It’s only double counted in a situation where you’re actually counting both sides. This is a Canadian study published by a Canadian outlet about the impacts of Canadian policy.

They’re not trying to balance the books, so to speak, they’re evaluating transactions on a single account.

404media is doing excellent work on tracking the non-consentual porn market and technology. Unfortunately, you don’t really see the larger, more mainstream outlets giving it the same attention beyond its effect on Taylor Swift.

Huh, thanks for the heads up. Section 4 makes it look like they can close-source whenever they want.

I’m just glad FUTO is still letting Immich use the AGPL instead of this, though.

Just curious, where does the Anti Commercial-AI bit come from? The page linked does not include that term in the title or summary, and from what I understand of the legal situation it wouldn’t make a difference to explicitly mention AI.

I’m still a big fan of D for personal projects, but I fear the widespread adoption ship has sailed at this point, and we won’t see the language grow anymore. It’s truly a beautiful, well-rounded language.

Also just recently a rather prominent contributor forked the entire compiler/language so we’re seeing more fragmentation :/

I can only assume at this point you are intentionally not engaging with the actual issue. Cheers.

Fanatical and humble bundle (the good old days) are good examples.

Incidentally Wolfire Games—the studio that founded Humble (but no longer operates it)—is currently in class-action litigation against Valve for this very issue.

I don’t know what you say “non-discounted”, cheaper is cheaper no matter what.

The Steam Distribution Agreement AFAIK allows temporary sales on other platforms to undercut Steam, but requires the “resting” price matches that on Steam. By specifying “non-discounted” I meant to indicate that although sales do exist on other platforms, the normal price of an item always matches on Steam. A quick few spot checks show the non-sale price of games on Humble, Steam, and Fanatical are equal.

“Cheaper is cheaper” kind of overlooks the core issue. Ultimately a publisher on Epic Games Store—which has a fee of 12% instead of Steam’s 30%—can have a lower price for a game as part of a promotion, but can’t just sell every game 18% cheaper always without violating Steam’s terms and being risk being de-listed.

Steam doesn’t get a cut from keys sold in perfectly legal thirth party stores like fanatical, humble or gmg. Epic does not sell steam keys so obviously no.

Okay, gotcha. Yeah, I misunderstood. For Steam Keys it’s pretty clear that Valve should be able to control the price since they provide the services after that key is purchased.

But the PMFN applies to all copies, even those distributed outside of Steam (e.g. the direct-from-publisher option I mentioned). Last time I was in a thread on this, another user found the following in the complaint (page 55) from the Wolfire v. Valve case mentioned above:

204. TomG also explained to another game publisher that the publisher should “[t]hink critically about how your decisions might affect Steam customers, and Valve. If the offer you’re making fundamentally disadvantages someone who bought your game on Steam, it’s probably not a great thing for us or our customers (even if you don’t find a specific rule describing precisely that scenario).” In that same thread, TomG responded to a question by stating: “we usually choose not to sell games if they’re being sold on our store at a price notably higher than other stores. That is, we’d want to get that lower base price as well, or not sell the game at all."
205. 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. . . .”

To add an example:

Take Cities: Skylines II. It’s listed at $50 on Steam, $50 direct from Paradox. If Steam is taking 30% cut, Paradox sees $35 from each sale. Why is Paradox not listing the game at $40? They would earn an extra $5 per sale, and draw more sales.

They have every economic reason to undercut Steam, but they aren’t. Like seriously, if not the PMFN, then what’s the explanation?

I guess I’m confused. Are you contesting that the PFMN clause has an effect or not? Whether that effect is anticompetitive?

Find me a game that has been de listed from Steam because it was sold cheaper elsewhere. You can’t, so don’t bother.

I’m not going to dig through the web for an example of enforcement (which are not likely to be published anyway), when the only relevant matter is whether the PMFN clause exists. You can count every instance of a direct-from-publisher listing not being ~≤30% cheaper than the Steam listing as evidence that all you need is the threat of enforcement.

There is no reason in a market without this PMFN clause that a publisher wouldn’t sell the game at equal or higher margin off-Steam.

You can find games sold cheaper than in Steam in many places. You can even buy games outside of Steam and they see 0 revenue from it.

I would genuinely love if you could point me to an example where the non-discounted price of a game is lower outside of Steam than it is on Steam — I’d love to buy my games cheaper lol.

That’s not how monopolistic marketplaces like Steam (and Amazon) operate, though. They have “Platform Most Favored Nation” (PMFN) clauses in their terms that mean products sold on the platform can’t be sold cheaper elsewhere…

Which means the whole “pass it on to the consumer” can’t happen, unless a product risks being de-listed from Steam. It literally removes the ability to compete on price.

Additionally, there’s the usability hurdle of interacting with non-home instances from outside mastodon. If I pull up someone’s blog and click the little mastodon social media icon, it may very well link to mastodon.world. If my home instance is mastodon.social, now I have to launch into my own server, search up the account, and then begin interacting.

It’s trivial to do but it is an extra step, but for your less-tech-literate friends and family it can be a point of confusion. Mastodon handles federation great in-ecosystem, but the broader web is still going to treat each instance as a different site.

I’m at my wits end trying to explain this. I guess I can just recommend reading the legal briefs that summarize the matter, or articles that dig deeper than this one.

Maybe I’ll think about it later and make a more complete write up with concrete examples. I really hate to see the confusion here. Wolfire is doing us a favor, we should not be handing Valve the keys to the market just because they act like Mr. Benevolent.

What Wolfire wants to happen is for game marketplaces and game services platforms to be decoupled. Right now Valve has vertically integrated the two. You buy the game, and they offer peer multiplayer, social, workshop, etc.

If those services were charged separately, so that the costs of those services was not forced into the pricing of other marketplaces that don’t offer those services, you open the market to more competition.

Note that the main argument Wolfire is making is that game marketplaces (buy/download the game) and game platforms (online features, mod distribution, social pages) need to be decoupled. By integrating the two, Steam is vertically integrating, amortizing the cost, and then forcing every other marketplace to bear the cost of a platform in their pricing.

If you bought a game and paid for platform services separately, then competition can better exist for both of those roles. Which is good for consumers.

Steam has a large userbase, which offers a lot of consumer inertia to prefer games on Steam. They also have a policy where game pricing on other platforms cannot undercut Steam.

The main complaint is that this pricing policy coupled with the consumer inertia makes it difficult for other gaming marketplaces to enter the market. You cannot undercut steam unless a publisher wants to not put their game on Steam at all (which would be suicide for anything but the largest titles), so you have to sell at Steam’s price point. Few platforms could match Steams’ established workshop, multiplayer, streaming, and social services; all of which benefit from costs at scale and the established user content.

Imagine trying to convince a user: “Buy your game here instead. It will cost the same as on Steam. No, you won’t have access to the existing Workshop. No, you won’t have in-platform multiplayer with your Steam friends.” Even if you had feature parity, people would prefer Steam since that’s where their existing games and friends are.

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.

Valve offers a great service, and I enjoy it a lot. But it’s very difficult for a competitor to enter the market because they won’t be able to match Steam’s services immediately. Typically in a market the approach is then to undercut Steam, but that is exactly what this policy is designed to make impractical by forcing publishers to overprice, on penalty of losing Steams’ userbase.

I mean I don’t know what else to say. It is anti-competitive. It doesn’t take too much to see why. There are many good articles and legal briefs on the matter. It hurts you and me, the consumer, and it hurts publishers. It enriches Valve, benevolent though they may appear. You shouldn’t like this type of strong-arming the market when Amazon does it, and you shouldn’t roll over and take it from Valve either.

Doesn’t even matter, the court is going to sort it out for us. But I hate to see the reputational hit Wolfire is taking here. I like their studio, I believe their developers are operating in genuine good faith, and I think they are doing consumers a favor.

The Platform Most Favored Nation policy employed by Steam is the one at issue in this case. And yes, it is anticompetitive. It abuses userbase size to prevent alternative marketplaces from providing fewer services for smaller cuts

Steam has such a policy. Valve may remove any games from Steam which are sold on other marketplaces for less than they are on Steam.

…unless you have a policy that requires other marketplaces to sell at the same price as on Steam, undercutting the ability for “better deals” to exist at all.

Which is what the lawsuit is actually arguing is going on.