Games

If you think removing those abusive clauses will have an impact on the market you're delusional.

Third party sellers have no reason to have a lower price on a different store, unless the store itself is paying them the offset of a lower price. That's only going to suffocate smaller stores that don't have money to burn.

And the stores with first party games can already create a bigger incentive for their store by keeping their games store exclusive because it would be the only place to play that particular game (it's why streaming services have gone down the route of exclusivity). Also having the game with a higher price point on Steam would just lead to a controversy which will hurts sales and damage the reputation of the company.

Removing the price parity clause will do nothing.

First filed back in 2024 by Vicki Shotbolt, the lawsuit claims that Valve charges “excessive commission charges” that lead to “an unfair price which is then passed on to consumers”.

These fees are 30% cut of profits per game key sold, not and extra fee on top of that. So selling the steam key costs the same amount and nets about the same profit as selling a PlayStation or Nintendo key.

Literally every other online store (Epic, GOG, Xbox, PlayStation, ...) does the exact same thing when it comes to both game keys and DLCs. Seems frivolous on that point at least.

This has been alleged before. And it was a nothing burger then. There's a whole pictograph floating around comparing the cut that other game sale platforms take and I think only like 2 of them take a smaller than 30% cut.

This compares physical games to electronic keys, and that's also a nothing burger. The cost will be higher with those on the manufacturing side because of the cost of materials to make the physical copies, the logistics of delivery to retailers, and the cost of manufacturing them.

Steam isn't a monopoly. You keep using that word but it has a very finite legal definition. That definition provides that through practices of the company that are anti-consumer or anti-competitve, or both, the company retains a significant majority of the market share.

So again I'm not even suggesting that these devs leave steam. But the crux of the matter is that they want to use steam keys on other store fronts etc and don't want to pay steam 30% for the use of those steam keys. They can use a different store front with a different store front's game keys and still provide steam keys through steam. They are not required to use steam keys on their own website or other digital store fronts.

You also aren't required to launch games from or use steam for anything except downloading the game. You can launch them, update them, modify them, etc without even having steam running.

As I said before, DLC being tied to the store front that supplied the key makes sense and is a normal standard business practice.

If what you allege is true then literally no exclusive games on the Epic store could every be made available on steam (after the exclusivity contracted time ends), because I think what you're trying to suggest is that Steam (through confidential agreement) is forcing these devs to only provide steam keys. Which is a pretty bogus claim.