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Valve faces a £656 million lawsuit in the UK for 'overcharging 14 million PC gamers'
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this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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Valve doesn't set the prices for any of the products you buy through their store. The game developers and publishers do.
The exception is valve developed games which are mostly free to play and make money on useless cosmetics. Most of their successful games are built on mods that are only possible because valve takes the very consumer friendly position of supporting and encouraging modding of their games.
Hell, they even allow and promote fan made remakes like Black Mesa and unofficial sequels.
If valve is a monopoly, it's only because they're the only corporation in the pc gaming space (OK maybe include gog too) that respects their customers. They're not perfect but they're orders of magnitude better than the competition.
I was shocked when Valve allowed Black Mesa to be monetized on Steam. I respect the fuck out of them since then.
Unlike the shit heads at Nintendo, suing everyone dares to touch their overused decades old IP.
No matter the reason, private monopolies are a bad thing for consumers.
The game devs and publishers set the price by taking into consideration that 30% goes to Valve, without that 30% games would be cheaper as they wouldn't need to sell for as high a price for the devs and publishers to recover their investment.
No need to have studied economics to understand that if you need to have 30$/copy in your pockets in order to cover your cost and someone takes 30% from every sales then you need to sell to the consumers for 43$.
No matter how nice Valve acts towards consumers (in many cases because it was imposed to them, not by choice), in the end you're defending a billionaire while you make less a year than he spends running one of his yachts for a single day.
Bullshit. Games on steam that hit sales thresholds pay less to steam and the prices remain the same. Games on EGS only pay 12% and prices haven't dropped.
Reality does not comport with your argument at all.
I've been in product development and management for 10+ years. I know how pricing decisions are made. You're very naive.
Well no shit they'll look at the highest price on the market and use the same price everywhere, but the highest price is based on the fact that the distributor takes a 30% cut!
Again, you are very naive. What you're describe is cost-up pricing which hasn't been a generally used method of pricing goods and services for decades at this point. The reason is that doing cost-up pricing is a really good way to go out of business.
The way pricing works today is that sellers set pricing based on what they believe the customer is willing to pay. From there you work backwards accounting for retailer margin, cost of goods, transport, discounts, etc... To find your maximum cost per unit. If you can't produce the product for less than the maximum cost, you either need to scale back your features, add a feature that would justify a higher sell price, or abandon the project.
Your notion that companies would lower prices if they had to give retailers a small cut is not borne out by theory or by observed real world outcomes.
You're wrong. Doubling down won't make you less wrong.