- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
From the opinion piece:
Last year, I pointed out how many big publishers came crawlin’ back to Steam after trying their own things: EA, Activision, Microsoft. This year, for the first time ever, two Blizzard games released on Steam: Overwatch and Diablo 4.
They literally cannot. If they offer a game at a lower price than Steam on other storefronts, Valve delists the game from Steam, which publishers cannot afford to since it’s the de facto leader of the industry, and forfeiting Steam sales means forfeiting a huge chunk of sales. Listing “they could just not sell on Steam” as a “trivial” way to get around Steam’s monopoly is so willfully moronic on so many levels that I don’t think I need to explain to you why that would be a bad idea.
As for “doing a different edition of the game for each platform”, that’s also a no-go. The content parity clause extends to DLC as well, and the link provided above by the other user includes multiple examples of games that were forced to match Steam’s price on other storefronts despite not being compatible. One such example:
Having a central store is nice and all, but I should not be forced to pay my games on GOG, Epic or whatever the same price that Valve charges on Steam. That doesn’t benefit me in the slightest. Heck, if anyone else other than Valve was forcing their competitors to match their prices, the outcry from the gaming community would be huge, and justifiably so. But since it’s Steam, nobody cares and “having a central store” is used as a smoke screen to cover their shitty monopolistic anti-consumer practices.
EDIT: My god, the Steam fanboys in this thread are insane. You can like the storefront and still criticize its anti-consumer practices. Your Lord and Saviour Gaben won’t knock on your door to kiss you, no matter what you do.