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Court rules Gabe Newell must appear in person to testify in Steam anti-trust lawsuit
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this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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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.
Thanks, that clears it up. So yeah, I think Wolfire has a case to make, then.
Does it though? It seems like Valve is targetting the fact, that you can't run the same game on a different platform for different amounts. So if Valve gets 30%, and some other store gets less, then they ask you to not run it cheaper. I.e. you can't sell on both stores for $40, and then set a permanent -30% sale there.
What right does valve have to discriminate against devs and publishers who are selling their game on other platforms? They have to compete for their business, not punish them for having a game that is more successful on another store that gives a higher revenue cut to the dev and a lower price to the customer.
I think the reason why valve is doing this is because people might buy a game at a higher price, either on Steam or another storefront, and then complain that it was cheaper on Steam or another storefront and start demanding refunds or demand that Valve reduce the game's price on steam.
What do you do then?
If you don't address it, you're automatically seen as the asshole even if it was the developer's choice.
You can give out refunds, which makes you look like the good guy, but that also looks bad to companies like Visa or PayPal (my understanding is that large numbers of refunds tend to look bad to payment processors, even if the refund was initiated from the company and not the consumer). Granted, Valve is a big enough company that they shouldn't have issues with that kinda thing, especially since they already offer refunds, but my understanding is that it still doesn't look good to payment processors and can make them upset.
You can ask the developer to reduce the price on steam, but what if the dev says no?
You can force the dev to reduce the price, but now you're even more of an asshole.
You can lower the cost on your storefront and cover the difference yourself, but now you're potentially losing money. That, if I'm not mistaken, is actually anti-competative from a legal standpoint.
You're kinda screwed if you're trying to be the good guy.
That's not even getting into how bad it looks if it's cheaper on steam than somewhere else when you have a marketshare as large as Valve's.
So what? Who cares if it "looks bad"? They have to compete on service. They need to find out why devs want to sell on steam at a higher price.
If other platforms want to compete in ways that make prices lower for customers lower for customers, so be it.
The same right as epic games has to prevent a game from going on Steam, or anywhere else, for the first year.
They usually sign an exclusivity deal in exchange for funding the development of the game. David is alleging that steam pressured him in ways not covered by steam ToS. It's not like valve funded development of receiver.
Yes, that is problematic. Not by itself, but coupled with a large captive userbase it is. As an example:
Let's say you want to start a game marketplace, which simply runs a storefront and content distribution—you specifically don't want to run a workshop, friends network, video streaming, or peer multiplayer. Because you don't offer these other services, you keep costs down, and can charge a 5% fee instead of a 30%.
With Steam's policy, publishers may choose to:
Obviously, pricing is much more sophisticated than this. You'd have to account for change in sales volume and all. Point is, though, that publishers (and consumers!) cannot take advantage of alternative marketplaces that offer fewer services at lower cost.
The question the court has to answer is whether the userbase/market share captured by Steam causes choice (2) to be de-facto necessary for a game to succeed commercially. If so, then the policy would be the misuse of market dominance to stifle competition.
And I think Wolfire might be able to successfully argue that.
Yeah they can, they just don't have to sell on steam.
Steam runs weekly deals and daily sales all the time. I doubt they have to check with gog.
This... misses the point? Of course the can not sell on Steam. That's always an option.
The antitrust aspect of all of this is that Steam is the de-facto marketplace, consumers are stubborn and habitual and aren't as likely purchase games less-known platforms, and that a publisher opting not to sell on Steam might have a negative influence on the games success.
If that consumer inertia gives Steam an undue advantage that wouldn't be present in a properly competitive market, then it there is an antitrust case to be made, full stop. At this point, the court will decide if the advantage is significant enough to warrant any action, so there's really no need for us to argue further.
But I really don't like seeing Wolfire—which is a great pro-consumer and pro-open-source studio—having their reputation tarnished just because Lemmyites have a knee-jerk reaction to bend over and take it from Valve just because Steam is a good platform.
Can I create a shitty service that only me and my brother use, and then sue Steam cause they have more players? It's a dumb lawsuit, plain and simple
As I said, no need for us to argue further. The lawsuit has grounds, even if you don't understand why. Read articles and legal briefs on the matter if you would like to learn more.
No, it doesn't.
Oh ok
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.
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
We literally do it all the time...
Not all artists do
I’m glad your line of work allows you to make a living, but the same model doesn’t work for everyone.
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?
Commissions don't give a damn about copyright. The end product is made specifically to please one person and reproductions are already worthless, since only Jimbo wants an impressionist picture of Blue Eyes White Dragon wearing a tutu. Jimbo ends up happy, since he got his picture, I end up happy, as Jimbo pays me for the time it took to paint it, and anyone else that manages to copy it can be happy as well.
I’m happy that you’re able to work on commission, but with all due respect, your logic is somewhat specific to your chosen medium. Various other forms of art—novels come to mind—would not be so unaffected.
Not only would they, they already are - that's what crowd funding like Patreon is for, and it's also how it gets used. There are hundreds of thousands of sites sharing "copyrighted" material produced for supporters, and yet no artist bothers going after them, because it's irrelevant. The people who want that content enough to pay for it do so, anyone else is just tagging along for the ride.
The vast majority of books are not crowdfunded lmao
The real advantage of copyright to authors is not to prevent any and all unauthorized reproduction of their works, but rather to distinguish genuine reproductions in the marketplace. Authors don’t give a fuck about free online “libraries”, but you best believe shit goes down the second bootleg copies appear on shelves at B&N or on the Kindle Store. Consumers expect purchases made in legal markets to benefit the owner (ideally the creator) of the work.
For the record, I don’t particularly like the concept of copyright, and I really don’t like current copyright laws. My only concern regarding the complete destruction of copyright is the immense difficulty in determining the creator of the work that it would obviously create. There is absolutely no obligation to provide attribution for public domain works. You can even claim to be the creator yourself, if you wish.
I think probably the obligation, or rather, advantage, of attributing original creators for public domain works, is: how else will I find more of this work that I like? It would probably also still be frowned upon to just take a work wholesale and post it without crediting the creator, on the basis that it makes the creator harder to find, and makes work that you like harder to find. Whenever somebody ends up trying to pass off something without the author's name, there's usually someone close behind asking who did this, tracing the lineages of the media.
Agreed, there are clear advantages to giving credit when both parties are acting in good faith. There is nothing stopping me from claiming that I wrote Macbeth and asking for donations on my Patreon so that I can write Macbeth 2, save for maybe Patreon’s ToS (I haven’t read it). In the absence of all copyright law, I could do that with any work, including ones published this morning by an artist struggling to get by.
well yeah, my point is more that with macbeth, nobody would believe you, you'd obviously be full of shit. that might not be the case with artists struggling to get by, but I don't really see that as being fixed by the current system, or really, by any legal mechanism, unfortunately. in the current system, struggling artists get sacked by that shit all the time when people steal their art and paste it to merch on redbubble, and can make money basically for free. bigger corps can just steal shit basically full throttle, if not in actuality, than in likeness, and, through monopolization of the mechanisms of distribution, like with music. the struggling artist becomes the exploited artist. streaming services become competitors on the basis of content rather than the features of their platform.
I appreciate the sentiment, and small-time artists do get way too much shit, but you are somewhat underrepresenting the mechanisms we have in place. YouTube holds the ad revenue generated by disputed content in escrow until the dispute is resolved. DMCA requests, as much as I don’t like them, are rather effective in this day and age.
In this particular context big corporations have to be the most careful because they have the most to lose. Remember the Obama “HOPE” ad? This thing? All of these were serious Ws for relatively unknown photographers.
I mean, if we're sort of going by DMCA requests, right, there's upsides, but there's also downsides. They get abused all the time, and there's not a clear example in the public consciousness as to what constitutes fair use, so they can even be misused in good faith. Larger corporations can also have bots, or armies of hired outsourced cheap labor (usually in combination with each other) handing out youtube copyright claims left and right. The next step of the youtube claims system, specifically, is that you have to go to court, if you want to contest the claim, and court usually ends up in favor of the larger parties, either because they have the capability to have an out of court settlement, or just because they can hire the best lawyers, and it's relatively hard for most artists to fund what might be a protracted legal battle. I wonder whether or not the effect is that it's overall to the benefit, or not. Are these examples you've provided, are they representative, or are they examples of survivorship bias?
I dunno, I don't have access to the numbers on that one, and it's kind of hard to take artists at their word, because the plural of anecdote isn't data, and because lots of artists don't inhabit that legal grey space of copyright infringement, either out of just a lack of desire, or out of a self-preservation instinct. Then plenty of artists are also woefully misinformed people that blame the copyright-infringing artist for their copyright-infringing art. I think I'd probably want to prod a copyright lawyer on their take, as they would tend to see more of the legal backend, the enforcement, but then, there's a little bit of a conflict of interest there.
I also think that on the basis of just like, moral arguments against copyright, we could make the argument, right, that the obama hope ad was extremely popular because of the circumstances around which it arose, rather than because of the specific photograph used. i.e. it wouldn't be as popular if not for being a ripoff of a photo that was commissioned from some guy and then pumped out and thoroughly marketed and memeified. Sort of a similar argument to how piracy doesn't really transfer over to sales, that there's not an equivalent exchange going on there. The sales of the copy, or, the sales of the modified version, don't transfer to the original, is the idea. But then, it's kind of an open, hard to answer question, because it's pretty contextual and it's hard to read in hindsight. If the sales do transfer over to the original, if we get rid of the copy, then I think that crediting the original artist is probably the best thing you can do, because that drives more attention to the original, if the original is what people really wanted. That's sort of like, a limiting mechanism for how popular a thing might get on the merit of something else, as I see it. You could legally enforce that, and I think it would probably be a pretty good move, but you also kind of end up swamping yourself with the same problems that any legal enforcement mechanism will have, of being heavy-handed, grey, primarily only able to be wielded by the powerful, so I think you could also make the case that whatever the public would enforce would be fine.
lol who reads books nowadays we have better things like shorts and tiktok now
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.
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.
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. Capitalism inherently drives towards monopolies.
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