitrust suit" thread somewhere around here.

I think it was quite wrong of Steam to forbid it.
They're the developers and they should decide the price to sell on whatever platform.

It's funny because I frequently see games slightly more expensive here than there. There may be something to that.

Interesting case. My gut tells me it won't go anywhere, as there are plenty of viable Steam alternatives in the marketplace, but I'm no lawyer. Certainly no antitrust lawyer. Microsoft still had endless trouble in the 90s and early 2000s despite the existence of Mac and Linux.

Linux, not so much but when MS was going through Anti-trust it had direct competition in the commercial OS/Server market from these billion dollar companies

IBM
Sun Microsystems
Novell
HP
SCO
and Apple

Microsoft's influence was so great it over shadowed them all.

I stopped using Steam 7 years back, for the vast majority of PC games there are no viable alternatives to Steam.

PC gaming without Steam is just like sys-admin without Microsoft, yes it can be done, but it requires a hefty Sacrifice. There additional costs, things take longer, you loose connectivity and choice.

Sure, but when does that become an issue for the government? Steam is massively popular because people choose for it to be so. I guess you could say the same for Windows though. I dunno, like I said I'm not a lawyer.

No it's not. Rather, Steam is massively popular because they strong-armed physical discs out of existence for PC games, and forced everyone to buy either Steam-DRM-infested games, or nothing at all, in the years when they first came onto the scene. And in that way, they established their monopoly through evil tyranny.

Oh, it's ages I haven't heard of that game. Those devs aren't wrong about that Steam policy.
I wonder if they actually wanted to sell their game on Epic, though.

So let me ask you this: Did Netflix strongarm Blockbuster and other video rental chains out of business?

Did CDPR strongarm Russian pirates out of business?

Did Amazon strongarm your local Barns & Noble out of business?

Or is it more this: They've all literally offered a better product than what was the norm?

In a way I see this as a bit similar as Microsoft forbidding a PC company sell their PCs (laptops etc.) with preloaded OEM Windows, if the said PC company also sells the same PC without Windows, e.g. without any OS or Linux preloaded, and sells that non-Windows machine a bit cheaper due to lower costs.

According to Epic, Valve has no policy for prices on other stores yet, except for Steam keys. But in the article says: "Rosen alleges that Steam use their power even when Steam keys aren't involved.".

Also Epic seems to be the ones setting the final price on their store, and can lower them to match Steam's without approval from partners.

Buying a box with a disk containing only a Steam client is the better product than buying an actual game? Because this is what happened. And until some court rulings it wasn't even mentioned on most boxes.

Of course that's mainly the fault of the publishers with their DRM obsession. But Valve set the example with HL2.