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Steam owner Valve accused of ripping off 14m UK gamers (www.bbc.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by Potatos_are_not_friends to c/games

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Valve Corporation is being accused of using its market dominance to overcharge 14 million people in the UK.

"Valve is rigging the market and taking advantage of UK gamers," said digital rights campaigner Vicki Shotbolt, who is bringing the case.

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[–] Potatos_are_not_friends 33 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

It says Valve "forces" game publishers to sign up to so-called price parity obligations, preventing titles being sold at cheaper prices on rival platforms.

Ms Shotbolt says this has enabled Steam to charge an "excessive commission of up to 30%", making UK consumers pay too much for purchasing PC games and add-on content.

This is actually the norm on a lot of platforms unfortunately. Apple. Google Play. Not at all unique to Valve.

[–] CrazyLikeGollum 26 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

That 30% cut is also done on the Xbox and Playstation stores. I would assume Nintendo does the same thing.

It also sounds like Valve's price parity agreement only applies to Steam keys. So, if a developer or publisher wanted to provide the game through their own storefront or on another third-party platform then they could charge whatever they wanted.

As for the 30% cut being excessive, I don't know if it is or not, but storing data at the scale that Valve does costs a lot of money, not to mention the costs associated with ensuring the data's integrity and distributing the data to their users all over the world at reasonable speeds. In all likelihood they are running multiple data centers on multiple continents with 100s of petabytes of storage each with some extremely high speed networking within the individual data centers, between the data centers, and out to the wider internet. Data hosting, especially for global availability, is damn expensive.

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