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.
Just because it’s the norm doesn’t mean it’s not excessive. In contrast, Apple’s implementation of a 30% cut is even worse, since with an iPhone you can’t just install an app from another source (and even when you can in the case of the EU, there are recurring costs for doing so). Since Steam accounts for the majority of PC video game sales, with AAA titles only not releasing on it when they have a clear financial motive not to, Valve’s use of a price parity clause effectively makes it the arbiter of what the industry standard markup on PC should be.
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.
As I mentioned in another thread, if their running costs were close to the revenues they make then their owner wouldn’t be a multiple yachts owning billionaire.
Their cut is a %, which means that as games become more expensive they make more money. But their running costs actually go down as they improve their tech and code.
An internal memo was made public and they make more revenue per employee than Microsoft.
We’re overpaying for games but people just got used to it.
Forcing you to sell at the same price as on steam when customers will be downloading from steam servers anyway is not sketchy but very fair.
As a developer you could set the game price on steam to a high number and sell keys on your own site for cheaper. Anyone who buys a key then used steam resources to download it. The dev keeps the 30% since its not a sale through steam. Yeah id like free file hosting with terabytes of bandwidth too please.
If you sell the game yourself and provide the files, you can set lower prices. This is fair and valve doesn’t restrict that.
There was a indie dev, the Spiderweb games guy, who refused to use Steam for years and he sold his games on his website. I think it was from like 2008 all the way to 2022. Refused to give Valve a cut.
Then he finally released it on Steam and he wrote a blog post how his niche games sold extremely well and regrets leaving so much money on the table for years.
Apparently the ones being pirated in this ring. My point is people still want retro gaming consoles and games. If the IP holders aren’t selling them, what do they expect people to do?
“Physical copies” is a big ask, considering they would also have to be selling the hardware to run those games.
To your credit, they aren’t actually selling most of their back catalog anymore, since their e-shops that sold games for the WiiU/3DS are closed down, and with them, the Virtual Console died. Now we’ve only got a subscription-based library to play a much more limited selection of old games.
Either way, it’s not Nintendo’s fault you pirate games. You want to play old games, and you don’t want to pay too much money for them, so you pirate them. Let’s be real.
There are retro revival consoles that aren’t deliberately made to looks like the original incarnations. I think the issue here was that the consoles being sold were deliberate counterfeits of otherwise valuable original retro machines.
For instance, litigious as they are Nintendo has either been unable or unwilling to snuff out things like the RetroN machines which play original Nintendo and SNES cartridges (and Genesis, and some others) but don’t claim to be a Nintendo machine or look like one in any way.
That said, I personally would totally buy a fake OG JDM Super Famicom just to have on the shelf, or even a shell just that looks like one.
Nintendo doesn’t have a legal right to go after NES clones in the States because the patent on the NES expired and anyone is legally allowed to make perfect duplicates of NES hardware.
The only legal ground Nintendo has is software copyright for games they published and / or licensed ( probably just published )
What do they mean sex scenes are common? None of the games I have played in the last couple years haves had those kinds of scenes. Some minor flirting and romance, but no sex.
“I turned up and was told what I would be filming would be a graphic rape scene,” she said.
"This act could be watched for as long or as little time as the player wanted through a window, and then a player would be able to shoot this character in the head.
What game is this even? I mean, why would any game need a graphic rape scene? Who is this going to sell to?
Don’t video games outside of Japan try to avoid getting AO rated any more?
What game is this even? I mean, why would any game need a graphic rape scene? Who is this going to sell to?
Don’t video games outside of Japan try to avoid getting AO rated any more?
Sounds like some typical David Cage bullshit. Wouldn’t be surprised at all if it was one of his games.
Edit: Considering the content of the games, and looking over her IMDb credits, it was very likely one of The Dark Pictures Anthology games, which was actually my second guess after David Cage (well, those or Until Dawn; same developers) due to some of the weird shit Supermassive Games add in for “shock value” because “horror”.
No surprise that she suddenly stopped working with them after House of Ashes, so that was probably the game in question, if I had to guess by context here.
There are only a handful of studios that’ll throw that kind of shit in their games. Quantic Dream and Supermassive are always the most likely culprits.
I mean, that’s not cruelty free. Someone’s still gotta animate that. And most good animators either act scenes out beforehand and/or use reference footage.
I’m fairly certain that applies to keys a dev requests be generated, so that any Steam keys can’t be sold elsewhere for cheaper than they are on Steam itself. Games that are sold on multiple platforms including Steam can absolutely be sold at different prices. I know, because I’ve bought games elsewhere because they were cheaper than on Steam at the time due to sales.
The lawsuit doesn’t imply that Steam forces their piece to always be cheaper than the competition. Sales can happen on different stores at different times, thus a game can be $50 on Steam and $40 on Epic today.
But Steam forces sellers to offer “the same offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time” - source (sorry, Shitter link) from this article, which is about a similar lawsuit from 2021.
And the language used means that, while this only applies to devs who make use of Steam keys, it doesn’t apply to the Steam keys themselves - if you want to use Steam keys, you also can’t offer discounts on competing storefronts. From the source:
Rosen said he ran into that issue when he decided to release Overgrowth at a lower price on other storefronts in order to take advantage of their lower commission rates. “When I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM,” Rosen wrote.
Hot take but I wish sex scenes were just eliminated from games entirely. A nice fade to black is a million times better than awkwardly watching some 3D models gyrating along with weird exaggerated “this is what sex sounds like” acting.
Started a fresh playthrough on the 21st and man the time they put in shows. Really wish companies like CDPR would go the Larian route of funding big projects like this instead of going public. Shareholders ruined CP2077 launch. It should have been delayed a year or two from its original launch. Instead it was rushed and then after launch they had to fix the rushed product before making/finishing the game they wanted to make. If CP2077 released as it is now or even slightly less polished, it would be considered a top 5 game of all time.
Lessons are there to be learned by other studios. Hopefully they are paying attention. Gamers will wait for a great game.
All that being said, I’m excited to hand over $30 now that I’ve seen the game perform. Stoked to see Elba.
I mean, it would be nice of course, but lets not forget Larian almost went bankrupt in the process. I mean this as in Larian is the exception. And they made a gigantic gamble which could’ve been their ruin had it not turned out so good.
You know what’s really funny? CDPR only had one big AAA game release without any major problems, the Witcher 3. Thronebreaker was a small scale game based on something already made and I don’t feel that one counts.
The Witcher 1 and the Witcher 2 were bad enough at launch that they had to release an “enhanced edition” of both games to fix the problems. If you don’t believe me, then just look at the piss poor Linux “port” of the Witcher 2.
The only reason the Witcher 3 wasn’t in such a bad state was because it was delayed like 4 or 5 times and released a year and a half later then it was intended. Cyberpunk 2077 has followed the same development path as the Witcher 1 and 2, but for some stupid reason people thought CDPR was immune to bad releases.
WAIT WHAT??? have you been around during launch? does everyone keep forgetting how shit actually was? like i said in a previous comment, it astounds me how people still think they should give these hacks even a microinch. witcher 3 launched in an AWFUL state literally, and i do mean LITERALLY as bad as c2077, it ran like absolute ass, ai was funny as best it took them months to fix the awful state the game run as, the ui also had a serious overhaul, just to name a few youd be lucky to reach a maximum of 60fps on a highend machine of the time. oh and
it was delayed like 4 or 5 times and released a year and a half later then it was intended.
it was delayed once, not 4 to 5 times
this rotating door of a company never had a single release that didnt launch like ass
Were you around during the Witcher 1 and 2 launches? Compared to them them Witcher 3 was a godsend. The Witcher 1 had terrible performance, bad loading times, just bad in general, the Witcher 2 had horrible performance, bad AI pathing, broken quests etc. Both had to have big overhauls.
The Witcher 3 was delayed at least twice, was originally to launch in 2014, then pushed back to February 2015, then again to may 19th 2015, 4 or 5 times is incorrect .The next-gen patches were then delayed a couple times as well. The Witcher 3 was a decent launch outside the garbage nvidia hairworks nonsense.
Were you around during the Witcher 1 and 2 launches? Compared to them them Witcher 3 was a godsend. The Witcher 1 had terrible performance, bad loading times, just bad in general, the Witcher 2 had horrible performance, bad AI pathing, broken quests etc. Both had to have big overhauls.
The Witcher 3 was delayed at least twice, was originally to launch in 2014, then pushed back to February 2015, then again to may 19th 2015, 4 or 5 times is incorrect .The next-gen patches were then delayed a couple times as well. The Witcher 3 was a decent launch outside the garbage nvidia hairworks nonsense.
their demands was based on what they where told by cdpr, and they said to the investors everything was going swimmingly just look it up, you have the information at your fingertips
Live action with the producer who make half of the worse superhero movies, the guy only produce movies from famous IP. A fucking money milking machine producing Zelda…
With a director who’s most known for doing some hunger games ripoff-ripoff YA garbage. It’s so amazingly beyond parody that if you told me Nintendo’s plan was to delegitimize film as an art form, I’d believe you.
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