They sue Valve for the conditions and prices of games on Steam

It was a matter of time and finally someone has entered to dare to sue Gabe Newell’s company, which has been accused of something that many will not know but that was making the free market of PC games impossible: being the most benefited from the industry game pricing. This is why Valve is facing a lawsuit over Steam in the US.

The lawsuit is a little more complicated than this really, but basically it all revolves around how Valve sets prices and the conditions that it requires from developers who want to sell their games on Steam, something that leaves no room for competition and that always positions the company as a coercion of the industry.

The lawsuit against Valve: a possible illegal conduct that would force the monopoly of Steam

How precisely is Valve going to engage in monopolistic conduct? Well, because of the pricing and the conditions that you demand for your store. Has been Wolfire Gaming the one that after the judge’s ruling on the 6th of this month will continue with the litigation initiated in April where Valve is accused of keep 30% of the sales of the game so that it stays in the Steam store.

There would be no problem with this if it were not for the fact that Steam, hand in hand with Valve, forces developers or distributors to do something very curious: they will not sell their games at a lower price outside of the Steam platform.

You don’t have to be a genius to understand that no one can compete with this, since everyone will have more costs compared to Valve and its platform and therefore Steam exerts dominant market pressure where there is no free competition, since the minimum price will always be within the Gabe Newell store.

This has one more adverse effect, and that is that no one is more profitable than Steam, that is, no one can even set the same price as what is marked in the Valve store because costs prevent it and this forces the competition to have always the most expensive games to be able to earn some money with it.

Justice Coughenour explains it briefly thus:

The company “allegedly enforces this regime through a combination of written and unwritten rules” that imposes its own terms on how non-Steam-enabled games are sold and priced. These allegations are sufficient to plausibly allege illegal conduct.

We’ll see if finally Wolfire Gaming is right and if Steam is forced to change its conditions, which could have very advantageous conditions for users if the other platforms can start selling even at a loss but in high volume, generating lower prices with the developers and being with the profitable time.

VIA: Bloomberg