Valve is sued for £656m for "rigging the market and taking advantage of UK gamers".

Hmm no more key activations in UK sound entirely reasonable for me. They can then go to competing services to get their games downloaded.

It's a solid argument right up until you look at literally any of the details.

As far as I'm aware, Steam's price parity agreement only applies to games sold as Steam keys, not the game being sold via other distribution methods, And as we've seen from other cases, 30% is an industry-standard cut; the lawyers are also well aware that many studios don't even pay that much as they hedge it with "up to 30 percent".

I don't really see this going anywhere.

lol games always on sale 50-90% off, even brand new AAA titles regularly getting 10% off sales but they are being overcharged? I agree, let them go to competing sites then, there are no shortage of them. Personally I have found British people to want to complain about everything, my best friend was British and that's all he did all the time and was even offended by the term British because he was from England. He's no longer my friend. Cheers.

Vicki Shotbolt can go and wait until midnight in the rain outside a shop to try and get her copy of Candy Crush 2024 if she wants. I've been on Steam for over 18 years and I've got no complaints shipping my goods wherever I go, letting my family play games I've purchased, always being up-to-date and getting refunds on any fraudulent offers from publishers and developers.

Who is paying Ms. Shotbolt's bills and why is she trying to represent a group who didn't ask for her assistance?

There are perfectly fine consumer rights groups in the UK which people can turn to if they have problems. This is just someone wanting to get fame from the ten year anniversary of Gamergate and is putting themselves into a situation which they know nothing of.

Go fight for DVDs over streaming services if you want to make sure that people keep their money and can access what they've paid for.

all I see is another lawsuit that will get dismissed

valve does absolutely nothing while every other service got worse over time (gog might be the exception and epic stays relevant with fortnite, weekly gifts but at the cost of a borderline working /barebones site)

So you are telling me they found enough reasons to sue for £656m, but couldn't find one for the extra £10m to go all the way? Are these lawyers even trying? (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

And EGS take 12% cut but price for gamers same like on Steam
And Steam require same price for STEAM key not on other platform.

Nonsense

Well that "article" is a whole lot of words saying basically nothing. (Actually, it's pretty short; not even sure if I can call that "a lot of words".)
Only way it could be less worthy of notice is if it was published on The Guardian.

Breaking news: Company wants more profits.

No 65,6% option in poll 🙁

Can't really judge on the merits of the case from the snippet of information in that article or what I know about Steam but I can tell you one thing:
if that legal firm is involved, it's because they smell big numbers in settlement out of court so there's probably a good case to be made.

If the same law firm is involved British Telecom uses for patent trolling they could squeeze out some money from Valve perhaps.

Vicki Shotbolt. I was wondering why that name sounded familiar. She's a modern Jack Thompson, "campaigning" for "digital rights", "internet safety" and other buzzwords, and CEO of a "family advocacy" company Parent Zone. She's a morality troll targeting high-profiles.

That BBC article smacks of bias in its writing. Here's a bit more neutral take on the suit: https://www.techspot.com/news/103366-valve-faces-843-million-lawsuit-uk-allegedly-overcharging.html

I know jack-shit about UK law so I can't tell if this is a solid case or not, but it sure doesn't feel like they have much of an argument. And the article is pretty lacking.

https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/valve-is-being-sued-in-the-uk-for-dollar843-million-for-overcharging-14-million-pc-gamers-and-abusing-its-dominant-position-with-steam/
I think this is a better article.

Partially makes some sense to me but i think overall it is a pretty lost cause.

When a nutjob like that shotbolt starts throwing around buzzwords and populistic phrases of "hurting competition", "hurting consumers", "making losses" etc, then obviously a law firm will jump on it as well. The problem is no one there probably is in the gaming environment and doesn't understand the industry one bit. Just some crazy serial suer who wants to cash in on every little thing. Most likely no grounds to this accusation or at best just a hope steam will settle with some irrelevant amount of money. When someone like shotbolt sees revenue of 9 billion dollars they just want a piece of that. Nothing more or nothing less here.

This makes no sense, and I don't see it fairing any better than the Wolfire case.

The price parity does not apply to competing stores selling non-Steam games (e.g. Epic, Windows Store), Valves response in the Wolfire case:

the lawsuit is missing "any factual allegation that Valve... did anything at all to affect, let alone coerce, the developers to sell at the same prices in two stores."

If they get fed up being sued for the blanket 30% cut of sales for store services, the solution for all these companies (i.e. Valve, Apple, Epic, etc.) would be to charge separate fees for the services the game actually uses (e.g. listing on the store, game distribution, discussions, steam cloud, achievements, generation of keys, sales statistics, etc.). Then offer 30% for everything as an alternative, and developers/publishers can choose which is cheaper.

It doesn't matter if Steam is more expensive, if consumers prefer Steam.

Well that part

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.

looks bad. But the price parity obligation only applies to Steam keys. Basically, if you sell something that activates on Steam for a given price, you must match that price on Steam. This is to prevent Steam from being used as a distribution platform without having any sale revenue. Unless the plaintiff (Ms Shotbolt) can get her hands on rock-solid proof that show that the price parity contract also applies to other, non-Steam related platforms, her suit in dead in the water.

Steam gets between 20 and 30 percent of Steam Store sales, but allows for Steam key distribution where they don't get anything. GOG gets 30 to 40 percent. PlayStation and Xbox get 30 percent, same with Apple and Google. Epic gets 12 percent and itch.io gets between 0 and 30 percent. PC and Android are the only gaming platforms where there ARE options to avoid paying a 30 percent cut.

Also most games tend to have the same price on Epic Game Store as they do on Steam and consoles. Customers pay the same amount and the publishers get paid more per copy sold. Even if Steam lowered their percentage it's unlikely to result in cheaper games for consumers in most cases.

As others have mentioned, it seems the price parity rule is only meant to give Steam Store purchases the same discount that is available for Steam keys. It does not mean that other distributors like EGS and GOG have to match their prices or discounts with Steam. It also seems like the price parity rule is not enforced at all, but this could be due to the ongoing lawsuit from Wolfire Games. I don't even know if the price parity rule still exists, I couldn't find it in current documentation (although I didn't look that hard tbh)