When the 30% fee gets lowered prices won’t come down. The market has already shown that consumers are willing to pay for the games at the current price level. Publishers will just pocket the increased revenue, instead of passing it on to the consumer.

You can like Valve but you cannot deny it's dominant position in the market. It is a monopoly. It's a fact.

I don't want to be a steam shill, but does the prevention of selling games cheaper (if this is true or effectively enforced) even do any good? I have over a thousand games on Steam, but I doubt I bought 10% of the games from them. Heck, the latest game I remember buying at release was Oblivion Remaster, and I got it from GMG because it was 17% cheaper on release day then on steam. This happens constantly.
If we are to objectively look at the problem, why would lifting this rule automatically mean games would be cheaper elsewhere? One of the biggest slogans in favor of Brexit was something along the lines: "of EU membership costing 350m pounds per week, we could spend it on the NHS instead".
We are paying $70 for games because of Steam, we could be buying them for $55! That **could **there is holding the whole thing up. And its not even real. Its a word on paper. Effectively today; cheaper games than on steam are available, where steam gets a 0% cut and it stuck with the bill of hosting and delivering the game for free. This is the reality. Consumers arent the ones crying here.

If there is a fight worth fighting, it is the one to be able to transfer digital ownership of game licenses. This is a fight we can take to everyone including Steam. This would be an actual win for consumers. Not bickering about something that in the end wont effect any consumer anywhere. The above is a fight between publishers and distributors...

Why not go for a bigger company first?

Apple does the same thing with ebooks. When I put my book up for sale with Apple, the terms stated that I could not list it for a lower price at another store. So no, that is not a new form of price fixing.

Also interested to hear what other digital goods stores charge less than 30%, aside from Epic who definitely wouldn’t maintain that if they had the monopoly position.

It's not the gamers, it's a commission and there is a lot of misinformation on their website (it can be viewed in English). https://gameclaim.consumercompetitionclaims.com/

Also tweakers.net a Dutch tech enthusiast website had a good post about it, most of the commenters do not agree with this as well https://tweakers.net/nieuws/249010/steam-laat-klanten-te-veel-betalen-voor-games-volgens-nederlandse-massaclaim.html (Dutch only so you'll have to use a translator if you want to read it)

People keep forgetting that in the olden days, the left over cut for the publisher was about 40% of the game value, the rest went to warehouse, shipping, and the retailer all got something. The rough estimate left over cut for the developer was 10~15%.

Now a days as a developer you can sell directly to the customer through Steam, and you don't need a publisher or a network if you only sell on Steam. So that 10~15% cut went to 70% (till x amount of revenue and then it gets lower).

Next to Steam not being a monopoly and Valve providing all the other companies the blueprint for a success in the PC market, none of the competitors follows it, or compare to the customer service of Steam. And it seems that none of those other billion dollar competitors (Microsoft, Amazon and Epic) wants to invest in a solid platform to stand up to Steam.

The man children who think Gabe Newell is their best friend are going to be very mad about this.

I’m curious who’s bankrolling them for this one.

They are not the same as Noyb who actually are very transparent and actually « believe » in something : these dudes are closer to insurance claims chasers from what I read about them.

Also I love their Q&A that states that they don’t get money from this

No. The Consumenten Competition Claims Foundation is a non-profit foundation.

Someone is absolutely paying them for the action it’s literally 5 questions above and is Winward NL. And they go back to my ambulance chaser parallel since it’s just a company doing litigation finance.

There’s nothing showing links from those guys to broader financial interests but that would not be out of the possibilities.

Is there any actual proof of valve taking actions to limit competition or are they just popular because they have a good business model?