“The legal action, originally filed in 2024 by digital rights campaigner Vicki Shotbolt”
Vicki is a leading campaigner for children’s digital rights, with over 20 years of senior leadership experience in national charities. She is the founder and CEO of Parent Zone, an organisation that works with families and global brands to improve the lives of children in today’s digital world.
That is why Valve is being sued for 900 million. Because Vicki Shotbolt wanted to. Why did she want to? Here is her claim (in her own words, not mine):
But Steam’s prices appear to be the lowest?
Steam can offer the lowest prices because of the anti-competitive price restrictions that Valve often imposes on game developers and producers (the Price Parity Obligations). This means a publisher or developer would not be able to list a game on another platform as well as Steam, unless the prices offered on Steam is the same or lower. This applies to games on all other distribution stores (including online and physical stores) not just those distributed by Steam Keys. This allows Valve to maintain the monopoly position it has for PC Games as there is not real incentive for gamers to go elsewhere where a game may be cheaper (which would then in turn enable those other platforms to improve).
It is also not possible to offer add-on content on other distribution platforms for cheaper or at an earlier time: this limits the ability of rivals to compete on price and enables Valve to charge the consumer higher prices in the absence of competition. The claim argues that the add-on content is a separate product, and that through the price restrictions and inability to purchase add-on content from another distribution platform or the developer itself Valve has illegally tied these products and limited consumer choice. Consumers must then purchase via Steam and pay its commission charge.
In the UK, dominant companies are not allowed to charge excessive prices. The claim argues that Valve’s commission rate of up to 30% is excessive given: competitors lower commission rates; the way the platform operates for the consumer; and the high level of profit that Valve is making absent a viable competitor (which its behaviour directly restricts as developers are not permitted to list games at lower prices on competing platforms). This unfair commission charge is paid for by the consumer.
"[…] but Epic Games wasn’t sued when they bought Rocket League and Fall Guys to remove them from steam?
Steam has a much easier claim to be considered a monopoly. It’s a little like (note: I never said it’s exactly like or it is very much like—I only said it’s a little like) Chrome being a monopoly for web browsers—everyone chooses to install chrome on their computers when they install a PC and prefer not to use the pre-installed Edge or Safari. Very few people install Epic games, much like very few people install Firefox. If you want to game on PC, you pretty much have to install Steam to play with your friends you know? Otherwise you’re kinda lame and don’t have friends.
because of the anti-competitive price restrictions that Valve often imposes on game developers and producers (the Price Parity Obligations). This means a publisher or developer would not be able to list a game on another platform as well as Steam, unless the prices offered on Steam is the same or lower. This applies to games on all other distribution stores (including online and physical stores) not just those distributed by Steam Keys
Textbook anti-trust lawsuit. Different from what Epic does, I doubt they impose such rules on developers.
It only applies to Steam product keys though, so developers cannot sell cheap Steam keys on other platforms while still taking advantage of Steam’s services.
It only applies to Steam product keys though, so developers cannot sell cheap Steam keys on other platforms while still taking advantage of Steam’s services.
I believe the problem is that it isn’t just Steam keys. There’s apparently emails from Valve employees that state that it’s all versions of the game, and that seems to be the real crux here. And if that’s true it’s pretty shitty, and they might actually lose this.
Do you have a source for that? All I can find on their Steamworks site is the rules on Steam keys being restricted, not other versions. Maybe I missed that email part in the news.
It only applies to steam keys though. Like if you want to sell on other storefronts (like Epic) for cheaper, it’s perfectly fine. You simply can’t sell steam keys on other storefronts for cheaper. It’s not really “price fixing” as much as it is “Steam ensuring their servers aren’t used to download the game unless the dev has properly paid them for the key”…
Like imagine a company wants to sell more copies of their game. So they set up their own site to sell directly to consumers, and it’s cheaper than buying on Steam. This is totally fine. Consumers can still choose to add the standalone version as a non-Steam game to be able to launch it via Steam.
It’s only a breach of contract if they start offering steam keys for that same (cheaper) price, which allows the game to be downloaded via Steam, includes achievement integrations, includes Steam’s friend list “join game” multiplayer, includes Steam Deck/Steam Machine optimizations, etc… If they want all of those nice Steam integrations, they need an official Steam key. And that Steam key can’t be sold cheaper than on Steam’s official store.
ah yes, they are price fixing by saying devs can’t set the price on steam (which the devs control) higher than the price on other platforms (which the devs also control)
That’s not true, it only applies if you’re selling a steam key. Devs are free to set the price on any platform they want, want proof? Check out the currently free game on epic which has never been free on Steam.
Steam provides developers with infinite steam keys that they can sell outside of steam for 100% profit, however those keys cannot be sold at a lesser price than what it’s sold on steam. Which honestly sounds like common sense.
Sure, but that’s more about Valve not pursuing violations than anything else (in other comment I also mentioned how they turn a blind eye to Humble Bundle as well). But legally they could go after silent hill f and demand it be sold for a similar value to $31.49 since some time has passed and stem users have not been offered a comparable offer. I think what’s in the clause they make people sign is more important than whether they enforce it or not, because if it was about price parity with other stores then it would be abusive (even if they didn’t enforced it always), but if it is about selling something they provide then it’s not abusive even if they do enforced it always.
Which isn’t accurate and is more nuanced involving Steam keys like another user said. For instance, Prey is on sale for $6 on the PlayStation store but still $30 on Steam.
As per my understanding (which isn’t saying much), Steam takes a 30% cut of each sale.
In UK, someone with a specific agenda claimed to represent gamers as a class and sued reasoning that the 30% cut inflates the price of games globally even beyond Steam’s store, harming everyone.
Did i understand it right? No idea.
What’s the actual goal here? Also no idea.
Is Steam the “good guy” in all this? Of course not.
I think devs actually get quite a bit for that 30%. Let’s present a hypothetical. What if Valve offered an option where you could list your game on Steam with no restrictions and they’d only take a 10% cut, but the tradeoff is, they won’t promote your game at all? Like, it won’t show up in any Steam storefront advertisements, can’t participate in sales, etc. - it’s still there if it’s linked to from off-Steam or if someone searches for it, but it won’t be promoted, period.
How do you think that would work out for developers? I’d argue not well, especially for small studios.
The promotion those games get applies to the game as a whole, not only through Steam - someone can see the promotion on Steam, then go shop around and buy it elsewhere. Why should Valve promote a game if they aren’t getting a cut of the sales?
Marketshare, and you have to remember the difference between platform and store. If Epic made them exclusive to the Epic Machine™ then there would be a problem but moving from Steam to Epic doesn’t remove Windows support.
Imagine Target bought Great Value (Walmart brand) and moved it from Walmart to target. Would anyone care?
Actually sony tried to fight it because of the COD franchise mainly but didn’t get into suing them, but they were a big part of the opposition when it came to governments giving approval of such a huge merger
If Epic spent half as much money as they are suing organisations and instead funded developing their shop into a gaming community platform like Steam, they’d probably have caught up by now.
I don’t understand this I use it for rocket league occasionally and it all just works ™ ? I prefer Valve 100% to slopnite developers but the launcher seems fine to me. (On Linux Heroic is unlikely better than steam which has a bunch of random bugs every few weeks)
I wouldn’t call them malware, but both Valve and Epic are not your friends and they have done a lot of bad shit (Valve was huge in enabling lootbox gameplay).
They could remove that competition by making a better product, but that is somehow always the last thing they’d ever think about. It never stops being so fucking weird with all these business people who go to great lengths to do shitty stuff and always end up making it worse for everyone except a quick buck for themselves, even though they could easily make a lot more for a longer time by simply doing a good job. But no, that would require anything other than immediate greed. Absolutely vile people.
If they didn’t have Fortnite they probably wouldn’t even have the money to dump into Unreal Engine to make it where it is today. They probably would ask Tencent for more money and Tencent would have bought the rest of the company. The game engine business is just not as profitable as Fortnite, just look at Unity.
There’s an argument for using these services in the early stages because they often operate at a loss in the hope that they will secure a monopoly in the future. The trick is to immediately abandon them when they jack the price up. I recently heard that in the food delivery space virtually no one is turning a profit.
Even worse, it’s costing the food places you order from money. We have a lot of restaurants here that will give you free stuff if you do not use Thuisbezorgd which is owned by Just Eat Takeaway. They also own the American Grubhub since 2021 and are also active in the UK, Germany, Canada and the Netherlands.
He literally said Epic’s launcher/store is ready as is, doesn’t need more development. It also runs in Unreal Engine, so you get Chromium (CEF) + Unreal Engine running just for one launcher/store.
At least on Linux you can run Unreal Editor without EGS (because it doesn’t exist on Linux) and if you’ve claimed any free games on Epic, you can use Heroic launcher to manage them easily.
To be honest, Epic is doing a good job of tearing down walled gardens in places like mobile, and we’ll probably be better off for it. But yeah, they’ve done a terrible job of competing with Steam.
Of course, but…broken clock, you know? A large percentage of personal computers will be freed from Windows in large part because of Valve, even though they profit off of legalized child gambling addiction. And walled gardens in mobile will be broken down in large part because of Epic, which uses dark patterns to trick people out of their money in pursuit of a cultural hodge podge of nonsense that won’t even exist in a few decades.
it’s often more risky and expensive to hire, train and develop systems and communities like that, especially when doing it against the tide, than to just try to trip up the competition. It’s not just that it’s dificult and it costs money, but it’s not preferred because investors abhor risks.
Isn’t this seen in global politics all the time. When US says China is too dominant in X and we need to fight it. They are not saying that US will invest in shit that will help them compete. All or 90% of the actions is to try to trip up, sabotage and sanction the competition.
Because sweeney is greedy lying piece of shit, who’s using “think of poor developers being robbed by app stores” to cut himself bigger market share by suing fuck out of competitors
Like they won over google and guess what? He fucked over “all the poor developers” and cut himself a juicy deal to settle antitrust case
I haven’t really looked deeply into this issue but what caught my eye was the claim that a 30% fee was excessive. I’m no insider into video game publishing but 30% is the standard retail markup for many things. If you bought a candy bar today, it probably cost the mini mart you bought it from 70% of what they’re charging.
It most certainly is not standard in retail. Most retail stores have a margin of a couple percentage points. Walmart, for example, is ~3% net margin most years
Unless you’re trying to compare wholesale price to final consumer price. In which case I would say that’s a silly and pointless thing to compare, but even then it’s far smaller than 30% across retail and varies wildly based on the individual item being sold
A 30% cut is only really common in the tech sector where the underlying economics make it feasible
I just did a cursory search online and the only markup I could fine below 30% was cellphones at about 8-10% and groceries at 5-25%. Now, I wouldn’t make a wager on the precise accuracy of a cursory glance but it’s telling that even in a Capitalist society, no ones denying their huge markups. Most sources list the markup on cloths to be 50-400%
More like the local store suing Walmart for putting them out of business, but only after they pushed away all of their customers with bad ideas and flashy gimmicks
They launched with a 12% service fee, dropped that service fee to 10%, and then dropped the service fee entirely for the first $1Mn in sales per year.
In June 2025, they released a new feature enabling developers to launch their own webshops hosted by the Epic Games Store. These webshops could offer players out-of-app purchases, as a more “cost-effective” alternative to in-app purchases.
They provide developers with free to generate license keys, and keyless integration with other e-shop stores including GOG, Humble Bundle, and Prime gaming.
They offer a user review system.
They also added cloud saves in July of 2025.
The thing is, they offer none of the other features Steam offers:
In-Home Streaming
Remote Play with Friends
Family Accounts
Achievements
Price Adjusted Bundles
Gifting Games
Shopping Cart
TV/Big Screen Mode
Epic launched their service in 2018. It’s been 7 years. The only reason not to offer feature parity (for a company that makes $4.6Bn - 5.7Bn in revenue, and a shop that makes $1.09Bn, you’d think they would be enticing users with the services they want.
What they have done instead is exclusivity deals that plenty of consumers complain about but devs don’t seem to care about so long as they’re getting paid.
So, the excuse that Steam got there first (as if it’s just about that and the reason their market share is what it is is because they have refined, adapted, and improved their service offering over time) doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when steam has a significant percent of the market share (79.5% to epic’s 42.3%) but is only making twice the revenue of their rival store.
It makes sense for GOG or Itch.io who’s market cap is smaller by quite a lot to not offer the same feature parity. Each of those platforms has figured out they can offer other things to devs and consumers to make themselves competitive over time.
Sweeny’s attack is basically just a pity party he’s throwing for himself because he doesn’t want to compete.
Edit
This is a sanity check because I wasn’t correct with my numbers by mistake.
So, the excuse that Steam got there first (as if it’s just about that and the reason their market share is what it is is because they have refined, adapted, and improved their service offering over time) doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when steam has a significant percent of the market share (79.5% to epic’s 42.3%) but is only making twice the revenue of their rival store.
These numbers are not correct and I was mistaken. In actuality Valve’s revenue is approximately 16 times that of Epic e-shop. It looks like an estimate of Steam’s game sales is that about $4Bn of their revenue last year was from Steam’s game sales. I am trying to corroborate that from other sources.
I’m still looking into and trying to parse out what percentage of steams sales last year were hardware (epic to my knowledge doesn’t have a hardware arm of their business), and it’s not immediately clear how much they made on the e-shop portion of their business alone so I can get more comparable numbers.
What I have been able to find so far I’ve posted below, and I’ll try to remember to come back and do some math on that after I focus on the first thing.
I am definitely not on epic side here, but the reason they had to pay for exclusivity for games is because valve doesn’t allow any games on steam to be sold cheaper elsewhere. Which developers follow because steam brings in a lot of revenue.
Without that, epic could try to compete with steam (and its extra features) by offering lower prices, and letting the consumer make the choice of features vs price.
But valve policies effectively make it impossible for any new marketplace to compete.
That’s false. They do not allow steam keys (free to generate steam licenses of games) to be sold cheaper anywhere else for less than the game is sold for on steam. And in exchange, the profits on those game licenses sold elsewhere the developer gets to keep 100% of.
It is alleged by one developer that steam told them they can’t sell their game for less on other stores even if they use a different company to generate the license keys. But that hasn’t been proven. And since only 2 other developers are backing the new class action lawsuit out of literally thousands of devs who would be effected this way if it were true, it logically doesn’t make sense. The dev who brought the first lawsuit that go thrown out? Their game is still up on Steam.
The fact is, Epic is making half the revenue Steam is with 11 times less market share, and not gaining market share because customers don’t want to use their store. Customers don’t want free games they want services that work.
You’re alleging that Valve is doing something anti-competitive to maintain their market share here and you still haven’t given me what I asked for.
What regulations are you expecting to be imposed, and how will that detrimentally or positively effect the consumers?
Steam isn’t being sued by Sweeny, they are being sued on behalf of 14 million UK gamers.
Also, epic has an estimated 3% to 7% of the market share (not 42 which makes no sense with steam having the other 80%), yet they should be regulated as well. If you stopped bootlicking for half a second, you would realise that this isn’t about who’s the worst but the fact that they are all bad (except itch, bless them).
Your enjoyment of their product doesn’t mean it isn’t having a serious and negative impact on the industry. Amazon is really convenient too, can you defend them next please?
I was quickly googling market share stuff on break so I misread the Epic e-shop market share vs Epic’s full market share outside that.
The fact that Steam only makes double what epic e-shop makes with literally 11 times the market influence?
What regulations are you expecting out of this? How will that have a positive effect on consumers?
I never said this was about good or bad. I pointed out pros and cons of using each service which extrapolated quite literally to why consumers choose Steam over Epic.
A monopolistic corp who uses anit-consumer/anti-competitve tactics to remain a market leader/? monopoly is illegal. And it’s regulated.
The only reason steam is being investigated at all is because 2 or 3 out of literal thousands of game developers have made a claim that steam is threatening to remove their game if they try to sell it on other game stores for cheaper than steam (not steam keys, but using another stores licensing keys).
That hasn’t been proven and if it is, a further investigation into how wide spread that behavior is would still be needed to prove that Valve or Steam came by their market share illegally.
Also the fact that you brought up Amazon as the foil to your argument at the end is laughable. For multiple reasons.
Steams revenue was 16b (edit: it’s 4b) in 2025, epics was 1b in 2024. At least click the links instead of pasting what the Google summary tells you. You are mixing up epics store revenue with their unreal engine revenue.
The fact is any game store front is a money printing machine mostly because of the rampant price fixing, hard to enter markets and abuse from those that hold the lion share of that market (Steam, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo).
That money is being sucked out of the companies that are actually making games, and is leading to a reduction in quality, layoffs and bankruptcies.
For regulation, we could easily have limits on the percentage store fronts are allowed to demand for digital media, but each time there’s a lawsuit, a bunch of idiots loudly fight it. Lawmakers aren’t going to enact laws that go against what the lobbyist want, especially if the majority of the population have been instructed that the boot is for their benefit.
Your list of pros and cons doesn’t matter, every player being compared is bad. It’s just a defense in favor of Gabens yacht fleet at this point. Exclaiming that steam shouldn’t change because you like their product, even though it’s clearly having an impact, is the same as defending Amazon because drop shipping is easier than going to the store.
Fyi, I use both, I literally own a steam deck and the sd card came from Amazon. Defending their practices is just fucking weak though.
I can’t corroborate that Steam’s revenue for the e-shop was $16Bn. The best estimate that I have is that their game sales netted them $4Bn last year. I’m still trying to find a better source for that. However we may both be wrong here.
Ya, I misread it and I’m way off. It’s 4bn. Epic also made a lot less, my stats are not for gross revenue but generated revenue before they split it with the devs. Amateur hour over here (me, not you).
I went off in my other comment and was a bit of a dick throughout the convo. It just feels like someone is being robbed here. 4bn is a lot of money and, from the wolffire lawsuit leak, they have less than 100 people working on steam full time.
From what I read, that $4BN number could be taken two ways. I don’t know if that analyst excluded the games Valve developed, and that $4BN is games sales of everything else, or if that’s what they made from their own titles. I didn’t want to go through the rigamarole of Xitter to see the direct quote and I haven’t had a chance to find it in the internet archive.
I also kind of want a good run down of what steam offers to developers that makes their platform so attractive because my understanding is it’s more than just e-shop services and that’s one of the reasons I have seen touted as why people feel the service fee is reasonable.
I didn’t want to leave you on read, but I also am still looking up all kinds of random information to put together.
Also, my confusion is because there are two different lawsuits involving the 30% cut of game sales.
There’s a class action lawsuit in the UK involving all of steams consumers there, predicated on the idea that the 30% service fee makes games more expensive to the detriment if those consumers.
And there’s a different class action lawsuit brought by developers Wolfire and Dark Catt representing every developer who uses Steam as an E-Shop platform, also over the 30% service fee and alleged anti-competitve practices (Wolfire say that Steam told them they couldn’t sell their game anywhere else for less than it was available on Steam (even if they didn’t use steams license keys)).
I know I can come off as really terse, and tone is hard via text anyway. But thank you for addressing it.
I’m not reading the Google summary. There is no Google summary for me. That shit is deep sixed. I don’t want it. I love it when people automatically assume that I must be using Generative AI to get some silly answer off the internet.
The fact is any game store front is a money printing machine mostly because of the rampant price fixing, hard to enter markets and abuse from those that hold the lion share of that market (Steam, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo).
If so then Epic should have caught up by now, no?
That money is being sucked out of the companies that are actually making games, and is leading to a reduction in quality, layoffs and bankruptcies.
Please back that up. The game developers seeing bankruptcies are seeing them because of gross mismanagement and a never ending attempt to deliver crap that their consumers don’t want. Pushing the “bleeding edge” of graphics while making games that sell poorly because they want to charge $60-70 for a game even 5 years after it came out.
And that’s with the proliferation of crap like in game micro transactions, season passes, DRM, and internet sanity checks to even play single player games.
Indie developers are caught in the lurch, but that’s generally the case with any small business, and on top of that the regulation will probably harm them more than it will help them because the percentage of sales pays for things that they use to market their game.
What is the limit on what store fronts can charge going to be? How much is too much? What does that 30% pay for? Do you know? Does it scale by user base?
Would other store fronts who charge less be more successful by a meaningful amount if they were charging the same?
It literally doesn’t matter where your products come from. I own more computer games on disc from physical stores than I do from steam. I have paid for more than one game on both steam, switch, PS4, or physical copy. I’m not trying to call Steam the good guy here.
But I do not trust the developer who originally brought the lawsuit because even now most of the other devs who have games for sale on steam have not attempted to make a statement, join the class action, or even make a complaint about what is alleged.
On top of that, why sue only steam if this is a problem. Nobody is suing Nintendo, PlayStation, or Microsoft over this.
I also never said “steam shouldn’t change”, or that steam shouldn’t take a smaller cut.
I feel like you scanned right over half of what I did say so you could be snotty in your response. You have a good day dude.
And yes, all those points you mention are happening, but having a huge chunk of your profits taken like that obviously aggravates it.
What does that 30% pay for? Do you know?
I know it pays for Gabens yacht fleet worth 1.5 billion lol. We do have rough numbers. We know their employees count and revenue, and that they are making an estimated 11 million per employee from an article by the financial Times. That doesn’t include data atorage but I doubt the cost of offering downloads is anywhere near there revenue.
I own more computer games on disc from physical stores than I do from steam.
I want to point out that this is pure whataboutism, just like the OP. But what about epic, but what about nintendo. All of them deserve to get sued.
I also never said
Then the proper response would be “yes, steam does deserve to get sued, epics behavior doesn’t even have anything to do with the subject, but they also deserve to get sued”. Like what’s your point then? Why make a bullet point of things steam does well if you aren’t trying to imply that they are “good enough to be allowed to abuse”.
I feel like you scanned right over half of what I did say.
You’re not being annoying. It’s probably because I lost track and for what it’s worth I am sorry, I’ll try to fix it but probably won’t catch all of them.
I personal want a store that is native Linux. I have yet to find a store that does it better, no matter your OS. Epic, GOG, Amazon, ubisoft, and Xbox gamepass do not support or have a native Linux programs and require using Wine/proton to access their stores. Having an extra layer on top makes it hard to install games as all of them are expecting a C:/ that is just how any Linux OSes work.
Valve is being sued because they are forcing others to follow policies that further entrenches Steam as the largest store.
Since Epic bought the game developer, it only applies to themselves. It is much harder to sue someone over a decision that only applies to something they own. How can a company be sued for not selling their product at a store? Should Valve be sued for not selling their own games on Epic or GOG?
Is Epic’s decision to only sell their games on their store annoying for users? Yes. But unfortunately, there is nothing illegal about. There would be a better chance of a lawsuit of Epic paying other game developers for exclusivity, but that would still not be easy as game exclusivity is still a significant factor on game consoles as well. Albeit much less than in the past.
Not allowing devs to sell steam download codes on other stores, But the ban only applies if they are selling the download code for cheaper than Steam
Not allowing devs to sell steam DLC download codes on other stores
I don’t think 1 or 2 puts other stores at any disadvantage. If a store wants to sell steam download codes then Valve has to get their normal cut. If they don’t want to pay the valve tax, then they don’t need to offer a Steam download code.
I could see Valve controlling a bit of a monopoly in the game launcher and gaming social media markets.
A pro-consumer change that the EU could impose would be to split up the game marketplace from the game launcher and gaming social media markets through intercompatible APIs.
Maybe you could download games from steam in GOG or Lutris, and the steam overlay works on GOG or Lutris too. Maybe your discord friends could show up in the Steam friend list.
There are laws that say that abusing a monopoly is illegal. Steam is objectively a monopoly in pc games. Sure, you don’t have to use it, but it is basically impossible for indie developers to make a living without it.
Now, the question is if valve’s actions are actually abusing the monopoly, or normal business practices.
Hytale has incredible publicity for an indie release and caters to a target group that’s used to a separate launcher. Not comparable to the usual release.
Notably, almost none of those are indie games, and almost any indie game that you did list came out in the 2000s like Roblox, before Steam was the behemoth it is today. Half of them are games by the same sets of AAA studios like Epic Games, Blizzard, and MiHoYo, and most Blizzard games have an entire franchise of games older than Steam itself to piggyback off of. Speaking of, anything by Blizzard isn’t even true… their most recent games like Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 are both on Steam. Tarkov is also on Steam now, but I’ll admit I’m splitting hairs here since it spent nearly a decade off of it. Though the fact that it released on Steam with its 1.0 update does say something.
So I really don’t think any of those games aside from debatably Tarkov shows that the average modern indie dev can be successful outside of Steam.
There are not many objectively provable monopolies and i doubt that English law would support that claim without extremely strong evidence, generally utilities are the only ones that’d get close. A necessity with high fixed costs and infrastructure lock-in.
Steam has high market share in a segment, but not necessarily a distinct segment, I’m sure steam would argue that there are enough consumers who can and do substitute between pc and console and mobile, as well as other vendors so that their market power is mitigated by a fair amount of consumer mobility.
So what you’re looking to prove is unlikely to be a pure “monopoly” but ‘excess market power’, and ‘abuse of market power’. That is a complex legal art that the competition regulator is usually not that successful at proving, at least in English law.
Abuse of market power has to impact consumers not producers. There are always marginal producers struggling to make a profit - that happens in competitive markets, producers bidding prices down, some going out of business. I’m not saying I agree, but that’s more or less how the law sees it, lookup what they let supermarkets get away with in contracts with farmers.
To show consumer harm from upstream market manipulation you’d probably have to show a material dearth of choice being created by steam policies in order to jack up prices. Maybe that can be demonstrated, but it’s not simple and more likely to come down to subjective interpretation of the arguments and evidence from both sides rather than any unarguable objective truth.
If it were unarguable or objectively true then the CMA might lead the investigation itself instead of this being a private action. Though maybe this is too small a market for them to worry about.
You have to differentiate between a monopoly in economics and a monopoly in law.
In economics a monopoly is the only seller of a good with no other competition. If I am the only one who owns apple trees, I got a monopoly on apples.
In law a monopoly is someone who owns so much of the market that they can charge unfair prices. If I am the only one who owns large orchards full of the best kind of apple trees, it doesn’t really matter to me that someone else has a couple mediocre trees in their backyard. I am not a economics-monopoly, since someone else is also selling apples, but I hold enough of the market that I can set the price to whatever I want.
(Ok, the analogy isn’t perfect, but you get it, I hope. Basically the “excess market power” thing you talked about is the legal definition of a monopoly.)
Customers don’t necessarily need to be end customers. If steam is charging their business customers too much, that counts too. (It also affects the end customers too, btw.)
So the question is: If I don’t release a game on steam, will that cause it to underperform significantly? If so, does steam charge a lot above market price? If both of these questions are answered with yes, a lawsuit could be successful.
My point was that proving dominance and abuse is rarely objective fact. It sure isn’t showing market share and that some games companies go out of business. They have to show the things that valve does to restrict competition - being popular isn’t enough alone.
Your last question is quite a good example of how hard it is to prove because it includes counterfactual comparisons.
This might be why it seems (if the journo is to be believed) that they’re going down the tie-ins angle for the DLC, not necessarily headline pricing. Thou the latter would probably a worse outcome for valve if guilty.
I haven’t really looked deeply into this issue but what caught my eye was the claim that a 30% fee was excessive. I’m no insider into video game publishing but 30% is the standard retail markup for many things. If you bought a candy bar today, it probably cost the mini mart you bought it from 70% of what they’re charging.
Retail needs a location to store and sell their product. They need employees as well. One small Walmart has as many employees as steam does. Retails also buys the product in bulk, there is a bigger risk involved if it doesn’t sell or even sells slowly.
and steam needs data centers and servers and power and all the stuff to keep those running. ultimately though it didn’t matter. if steam thinks that their ecosystem is worth charging that much, then it’s up to the dev to decide if what steam provides is worth it to them
We don’t know how much it costs for their servers but I doubt it’s anywhere near what they charge devs. Gaben having an 11bn dollar net worth kind of points to that.
The biggest problem is that it isn’t up to devs since steam has market dominance. Not putting your game on steam is basically suicide, they have close to 90% of the PC market…
market dominance is not a monopoly. market dominance is a label given to the most successful product. and the product is successful because they offer a service that none else seems to be able to or wish to fulfill.
devs can choose to sell their game on steam, or windows live, or gog, epic game store, playstation, nintendo online, android app store, ios app store, on their own site, eb games, or the back of their car, what ever.
are all of these equally effective? nope. when you put your game on steam you get, the vast user base cultivated by valve, server space to host your game, massive server upload speeds, a built in store front, the discussion boards, steam game cloud, the stream overlays and stream input, steam workshop, community hubs, steam achievements, global money processing, themed sales, two special discovery windows. blah blah blah.
again, it’s up to the dev to decide if they want to pay 30% for these things.
to put it in perspective, when epic game store has a sale, steam makes a profit.
For brick and mortar, which has significantly more costs to make up than digital. Which is the entire point of this suit. And steam’s policy requires that no game can be regularly priced cheaper than on their platform - artificially raising prices across the board.
It’s bizarre seeing everyone here defend steam here just because they don’t like who’s saying it.
Steam provides more than just a one time exchange of download for money, so I wouldn’t exactly compare it to a store where you walk out the door and your exchange is completed. As a leftists, I think Steam makes too much money and should charge less and pay more but in a capitalist nation i don’t see Epic having a successful case
Depends if you’re a big developer or some indie one. Big developers commonly don’t pay fees or have special deals (Uber, etc.). Smaller ones pay 15% up to 1 million downloads, then it’s 30%. So if you want to pay less, get really rich first.
That being said, this is on top of the VAT, not part of it. Still charging 30% in 2026 feels criminal and greedy. This applies to nearly all big corporations, including Valve Corporation with Gabe’s fleet of yachts and company making more money per employee than any other company. It made more sense to take 30% cut when 100Gb of HDD costed thousand dollars, internet was metered in megabytes and the whole infrastructure was just not there yet, but this “industry standart” tax never changed even tho for them distributing apps has become far, far cheaper than it used to.
thats what apple forces and imposes on any developer that uses the app store, which is most of them since on ios alt stores are only a thing on eu and japan afaik
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That is why Valve is being sued for 900 million. Because Vicki Shotbolt wanted to. Why did she want to? Here is her claim (in her own words, not mine):
Steam has a much easier claim to be considered a monopoly. It’s a little like (note: I never said it’s exactly like or it is very much like—I only said it’s a little like) Chrome being a monopoly for web browsers—everyone chooses to install chrome on their computers when they install a PC and prefer not to use the pre-installed Edge or Safari. Very few people install Epic games, much like very few people install Firefox. If you want to game on PC, you pretty much have to install Steam to play with your friends you know? Otherwise you’re kinda lame and don’t have friends.
Textbook anti-trust lawsuit. Different from what Epic does, I doubt they impose such rules on developers.
It is a scummy thing to do but the leaders of the gaming industry, Gabe aside, have always been psychopaths.
Epic is trash, simple as
What are they being sued for? I guess I missed this?
Also I guess it could be argued they only removed it from new sales whereas people who already owned those titles on Steam still have them on Steam.
They are being accused of price fixing with the whole “can’t sell games for cheaper on other store fronts compared to the steam listing” thing
[email protected] explains it better below:
I’m pretty sure that Amazon also says that you can’t sell things on Amazon for more than you sell the same item elsewhere.
I’ve certainly seen a video claiming that.
I think this lawsuit is actually about allowing people to buy dlc from other stores for games that you bought through steam?
Oh well that’s totally fair, honestly.
It locks out real competitive pricing.
How does it do that?
It only applies to Steam product keys though, so developers cannot sell cheap Steam keys on other platforms while still taking advantage of Steam’s services.
Yes this is a more apt description, sorry, this whole thing has been stupid tbh.
I believe the problem is that it isn’t just Steam keys. There’s apparently emails from Valve employees that state that it’s all versions of the game, and that seems to be the real crux here. And if that’s true it’s pretty shitty, and they might actually lose this.
Do you have a source for that? All I can find on their Steamworks site is the rules on Steam keys being restricted, not other versions. Maybe I missed that email part in the news.
They were mentioned in a recent Youtube video by Bellular News. I haven’t read more about it myself.
I guess whether this is true or not will be a defining point of the whole lawsuit
It only applies to steam keys though. Like if you want to sell on other storefronts (like Epic) for cheaper, it’s perfectly fine. You simply can’t sell steam keys on other storefronts for cheaper. It’s not really “price fixing” as much as it is “Steam ensuring their servers aren’t used to download the game unless the dev has properly paid them for the key”…
Like imagine a company wants to sell more copies of their game. So they set up their own site to sell directly to consumers, and it’s cheaper than buying on Steam. This is totally fine. Consumers can still choose to add the standalone version as a non-Steam game to be able to launch it via Steam.
It’s only a breach of contract if they start offering steam keys for that same (cheaper) price, which allows the game to be downloaded via Steam, includes achievement integrations, includes Steam’s friend list “join game” multiplayer, includes Steam Deck/Steam Machine optimizations, etc… If they want all of those nice Steam integrations, they need an official Steam key. And that Steam key can’t be sold cheaper than on Steam’s official store.
ah yes, they are price fixing by saying devs can’t set the price on steam (which the devs control) higher than the price on other platforms (which the devs also control)
That’s not true, it only applies if you’re selling a steam key. Devs are free to set the price on any platform they want, want proof? Check out the currently free game on epic which has never been free on Steam.
Steam provides developers with infinite steam keys that they can sell outside of steam for 100% profit, however those keys cannot be sold at a lesser price than what it’s sold on steam. Which honestly sounds like common sense.
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Sure, but that’s more about Valve not pursuing violations than anything else (in other comment I also mentioned how they turn a blind eye to Humble Bundle as well). But legally they could go after silent hill f and demand it be sold for a similar value to $31.49 since some time has passed and stem users have not been offered a comparable offer. I think what’s in the clause they make people sign is more important than whether they enforce it or not, because if it was about price parity with other stores then it would be abusive (even if they didn’t enforced it always), but if it is about selling something they provide then it’s not abusive even if they do enforced it always.
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Which isn’t accurate and is more nuanced involving Steam keys like another user said. For instance, Prey is on sale for $6 on the PlayStation store but still $30 on Steam.
That’s because they can’t intimidate Bethesda with an email.
As per my understanding (which isn’t saying much), Steam takes a 30% cut of each sale. In UK, someone with a specific agenda claimed to represent gamers as a class and sued reasoning that the 30% cut inflates the price of games globally even beyond Steam’s store, harming everyone.
Did i understand it right? No idea. What’s the actual goal here? Also no idea. Is Steam the “good guy” in all this? Of course not.
Too bad a lot of people, even here or in other threads, don’t get it, so they willingly cheer for Valve simply because Tim Sweeney sucks.
I think devs actually get quite a bit for that 30%. Let’s present a hypothetical. What if Valve offered an option where you could list your game on Steam with no restrictions and they’d only take a 10% cut, but the tradeoff is, they won’t promote your game at all? Like, it won’t show up in any Steam storefront advertisements, can’t participate in sales, etc. - it’s still there if it’s linked to from off-Steam or if someone searches for it, but it won’t be promoted, period.
How do you think that would work out for developers? I’d argue not well, especially for small studios.
The promotion those games get applies to the game as a whole, not only through Steam - someone can see the promotion on Steam, then go shop around and buy it elsewhere. Why should Valve promote a game if they aren’t getting a cut of the sales?
Plus you get the download servers, payment processing, customer support, reviews, …
Well that’s stupid. If Steam charged less, the price of games wouldn’t change.
Developers and publishers would just pocket the difference.
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Because Epic and Tencent should have first pick from the IP farm.
Marketshare, and you have to remember the difference between platform and store. If Epic made them exclusive to the Epic Machine™ then there would be a problem but moving from Steam to Epic doesn’t remove Windows support.
Imagine Target bought Great Value (Walmart brand) and moved it from Walmart to target. Would anyone care?
It does remove easy Linux compatibility. Also you can run any storefront on steam deck, so not sure what your point is about hardware
A hypothetical Epic console.
Heroic gives Linux support and has the added benefit of being third party.
Same reason nobody, not even Sony, sued M$ for buying Activision-King and Bethesda.
Actually sony tried to fight it because of the COD franchise mainly but didn’t get into suing them, but they were a big part of the opposition when it came to governments giving approval of such a huge merger
If Epic spent half as much money as they are suing organisations and instead funded developing their shop into a gaming community platform like Steam, they’d probably have caught up by now.
I don’t understand this I use it for rocket league occasionally and it all just works ™ ? I prefer Valve 100% to slopnite developers but the launcher seems fine to me. (On Linux Heroic is unlikely better than steam which has a bunch of random bugs every few weeks)
“Gaming community.”
Steam and Epic are both malware.
I wouldn’t call them malware, but both Valve and Epic are not your friends and they have done a lot of bad shit (Valve was huge in enabling lootbox gameplay).
its not about making better product for epic. its about removing competition so they dont have to.
They could remove that competition by making a better product, but that is somehow always the last thing they’d ever think about. It never stops being so fucking weird with all these business people who go to great lengths to do shitty stuff and always end up making it worse for everyone except a quick buck for themselves, even though they could easily make a lot more for a longer time by simply doing a good job. But no, that would require anything other than immediate greed. Absolutely vile people.
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we are products and cattle for them, not customers. Their customers are other rich people they associate with and exchange favors and assets with.
I wonder if this is how it would be to live in world dominated by vampires.
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If they didn’t have fortnite and unreal engine money propping them up it would have closed by now. Hasn’t been profitable since it opened in 2018.
If they didn’t have Fortnite they probably wouldn’t even have the money to dump into Unreal Engine to make it where it is today. They probably would ask Tencent for more money and Tencent would have bought the rest of the company. The game engine business is just not as profitable as Fortnite, just look at Unity.
There’s an argument for using these services in the early stages because they often operate at a loss in the hope that they will secure a monopoly in the future. The trick is to immediately abandon them when they jack the price up. I recently heard that in the food delivery space virtually no one is turning a profit.
Even worse, it’s costing the food places you order from money. We have a lot of restaurants here that will give you free stuff if you do not use Thuisbezorgd which is owned by Just Eat Takeaway. They also own the American Grubhub since 2021 and are also active in the UK, Germany, Canada and the Netherlands.
-edit-
Correction they no longer own Grubhub, and are active in a lot more countries than I first thought, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Eat_Takeaway.com
Why would a restaurant allow delivery services if it causes them to lose money?
They don’t get a choice.
For real? I don’t know how any of this works from the restaurant side. I thought they had to “join” GrubHub, that’s not the case?
As of late 2025, Just Eat now belongs to Prosus.
Epic Games Launcher would always end up a pile of shit anyway. Tim Sweeney is a fuckhead and he has lots of investors to please.
Sweeney is legit delulu tbh.
He literally said Epic’s launcher/store is ready as is, doesn’t need more development. It also runs in Unreal Engine, so you get Chromium (CEF) + Unreal Engine running just for one launcher/store.
At least on Linux you can run Unreal Editor without EGS (because it doesn’t exist on Linux) and if you’ve claimed any free games on Epic, you can use Heroic launcher to manage them easily.
Oooh. This is interesting. I wonder how much of the epic library is Linux compatible.
Everything except fortnite and a few other kernel level anticheat games
To be honest, Epic is doing a good job of tearing down walled gardens in places like mobile, and we’ll probably be better off for it. But yeah, they’ve done a terrible job of competing with Steam.
They’re doing that because they want their own walled garden.
The problem there comes from Epic taking secret deals to settle those cases instead of let any precedent be set that would actually benefit customers.
They only did that because they wanted their walled garden to be there too. Tim Sweeney is just butthurt his walled garden isn’t the biggest
Of course, but…broken clock, you know? A large percentage of personal computers will be freed from Windows in large part because of Valve, even though they profit off of legalized child gambling addiction. And walled gardens in mobile will be broken down in large part because of Epic, which uses dark patterns to trick people out of their money in pursuit of a cultural hodge podge of nonsense that won’t even exist in a few decades.
it’s often more risky and expensive to hire, train and develop systems and communities like that, especially when doing it against the tide, than to just try to trip up the competition. It’s not just that it’s dificult and it costs money, but it’s not preferred because investors abhor risks.
Isn’t this seen in global politics all the time. When US says China is too dominant in X and we need to fight it. They are not saying that US will invest in shit that will help them compete. All or 90% of the actions is to try to trip up, sabotage and sanction the competition.
Just a bunch of crabs in a bucket.
I wish they’d just focus on fixing Unreal. It’s a shit show.
You dont like games that look like you have grease smeared over your monitor?
Every time someone uses lumen the frame rate drops by roughly 2/3rds, it’s nuts.
Always has been
Because sweeney is greedy lying piece of shit, who’s using “think of poor developers being robbed by app stores” to cut himself bigger market share by suing fuck out of competitors
Like they won over google and guess what? He fucked over “all the poor developers” and cut himself a juicy deal to settle antitrust case
Fuck him, fuck Epic
https://appleinsider.com/articles/26/01/23/epic-hypocrisy----google-gets-800-million-in-fortnite-antitrust-settlement
Epic customer support is also garbage. I’ve sworn off the company.
I haven’t really looked deeply into this issue but what caught my eye was the claim that a 30% fee was excessive. I’m no insider into video game publishing but 30% is the standard retail markup for many things. If you bought a candy bar today, it probably cost the mini mart you bought it from 70% of what they’re charging.
It most certainly is not standard in retail. Most retail stores have a margin of a couple percentage points. Walmart, for example, is ~3% net margin most years
Unless you’re trying to compare wholesale price to final consumer price. In which case I would say that’s a silly and pointless thing to compare, but even then it’s far smaller than 30% across retail and varies wildly based on the individual item being sold
A 30% cut is only really common in the tech sector where the underlying economics make it feasible
I just did a cursory search online and the only markup I could fine below 30% was cellphones at about 8-10% and groceries at 5-25%. Now, I wouldn’t make a wager on the precise accuracy of a cursory glance but it’s telling that even in a Capitalist society, no ones denying their huge markups. Most sources list the markup on cloths to be 50-400%
This would be like if someone sued Walmart for letting their local store go out of business.
More like the local store suing Walmart for putting them out of business, but only after they pushed away all of their customers with bad ideas and flashy gimmicks
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It’s not a perfect analogy, but you get my point.
Because Steam is the world’s biggest games store on PC while Epic is statistically insignificant. What’s the question?
What if I told you that the MAU count for Fortnite alone is more than half of the total MAU count for all of steam?
Even if the only game on epic was Fortnite, that doesn’t qualify as “statistically insignificant” no matter how you look at it.
Isn’t most of that from consoles and mobile?
Yes, almost certainly. A gaming device is a gaming device, what matters is how many users you have.
If we’re concerned about distinguishing between platform, then steam is statistically insignificant on the vast majority of platforms people game on.
Why is Epic insignificant?
They launched with a 12% service fee, dropped that service fee to 10%, and then dropped the service fee entirely for the first $1Mn in sales per year.
In June 2025, they released a new feature enabling developers to launch their own webshops hosted by the Epic Games Store. These webshops could offer players out-of-app purchases, as a more “cost-effective” alternative to in-app purchases.
They provide developers with free to generate license keys, and keyless integration with other e-shop stores including GOG, Humble Bundle, and Prime gaming.
They offer a user review system.
They also added cloud saves in July of 2025.
The thing is, they offer none of the other features Steam offers:
Epic launched their service in 2018. It’s been 7 years. The only reason not to offer feature parity (for a company that makes $4.6Bn - 5.7Bn in revenue, and a shop that makes $1.09Bn, you’d think they would be enticing users with the services they want.
What they have done instead is exclusivity deals that plenty of consumers complain about but devs don’t seem to care about so long as they’re getting paid.
So, the excuse that Steam got there first (as if it’s just about that and the reason their market share is what it is is because they have refined, adapted, and improved their service offering over time) doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when steam has a significant percent of the market share (79.5% to epic’s 42.3%) but is only making twice the revenue of their rival store.
It makes sense for GOG or Itch.io who’s market cap is smaller by quite a lot to not offer the same feature parity. Each of those platforms has figured out they can offer other things to devs and consumers to make themselves competitive over time.
Sweeny’s attack is basically just a pity party he’s throwing for himself because he doesn’t want to compete.
Edit This is a sanity check because I wasn’t correct with my numbers by mistake.
These numbers are not correct and I was mistaken. In actuality Valve’s revenue is approximately 16 times that of Epic e-shop. It looks like an estimate of Steam’s game sales is that about $4Bn of their revenue last year was from Steam’s game sales. I am trying to corroborate that from other sources.
I’m still looking into and trying to parse out what percentage of steams sales last year were hardware (epic to my knowledge doesn’t have a hardware arm of their business), and it’s not immediately clear how much they made on the e-shop portion of their business alone so I can get more comparable numbers.
What I have been able to find so far I’ve posted below, and I’ll try to remember to come back and do some math on that after I focus on the first thing.
https://gamalytic.com/blog/steam-revenue-infographic
https://80.lv/articles/valve-earned-over-usd4-billion-on-steam-alone-in-2025-analysts-say
I am definitely not on epic side here, but the reason they had to pay for exclusivity for games is because valve doesn’t allow any games on steam to be sold cheaper elsewhere. Which developers follow because steam brings in a lot of revenue.
Without that, epic could try to compete with steam (and its extra features) by offering lower prices, and letting the consumer make the choice of features vs price.
But valve policies effectively make it impossible for any new marketplace to compete.
That’s false. They do not allow steam keys (free to generate steam licenses of games) to be sold cheaper anywhere else for less than the game is sold for on steam. And in exchange, the profits on those game licenses sold elsewhere the developer gets to keep 100% of.
It is alleged by one developer that steam told them they can’t sell their game for less on other stores even if they use a different company to generate the license keys. But that hasn’t been proven. And since only 2 other developers are backing the new class action lawsuit out of literally thousands of devs who would be effected this way if it were true, it logically doesn’t make sense. The dev who brought the first lawsuit that go thrown out? Their game is still up on Steam.
The fact is, Epic is making half the revenue Steam is with 11 times less market share, and not gaining market share because customers don’t want to use their store. Customers don’t want free games they want services that work.
You’re alleging that Valve is doing something anti-competitive to maintain their market share here and you still haven’t given me what I asked for.
What regulations are you expecting to be imposed, and how will that detrimentally or positively effect the consumers?
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By sold cheaper I meant MSRP price, not sale price.
Yes. The shopping kart feature. Something online stores and webshops came with when the Internet looked like MS Paint.
Somehow absent on a modern platform…
Steam isn’t being sued by Sweeny, they are being sued on behalf of 14 million UK gamers.
Also, epic has an estimated 3% to 7% of the market share (not 42 which makes no sense with steam having the other 80%), yet they should be regulated as well. If you stopped bootlicking for half a second, you would realise that this isn’t about who’s the worst but the fact that they are all bad (except itch, bless them).
Your enjoyment of their product doesn’t mean it isn’t having a serious and negative impact on the industry. Amazon is really convenient too, can you defend them next please?
I never claimed steam was being sued by Sweeney. Sweeney made a statement about the steam lawsuit saying he agreed with it. https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/epic-games-boss-tim-sweeney-voices-support-for-usd900-million-steam-lawsuit-valve-is-the-only-major-store-still-holding-onto-the-payments-tie-and-30-percent-junk-fee/
I was quickly googling market share stuff on break so I misread the Epic e-shop market share vs Epic’s full market share outside that.
The fact that Steam only makes double what epic e-shop makes with literally 11 times the market influence?
What regulations are you expecting out of this? How will that have a positive effect on consumers?
I never said this was about good or bad. I pointed out pros and cons of using each service which extrapolated quite literally to why consumers choose Steam over Epic.
A monopolistic corp who uses anit-consumer/anti-competitve tactics to remain a market leader/? monopoly is illegal. And it’s regulated.
The only reason steam is being investigated at all is because 2 or 3 out of literal thousands of game developers have made a claim that steam is threatening to remove their game if they try to sell it on other game stores for cheaper than steam (not steam keys, but using another stores licensing keys).
That hasn’t been proven and if it is, a further investigation into how wide spread that behavior is would still be needed to prove that Valve or Steam came by their market share illegally.
Also the fact that you brought up Amazon as the foil to your argument at the end is laughable. For multiple reasons.
Steams revenue was 16b (edit: it’s 4b) in 2025, epics was 1b in 2024. At least click the links instead of pasting what the Google summary tells you. You are mixing up epics store revenue with their unreal engine revenue.
The fact is any game store front is a money printing machine mostly because of the rampant price fixing, hard to enter markets and abuse from those that hold the lion share of that market (Steam, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo).
That money is being sucked out of the companies that are actually making games, and is leading to a reduction in quality, layoffs and bankruptcies.
For regulation, we could easily have limits on the percentage store fronts are allowed to demand for digital media, but each time there’s a lawsuit, a bunch of idiots loudly fight it. Lawmakers aren’t going to enact laws that go against what the lobbyist want, especially if the majority of the population have been instructed that the boot is for their benefit.
Your list of pros and cons doesn’t matter, every player being compared is bad. It’s just a defense in favor of Gabens yacht fleet at this point. Exclaiming that steam shouldn’t change because you like their product, even though it’s clearly having an impact, is the same as defending Amazon because drop shipping is easier than going to the store.
Fyi, I use both, I literally own a steam deck and the sd card came from Amazon. Defending their practices is just fucking weak though.
I can’t corroborate that Steam’s revenue for the e-shop was $16Bn. The best estimate that I have is that their game sales netted them $4Bn last year. I’m still trying to find a better source for that. However we may both be wrong here.
Ya, I misread it and I’m way off. It’s 4bn. Epic also made a lot less, my stats are not for gross revenue but generated revenue before they split it with the devs. Amateur hour over here (me, not you).
I went off in my other comment and was a bit of a dick throughout the convo. It just feels like someone is being robbed here. 4bn is a lot of money and, from the wolffire lawsuit leak, they have less than 100 people working on steam full time.
From what I read, that $4BN number could be taken two ways. I don’t know if that analyst excluded the games Valve developed, and that $4BN is games sales of everything else, or if that’s what they made from their own titles. I didn’t want to go through the rigamarole of Xitter to see the direct quote and I haven’t had a chance to find it in the internet archive.
I also kind of want a good run down of what steam offers to developers that makes their platform so attractive because my understanding is it’s more than just e-shop services and that’s one of the reasons I have seen touted as why people feel the service fee is reasonable.
I didn’t want to leave you on read, but I also am still looking up all kinds of random information to put together.
Also, my confusion is because there are two different lawsuits involving the 30% cut of game sales.
There’s a class action lawsuit in the UK involving all of steams consumers there, predicated on the idea that the 30% service fee makes games more expensive to the detriment if those consumers.
And there’s a different class action lawsuit brought by developers Wolfire and Dark Catt representing every developer who uses Steam as an E-Shop platform, also over the 30% service fee and alleged anti-competitve practices (Wolfire say that Steam told them they couldn’t sell their game anywhere else for less than it was available on Steam (even if they didn’t use steams license keys)).
I know I can come off as really terse, and tone is hard via text anyway. But thank you for addressing it.
Sorry about yet another wall of text.
I’m not reading the Google summary. There is no Google summary for me. That shit is deep sixed. I don’t want it. I love it when people automatically assume that I must be using Generative AI to get some silly answer off the internet.
If so then Epic should have caught up by now, no?
Please back that up. The game developers seeing bankruptcies are seeing them because of gross mismanagement and a never ending attempt to deliver crap that their consumers don’t want. Pushing the “bleeding edge” of graphics while making games that sell poorly because they want to charge $60-70 for a game even 5 years after it came out.
And that’s with the proliferation of crap like in game micro transactions, season passes, DRM, and internet sanity checks to even play single player games.
Indie developers are caught in the lurch, but that’s generally the case with any small business, and on top of that the regulation will probably harm them more than it will help them because the percentage of sales pays for things that they use to market their game.
What is the limit on what store fronts can charge going to be? How much is too much? What does that 30% pay for? Do you know? Does it scale by user base?
Would other store fronts who charge less be more successful by a meaningful amount if they were charging the same?
It literally doesn’t matter where your products come from. I own more computer games on disc from physical stores than I do from steam. I have paid for more than one game on both steam, switch, PS4, or physical copy. I’m not trying to call Steam the good guy here.
But I do not trust the developer who originally brought the lawsuit because even now most of the other devs who have games for sale on steam have not attempted to make a statement, join the class action, or even make a complaint about what is alleged.
On top of that, why sue only steam if this is a problem. Nobody is suing Nintendo, PlayStation, or Microsoft over this.
I also never said “steam shouldn’t change”, or that steam shouldn’t take a smaller cut.
I feel like you scanned right over half of what I did say so you could be snotty in your response. You have a good day dude.
Okay, but your stats are still wrong? (Edit: so are some of mine though, disregard me being a dick here). Using AI wasn’t my point.
Is making 1 000 million in a year with something like 5% not catching up? Do you think any of these billion dollar stores are running at cost?
Having a vampire sucking up 30% of your revenue does affect a company but quantifying it would mean some pretty in depth studies and getting information from bankrupt companies. I do know most devs don’t like it. https://gdconf.com/article/gdc-state-of-the-industry-most-devs-feel-steam-s-30-cut-isn-t-justified-many-prefer-10-15/
And yes, all those points you mention are happening, but having a huge chunk of your profits taken like that obviously aggravates it.
I know it pays for Gabens yacht fleet worth 1.5 billion lol. We do have rough numbers. We know their employees count and revenue, and that they are making an estimated 11 million per employee from an article by the financial Times. That doesn’t include data atorage but I doubt the cost of offering downloads is anywhere near there revenue.
Stores don’t even stock physical discs for PC Games. How many of those are from the past 5 years? Last year had 95% of games sold digitally (PC and consoles). https://twicethebits.com/2025/06/19/the-shift-to-digital-gaming-why-physical-sales-are-declining/
What dev? This is about a UK lawsuit on behalf of UK gamers. I can’t find anything about a devs involvement.
PlayStation is getting sued for it, the trial is for March. This is specifically about the 30% (https://www.catribunal.org.uk/cases/15277722-alex-neill-class-representative-limited). (https://woodsford.com/woodsford-funded-5bn-class-action-against-sony-playstation-gets-go-ahead-in-uk-competition-appeal-tribunal/) .
I want to point out that this is pure whataboutism, just like the OP. But what about epic, but what about nintendo. All of them deserve to get sued.
Then the proper response would be “yes, steam does deserve to get sued, epics behavior doesn’t even have anything to do with the subject, but they also deserve to get sued”. Like what’s your point then? Why make a bullet point of things steam does well if you aren’t trying to imply that they are “good enough to be allowed to abuse”.
We are both writing walls of text.
I expect that no cap on storefront share of the price will be set as a result of this lawsuit or any other.
I also expect that even if Steam reduce their cut to 3%, prices will not get lower, and bankruptcies and lay-offs will go on as usual
Maybe I’m just pessimistic, don’t know
I’m being annoying, but why do you keep opening parentheses without closing them 😭
You’re not being annoying. It’s probably because I lost track and for what it’s worth I am sorry, I’ll try to fix it but probably won’t catch all of them.
No worries, I still knew where you meant to end them, it just took me a second pass.
epic is irrelevant because nobody wants it, not because steam is trying to crush competition.
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I personal want a store that is native Linux. I have yet to find a store that does it better, no matter your OS. Epic, GOG, Amazon, ubisoft, and Xbox gamepass do not support or have a native Linux programs and require using Wine/proton to access their stores. Having an extra layer on top makes it hard to install games as all of them are expecting a C:/ that is just how any Linux OSes work.
Valve is being sued because they are forcing others to follow policies that further entrenches Steam as the largest store.
Since Epic bought the game developer, it only applies to themselves. It is much harder to sue someone over a decision that only applies to something they own. How can a company be sued for not selling their product at a store? Should Valve be sued for not selling their own games on Epic or GOG?
Is Epic’s decision to only sell their games on their store annoying for users? Yes. But unfortunately, there is nothing illegal about. There would be a better chance of a lawsuit of Epic paying other game developers for exclusivity, but that would still not be easy as game exclusivity is still a significant factor on game consoles as well. Albeit much less than in the past.
Isn’t valve being sued for
Not allowing devs to sell steam download codes on other stores, But the ban only applies if they are selling the download code for cheaper than Steam
Not allowing devs to sell steam DLC download codes on other stores
I don’t think 1 or 2 puts other stores at any disadvantage. If a store wants to sell steam download codes then Valve has to get their normal cut. If they don’t want to pay the valve tax, then they don’t need to offer a Steam download code.
So the entire problem is about restrictions on steam codes?
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Valve isn’t forcing anyone to use their platform.
If Steam’s terms aren’t satisfactory for developers, then they don’t have to use Steam.
I could see Valve controlling a bit of a monopoly in the game launcher and gaming social media markets.
A pro-consumer change that the EU could impose would be to split up the game marketplace from the game launcher and gaming social media markets through intercompatible APIs.
Maybe you could download games from steam in GOG or Lutris, and the steam overlay works on GOG or Lutris too. Maybe your discord friends could show up in the Steam friend list.
There are laws that say that abusing a monopoly is illegal. Steam is objectively a monopoly in pc games. Sure, you don’t have to use it, but it is basically impossible for indie developers to make a living without it.
Now, the question is if valve’s actions are actually abusing the monopoly, or normal business practices.
looks at Hytale doing quite well without even touching Steam
Hytale has incredible publicity for an indie release and caters to a target group that’s used to a separate launcher. Not comparable to the usual release.
Got any other modern examples than just the one game that had a massive following for the last 7 years of development?
Star Citizen I guess. If by “well” it is meant “making lots of money”
But yeah it’s not realistic at all for 99+% of devs/games
Anything by Blizzard, Escape from Tarkov, Minecraft, Roblox, Valorant/LoL/TFT, Genshin Impact/HSR, Fortnite and more.
Notably, almost none of those are indie games, and almost any indie game that you did list came out in the 2000s like Roblox, before Steam was the behemoth it is today. Half of them are games by the same sets of AAA studios like Epic Games, Blizzard, and MiHoYo, and most Blizzard games have an entire franchise of games older than Steam itself to piggyback off of. Speaking of, anything by Blizzard isn’t even true… their most recent games like Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 are both on Steam. Tarkov is also on Steam now, but I’ll admit I’m splitting hairs here since it spent nearly a decade off of it. Though the fact that it released on Steam with its 1.0 update does say something.
So I really don’t think any of those games aside from debatably Tarkov shows that the average modern indie dev can be successful outside of Steam.
You asked a question, I answered. You didn’t like the answer so now you move the goalposts.
There are not many objectively provable monopolies and i doubt that English law would support that claim without extremely strong evidence, generally utilities are the only ones that’d get close. A necessity with high fixed costs and infrastructure lock-in.
Steam has high market share in a segment, but not necessarily a distinct segment, I’m sure steam would argue that there are enough consumers who can and do substitute between pc and console and mobile, as well as other vendors so that their market power is mitigated by a fair amount of consumer mobility.
So what you’re looking to prove is unlikely to be a pure “monopoly” but ‘excess market power’, and ‘abuse of market power’. That is a complex legal art that the competition regulator is usually not that successful at proving, at least in English law.
Abuse of market power has to impact consumers not producers. There are always marginal producers struggling to make a profit - that happens in competitive markets, producers bidding prices down, some going out of business. I’m not saying I agree, but that’s more or less how the law sees it, lookup what they let supermarkets get away with in contracts with farmers.
To show consumer harm from upstream market manipulation you’d probably have to show a material dearth of choice being created by steam policies in order to jack up prices. Maybe that can be demonstrated, but it’s not simple and more likely to come down to subjective interpretation of the arguments and evidence from both sides rather than any unarguable objective truth.
If it were unarguable or objectively true then the CMA might lead the investigation itself instead of this being a private action. Though maybe this is too small a market for them to worry about.
You have to differentiate between a monopoly in economics and a monopoly in law.
In economics a monopoly is the only seller of a good with no other competition. If I am the only one who owns apple trees, I got a monopoly on apples.
In law a monopoly is someone who owns so much of the market that they can charge unfair prices. If I am the only one who owns large orchards full of the best kind of apple trees, it doesn’t really matter to me that someone else has a couple mediocre trees in their backyard. I am not a economics-monopoly, since someone else is also selling apples, but I hold enough of the market that I can set the price to whatever I want.
(Ok, the analogy isn’t perfect, but you get it, I hope. Basically the “excess market power” thing you talked about is the legal definition of a monopoly.)
Customers don’t necessarily need to be end customers. If steam is charging their business customers too much, that counts too. (It also affects the end customers too, btw.)
So the question is: If I don’t release a game on steam, will that cause it to underperform significantly? If so, does steam charge a lot above market price? If both of these questions are answered with yes, a lawsuit could be successful.
UK law basically doesn’t use the term.
My point was that proving dominance and abuse is rarely objective fact. It sure isn’t showing market share and that some games companies go out of business. They have to show the things that valve does to restrict competition - being popular isn’t enough alone.
Your last question is quite a good example of how hard it is to prove because it includes counterfactual comparisons.
This might be why it seems (if the journo is to be believed) that they’re going down the tie-ins angle for the DLC, not necessarily headline pricing. Thou the latter would probably a worse outcome for valve if guilty.
They essentially removed games that I owned and made it so I could no longer play them by drippy Linux support.
Which ones?
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I haven’t really looked deeply into this issue but what caught my eye was the claim that a 30% fee was excessive. I’m no insider into video game publishing but 30% is the standard retail markup for many things. If you bought a candy bar today, it probably cost the mini mart you bought it from 70% of what they’re charging.
Retail needs a location to store and sell their product. They need employees as well. One small Walmart has as many employees as steam does. Retails also buys the product in bulk, there is a bigger risk involved if it doesn’t sell or even sells slowly.
Huge difference imo.
and steam needs data centers and servers and power and all the stuff to keep those running. ultimately though it didn’t matter. if steam thinks that their ecosystem is worth charging that much, then it’s up to the dev to decide if what steam provides is worth it to them
We don’t know how much it costs for their servers but I doubt it’s anywhere near what they charge devs. Gaben having an 11bn dollar net worth kind of points to that.
The biggest problem is that it isn’t up to devs since steam has market dominance. Not putting your game on steam is basically suicide, they have close to 90% of the PC market…
market dominance is not a monopoly. market dominance is a label given to the most successful product. and the product is successful because they offer a service that none else seems to be able to or wish to fulfill.
devs can choose to sell their game on steam, or windows live, or gog, epic game store, playstation, nintendo online, android app store, ios app store, on their own site, eb games, or the back of their car, what ever.
are all of these equally effective? nope. when you put your game on steam you get, the vast user base cultivated by valve, server space to host your game, massive server upload speeds, a built in store front, the discussion boards, steam game cloud, the stream overlays and stream input, steam workshop, community hubs, steam achievements, global money processing, themed sales, two special discovery windows. blah blah blah.
again, it’s up to the dev to decide if they want to pay 30% for these things.
to put it in perspective, when epic game store has a sale, steam makes a profit.
Just letting you know that you commented the same thing twice.
For brick and mortar, which has significantly more costs to make up than digital. Which is the entire point of this suit. And steam’s policy requires that no game can be regularly priced cheaper than on their platform - artificially raising prices across the board.
It’s bizarre seeing everyone here defend steam here just because they don’t like who’s saying it.
Steam provides more than just a one time exchange of download for money, so I wouldn’t exactly compare it to a store where you walk out the door and your exchange is completed. As a leftists, I think Steam makes too much money and should charge less and pay more but in a capitalist nation i don’t see Epic having a successful case
That’s what Apple charges devs in their “ecosystem” correct?
Depends if you’re a big developer or some indie one. Big developers commonly don’t pay fees or have special deals (Uber, etc.). Smaller ones pay 15% up to 1 million downloads, then it’s 30%. So if you want to pay less, get really rich first.
That being said, this is on top of the VAT, not part of it. Still charging 30% in 2026 feels criminal and greedy. This applies to nearly all big corporations, including Valve Corporation with Gabe’s fleet of yachts and company making more money per employee than any other company. It made more sense to take 30% cut when 100Gb of HDD costed thousand dollars, internet was metered in megabytes and the whole infrastructure was just not there yet, but this “industry standart” tax never changed even tho for them distributing apps has become far, far cheaper than it used to.
thats what apple forces and imposes on any developer that uses the app store, which is most of them since on ios alt stores are only a thing on eu and japan afaik