If you were to make a list of every concept you associate with Steam—even if you had hours, days, weeks to come up with it—chances are ‘high prices’ wouldn’t make a showing. Quite the opposite: if you’re anything like me, you associate Steam with swingeing sales that let you pick up vast troves of games (that you never play) for pennies.
But high prices are nevertheless at the centre of a new campaign by the Netherlands’ Consumer Competition Claims Foundation, a Dutch non-profit organisation that says its aim is to “protect consumers against unfair commercial practices, including breaches of competition law, breaches of consumer law and other unlawful conduct.”
The CCCF is inviting Dutch signups to “Game Claim”, its campaign against Valve that aims first to “sit down with Valve” and then, when that inevitably yields nothing (my editorialising, not theirs), to take the whole damn company to court. Valve, claims the non-profit, is artificially inflating game prices across all PC storefronts with its 30% commission on Steam sales (for the sake of accuracy, it’s actually a little more granular: Valve’s cut drops to 25% after a game’s first $10 million in revenue and 20% after $50 million, which is still a lot!)
“Valve prohibits publishers and developers from offering their games more cheaply on other PC gaming platforms,” writes the CCCF, “such as the Epic Games Store, the Microsoft Store and Ubisoft Connect. It does this through a mix of contractual terms and by pressuring publishers and developers.”
The org says that publishers jack up prices to make up for Valve’s 30% cut on Steam, then have to use those inflated prices everywhere—even places like the Epic Games Store, which only takes a 12% cut—in order to remain on the platform, which they more-or-less have to do because of Steam’s massive market share in the PC gaming space.
For its part, Valve—and Valve president Gabe Newell—denies that Steam sellers are subject to an unwritten rule about not selling their games cheaper on other storefronts, though there are various devs and publishers who have claimed otherwise. Newell himself was shown evidence of Valve employees enforcing such a rule in court in 2023, as part of an ongoing antitrust case, but continued to deny it: “Valve does not have a policy or practice of dictating prices to third-party software developers on other platforms.”
The CCCF thinks that’s bunkem, and it has other grievances with Steam’s manner of conducting business, too. “Valve agreed with various publishers that Steam Keys bought in Eastern Europe couldn’t be activated in Western Europe,” says the org, in order “to keep lower-priced Eastern European games off the Western European market. This is called ‘geo-blocking’, and it’s illegal.” Indeed, as the CCCF also notes, the European Commission fined Valve for doing just that a few years ago.
Even microtransactions don’t get away: “once you’ve bought a game on Steam, in-game microtransactions such as skins, loot boxes, in-game currency and season passes can only be bought on Steam through the Steam Wallet. Valve again charges a commission of typically 30%, for processing those payments. If Valve allowed competition from other payment processors, that fee would be far lower.”
The CCCF has already invited Valve for an out-of-court tete-a-tete, but going into court feels all-but inevitable. If it wins the case, a point which is years out right now, Dutch gamers who signed up to the claim will get some form of financial reward. “The Consumer Competition Claims Foundation has brought in the economic consultants at Copenhagen Economics to work out the damage. Their early estimate is that Dutch gamers have overpaid by more than 220 million euros. With interest, that comes down to more than 130 euros per gamer, and a good deal more for avid gamers.”
There are quite a few legal knives out for Valve and Steam. There’s this case, the aforementioned antitrust suit filed by Wolfire Games, and a class-action lawsuit over lootboxes, and—this is probably the biggest deal for the company—a lawsuit from the state of New York suing Valve for ‘letting children and adults illegally gamble’ with loot boxes.
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