EDIT: If it’s true that Valve is also refusing to sell games that are sold for a lower price in other stores where steam keys are not being sold then I think there’s definitely a case here. I didn’t understand that was their policy but if so it sucks and I take back anything good I said about them being permissive. Thanks to this comment for finding the exact language in the lawsuit that alleges this.
I’d be interested to see what Wolfire’s case is, if there’s more to it that I don’t know about I’d love to understand, but if the article is characterising their case accurately…
claiming that Valve suppresses competition in the PC gaming market through the dominance of Steam, while using it to extract “an extraordinarily high cut from nearly every sale that passes through its store.”
…then I don’t think this will work out because Valve hasn’t engaged in monopolistic behaviour.
This is mainly because of their extremely permissive approach to game keys. The way it works is, a developer can generate as many keys as they want, give them out for free, sell them on other stores or their own site, for any discount, whatever, and Steam will honour those keys and serve up the data to all customers no questions asked. The only real stipulation for all of this is that the game must also be available for sale on the Steam storefront where a 30% cut is taken for any sale. That’s it.
Whilst they might theoretically have a monopoly based on market share, as long as they continue to allow other parties to trade in their keys, they aren’t suppressing competition. I think this policy is largely responsible for the existence of storefronts like Humble, Fanatical, Green Man Gaming and quite a number of others. If they changed this policy or started to enshittify things, the game distribution landscape would change overnight. The reason they haven’t enshittified for so long is probably because they don’t have public shareholders.
To be clear I’m against capitalism and capitalists, even the non-publicly-traded non-corporate type like Valve. I am in fact a bit embarrassed of my take on reddit about 7 or 8 years ago that they were special because they were “private and not public”. Ew, I mean even if Gabe is some special perfect unicorn billionaire that would never do any wrong, when he’s gone Valve will go to someone who might cave to the temptation to go public. I honestly think copyright in general should be abolished. As long as copyright exists I’d love to see better laws around digital copies that allow people to truly own and trade their copies for instance, and not just perpetually rent them. I just don’t see this case achieving much.
I’m so worried about what will happen to Steam when Gabe dies. I really hope he has a successor picked out who is as ideologically stringent. Otherwise I’m going to lose a huge library.
I was under the impression that the policy required a game’s price to be the same on all marketplaces, even if it’s not a steam key being purchased. I.e. a $60 game on steam must sell for $60 off-platform, including on the publisher’s own launcher.
I just went to double check my interpretation, but the case brief by Mason LLP’s site doesn’t really specify.
If it only applies to steam keys, as you say, then I agree they don’t really have a case since it’s Steam that must supply distribution and other services.
But, if the policy applies to independent marketplaces, then it should be obvious that it is anticompetitive. The price on every platform is driven up to compensate for Steam’s 30% fees, even if that particular platform doesn’t attempt to provide services equivalent to Steam.
According to a Valve quote from the complaint (p. 55), it applies to everything:
In response to one inquiry from a game publisher, in another example, Valve
explained: “We basically see any selling of the game on PC, Steam key or not, as a part of the
same shared PC market- so even if you weren’t using Steam keys, we’d just choose to stop
selling a game if it was always running discounts of 75% off on one store but 50% off on
ours. . . .”
This is kind of necessary. You could open a store just selling Steam keys. You get Steam’s software distribution, installed user base, networking for free and pay nothing to them. Steam is selling all of those services for a 30% cut. Since your overhead is $0, you can take just a 1% fee and still turn a profit because Valve is covering 99% of your costs.
Steam could disable keys or start charging fees for them. As long as they’re being this ridiculously generous and permitting publishers to have them for free, some limitation makes sense.
I’m dubious, though. There must be a provision for promotional pricing. I’ve definitely bought keys for less than Steam prices.
As I said, Steam would be in their rights to enforce that pricing policy for Steam keys, because they provide distribution and platform services for that product after it sells.
But as @Rose clarified, it applies to not just Steam keys, but any game copy sold and distributed by an independent platform. Steam should not have any legitimate claim to determining the pricing within another platform.
David said in a blog post that the suit is specifically alleging price fixing tactics for other platforms that aren’t key sellers, but sell the whole game. Whether that holds up in court - we will see.
Copyright is a tool that gives creators the ability to commercialize their work. That its spirit, nothing more. The abolishment of copyright would be in no way productive imo. At least in the US, we have a lifetime for exclusive rights, at which point the material moves into the public domain. It really seems like a good system to me. If anyone could sell the thing you just spent time and money creating for free, there would be little incentive to create the thing. And its existence doesn’t at all prevent people from offering their creations for free use, by placing directly into the public domain.
You misunderstand me. Artists want to be able to dedicate themselves to the development and creation of their art. Unfortunately that requires money. For most people (poor people) the only way to both be making art non-stop, and be able to live at a somewhat normal standard, is to get paid while doing it.
I know many artists. I art majored. Everyone is trying to find a way to make it viable, by figuring out what they are able to sell. Sure, yeah, its for the love of art. It can only be so when you have someone paying your way, or you’re already retired. If your making art as a hobby and a hobby alone, you probably care little about conversations of IP. For one, because your original work is protected immediately upon creation, and for two, IP is about protecting commercial interests. You made the thing for no reason than to satisfy your own interest. You don’t really care if anyone paid you or not, you would have done it anyways, therefore IP doesn’t really concern your hobby. As soon as you take the thing to gallery, and put a price tag on it, you’re no different than anyone else trying to see what they can make a buck off of.
I’ve been on both sides of it, giving one form of art away, while seeing if I could make a living off of an another. Commercial art was not for me. But I respect what IP protection provides to those who do choose to commercialize.
In one sentence, you’ve already demonstrated that you don’t understand how artists subsist at all. You’ve also confused the word “incentive” with “motivation”.
Look, I understand that money isn’t the primary incentive for (hopefully all) artists. But I don’t think a system where you effectively cannot make a living as a full-time artist is beneficial for society either. Since you’re an artist, can I ask how you subsist without an alternative source of income?
At least in the US, we have a lifetime for exclusive rights, at which point the material moves into the public domain. It really seems like a good system to me.
It’s not a good system to have it be 50 years past the death of the creator. Having access to content in public domain has historically caused art to flourish by serving as a base for creators to build off of. But for the past few decades companies have been plundering from public domain while not contributing anything back.
Our original copyright system in the US gave a baseline 17 years of copyright, with an additional 17 years extension that you could apply to. 34 years is a perfectly fair span of time to get value out of your creation because nobody is going to wait that long to get access to art they want. But it also ensured that the public domain continually had new content added that wasn’t completely antiquated. This is the system we should be pushing to return to.
My quote is aligned with your statement. I didn’t say anything specific about what the lifetime should be. Just that I believe its good that there is one. Maybe 50 years is too long. Maybe 34 year is too long too. That number is the compromise line for two competing interest. People will always be pulling in the direction that servers their own.
Copyright is a tool that gives creators the ability to commercialize their work. That its spirit, nothing more.
That’s what we are told is the purpose because otherwise we wouldn’t accept its existence. In practice it doesn’t work that way. The persistent story is that artists get very little compensation whilst whichever large entity is acting as the middleman for their copyright - often owning it outright despite doing nothing to make it - takes the vast majority of the profit.
It is a tool of corporate control, nothing more. Without copyright there would be no way a middleman could insert themselves and ripoff artists, take their money, and compromise their work with financially-driven studio meddling.
And the idea that the “spirit” of copyright is for artists, that completely falls apart when you understand that modern copyright terms exist almost entirely to profit one company’s IP - Disney is just delaying the transfer of Mickey Mouse into the public domain. That’s why copyright is now lifetime +75 years, or something ridiculous like that. That is not for artists to be compensated. Mickey Mouse isn’t going to be unmade when that happens. If Disney can’t operate as a business with all the time and market share they’ve built then they should just go under. There’s no justification for it beyond corporate greed.
Also without copyright there couldn’t be monopolies like Disney buying Fox, Marvel and Star Wars. That is an absurd situation and should be an indication that antitrust is effectively gone.
And as for artists getting paid, we’re transitioning more and more to a patron model, where people are paid just to create, and release most of their work for free with some token level of patron interaction. You don’t need copyright for that.
Artists enter into contracts with publishers willingly. Their work is not stolen. If it was they could easily win a court case for infringement. They bargain their rights because they’re eager for a shot at money. It is very hard breakout without one, if that’s your goal. Consolidation of the networks is a completely different debate, and I agree its egregious and they need to be broken up. But no one is preventing anyone from creating a new super hero, or sci-fi universe. It happens every day, you just have to search a little harder because big networks aren’t paying millions of dollars to put some unknown indie author’s work in your social feed.
They bargain their rights because they’re eager for a shot at money. It is very hard breakout without one, if that’s your goal.
It’s incredible that you can say this and not understand that this is exactly why the relationship is coercive and gets abused.
Plenty of horrible things are legal; that is not the measure of what is good. Our entire economic system exists to benefit those with money. It’s always been that way. Can you guess who it was that decided we should have a political system that gives power to people based on how much money they have? It wasn’t poor people.
It wouldn’t be a problem if you didn’t need to sell the things you make and could just give them away.
So copyright is only useful to protect your profits. There are many people who put effort into many things not because they expect to make money but because of the act of doing it.
Just something to think about, not really sure what point im trying to make
EDIT: If it’s true that Valve is also refusing to sell games that are sold for a lower price in other stores where steam keys are not being sold then I think there’s definitely a case here. I didn’t understand that was their policy but if so it sucks and I take back anything good I said about them being permissive. Thanks to this comment for finding the exact language in the lawsuit that alleges this.
I’d be interested to see what Wolfire’s case is, if there’s more to it that I don’t know about I’d love to understand, but if the article is characterising their case accurately…
…then I don’t think this will work out because Valve hasn’t engaged in monopolistic behaviour.
This is mainly because of their extremely permissive approach to game keys. The way it works is, a developer can generate as many keys as they want, give them out for free, sell them on other stores or their own site, for any discount, whatever, and Steam will honour those keys and serve up the data to all customers no questions asked. The only real stipulation for all of this is that the game must also be available for sale on the Steam storefront where a 30% cut is taken for any sale. That’s it.
Whilst they might theoretically have a monopoly based on market share, as long as they continue to allow other parties to trade in their keys, they aren’t suppressing competition. I think this policy is largely responsible for the existence of storefronts like Humble, Fanatical, Green Man Gaming and quite a number of others. If they changed this policy or started to enshittify things, the game distribution landscape would change overnight. The reason they haven’t enshittified for so long is probably because they don’t have public shareholders.
To be clear I’m against capitalism and capitalists, even the non-publicly-traded non-corporate type like Valve. I am in fact a bit embarrassed of my take on reddit about 7 or 8 years ago that they were special because they were “private and not public”. Ew, I mean even if Gabe is some special perfect unicorn billionaire that would never do any wrong, when he’s gone Valve will go to someone who might cave to the temptation to go public. I honestly think copyright in general should be abolished. As long as copyright exists I’d love to see better laws around digital copies that allow people to truly own and trade their copies for instance, and not just perpetually rent them. I just don’t see this case achieving much.
I’m so worried about what will happen to Steam when Gabe dies. I really hope he has a successor picked out who is as ideologically stringent. Otherwise I’m going to lose a huge library.
I was under the impression that the policy required a game’s price to be the same on all marketplaces, even if it’s not a steam key being purchased. I.e. a $60 game on steam must sell for $60 off-platform, including on the publisher’s own launcher.
I just went to double check my interpretation, but the case brief by Mason LLP’s site doesn’t really specify.
If it only applies to steam keys, as you say, then I agree they don’t really have a case since it’s Steam that must supply distribution and other services.
But, if the policy applies to independent marketplaces, then it should be obvious that it is anticompetitive. The price on every platform is driven up to compensate for Steam’s 30% fees, even if that particular platform doesn’t attempt to provide services equivalent to Steam.
According to a Valve quote from the complaint (p. 55), it applies to everything:
Wow, that’s some good research! I’ll edit my comment about this, I don’t think my glowing description of their policy should stand without this info.
This is kind of necessary. You could open a store just selling Steam keys. You get Steam’s software distribution, installed user base, networking for free and pay nothing to them. Steam is selling all of those services for a 30% cut. Since your overhead is $0, you can take just a 1% fee and still turn a profit because Valve is covering 99% of your costs.
Steam could disable keys or start charging fees for them. As long as they’re being this ridiculously generous and permitting publishers to have them for free, some limitation makes sense.
I’m dubious, though. There must be a provision for promotional pricing. I’ve definitely bought keys for less than Steam prices.
As I said, Steam would be in their rights to enforce that pricing policy for Steam keys, because they provide distribution and platform services for that product after it sells.
But as @Rose clarified, it applies to not just Steam keys, but any game copy sold and distributed by an independent platform. Steam should not have any legitimate claim to determining the pricing within another platform.
David said in a blog post that the suit is specifically alleging price fixing tactics for other platforms that aren’t key sellers, but sell the whole game. Whether that holds up in court - we will see.
Copyright is a tool that gives creators the ability to commercialize their work. That its spirit, nothing more. The abolishment of copyright would be in no way productive imo. At least in the US, we have a lifetime for exclusive rights, at which point the material moves into the public domain. It really seems like a good system to me. If anyone could sell the thing you just spent time and money creating for free, there would be little incentive to create the thing. And its existence doesn’t at all prevent people from offering their creations for free use, by placing directly into the public domain.
In one sentence, you’ve already demonstrated that you don’t understand artists at all.
No, he understands just fine
Artists might create out of love, but they’re not going to share it for free so someone else can make a profit
You misunderstand me. Artists want to be able to dedicate themselves to the development and creation of their art. Unfortunately that requires money. For most people (poor people) the only way to both be making art non-stop, and be able to live at a somewhat normal standard, is to get paid while doing it.
I know many artists. I art majored. Everyone is trying to find a way to make it viable, by figuring out what they are able to sell. Sure, yeah, its for the love of art. It can only be so when you have someone paying your way, or you’re already retired. If your making art as a hobby and a hobby alone, you probably care little about conversations of IP. For one, because your original work is protected immediately upon creation, and for two, IP is about protecting commercial interests. You made the thing for no reason than to satisfy your own interest. You don’t really care if anyone paid you or not, you would have done it anyways, therefore IP doesn’t really concern your hobby. As soon as you take the thing to gallery, and put a price tag on it, you’re no different than anyone else trying to see what they can make a buck off of.
I’ve been on both sides of it, giving one form of art away, while seeing if I could make a living off of an another. Commercial art was not for me. But I respect what IP protection provides to those who do choose to commercialize.
In one sentence, you’ve already demonstrated that you don’t understand how artists subsist at all. You’ve also confused the word “incentive” with “motivation”.
Guess what I do for a living. You have 1 guess.
Look, I understand that money isn’t the primary incentive for (hopefully all) artists. But I don’t think a system where you effectively cannot make a living as a full-time artist is beneficial for society either. Since you’re an artist, can I ask how you subsist without an alternative source of income?
It’s not a good system to have it be 50 years past the death of the creator. Having access to content in public domain has historically caused art to flourish by serving as a base for creators to build off of. But for the past few decades companies have been plundering from public domain while not contributing anything back.
Our original copyright system in the US gave a baseline 17 years of copyright, with an additional 17 years extension that you could apply to. 34 years is a perfectly fair span of time to get value out of your creation because nobody is going to wait that long to get access to art they want. But it also ensured that the public domain continually had new content added that wasn’t completely antiquated. This is the system we should be pushing to return to.
My quote is aligned with your statement. I didn’t say anything specific about what the lifetime should be. Just that I believe its good that there is one. Maybe 50 years is too long. Maybe 34 year is too long too. That number is the compromise line for two competing interest. People will always be pulling in the direction that servers their own.
That’s what we are told is the purpose because otherwise we wouldn’t accept its existence. In practice it doesn’t work that way. The persistent story is that artists get very little compensation whilst whichever large entity is acting as the middleman for their copyright - often owning it outright despite doing nothing to make it - takes the vast majority of the profit.
It is a tool of corporate control, nothing more. Without copyright there would be no way a middleman could insert themselves and ripoff artists, take their money, and compromise their work with financially-driven studio meddling.
And the idea that the “spirit” of copyright is for artists, that completely falls apart when you understand that modern copyright terms exist almost entirely to profit one company’s IP - Disney is just delaying the transfer of Mickey Mouse into the public domain. That’s why copyright is now lifetime +75 years, or something ridiculous like that. That is not for artists to be compensated. Mickey Mouse isn’t going to be unmade when that happens. If Disney can’t operate as a business with all the time and market share they’ve built then they should just go under. There’s no justification for it beyond corporate greed.
Also without copyright there couldn’t be monopolies like Disney buying Fox, Marvel and Star Wars. That is an absurd situation and should be an indication that antitrust is effectively gone.
And as for artists getting paid, we’re transitioning more and more to a patron model, where people are paid just to create, and release most of their work for free with some token level of patron interaction. You don’t need copyright for that.
Artists enter into contracts with publishers willingly. Their work is not stolen. If it was they could easily win a court case for infringement. They bargain their rights because they’re eager for a shot at money. It is very hard breakout without one, if that’s your goal. Consolidation of the networks is a completely different debate, and I agree its egregious and they need to be broken up. But no one is preventing anyone from creating a new super hero, or sci-fi universe. It happens every day, you just have to search a little harder because big networks aren’t paying millions of dollars to put some unknown indie author’s work in your social feed.
It’s incredible that you can say this and not understand that this is exactly why the relationship is coercive and gets abused.
Plenty of horrible things are legal; that is not the measure of what is good. Our entire economic system exists to benefit those with money. It’s always been that way. Can you guess who it was that decided we should have a political system that gives power to people based on how much money they have? It wasn’t poor people.
It wouldn’t be a problem if you didn’t need to sell the things you make and could just give them away.
So copyright is only useful to protect your profits. There are many people who put effort into many things not because they expect to make money but because of the act of doing it.
Just something to think about, not really sure what point im trying to make