Gaming

It seems pretty fair to want equal pricing. You've been speaking as if Valve is actively killing small storefronts like itch.io and these little guys would be the one to gain from something like this. They might, but not nearly as much as Epic Games would which is the lead in a very similar lawsuit. Epic wants to be able to sell games available on Steam at a lower price to influence people to use their storefront instead. They're literally giving games away so I think they'd love a chance to try and recoup some of that while still getting to look like the pioneers of cheap.

I honestly don't think that's a viable strategy. Retail businesses mostly have the same practices, so one could say that Valve just doesn't want to start doing game price-matching like Best Buy. The closest I've ever seen is a store not having stock of something and a worker there suggesting a different store that might have it. But I've never been on Gamestop's website and seen that Funkopop for sale cheaper at Walmart or Target? An individual working there might tell me because they're not a corporation.

Given they also have pretty steep sales, I would imagine cheaper pricing could influence sale availability as well - if the game is always $20 cheaper somewhere else maybe the dev doesn't want to put the game on sale as often/at all. None of that is antitrust though, so why use that as their argument? I guess the case will tell us for sure.

I also think that, probably to a lesser extent, it's been to help Valve prevent the grey-market key selling. I'm of the opinion that Valve likely doesn't care too much about you or I selling our Humble Bundle key of a game for $3.74, however they do want to avoid stolen credit card key sales and revoked licenses. I personally don't think that Itch or Fanatical relates to this, but I do think there's a general misunderstanding that people conflate Fanatical/Green Man Gaming and grey market sites like G2A and Kinguin. It can't look good for Valve when a user buys 3rd party and their key is revoked and the user gets mad about it, and boy are there a lot of angry vocal people out there complaining about this very thing.

Frankly, you buy on Steam because you get the Steam Overlay to completely change your controller scheme and use community templates, access to per-game notes, and the Steam Workshop, in addition to whatever other peripheral things like cloud saving. It's all very user positive so of all things I don't really understand why this is the move that influences your decision when the other options, save literal indie stores, are decidedly worse.

Itch.io is great, it's unfortunate that devs who want to sell on Steam can't advertise to their alternate store listing but it also seems sensible? No business actively advertises the ability to buy somewhere else to give the devs 20% more of the sale. Does anywhere actively promote anything like this? Not as far as I've seen, so it seems odd to single out Valve when literally every single business in existence works the same way? And I'm not saying that I personally think it should/shouldn't, I'm more trying to see if there's any precedent in existence that would implicate Valve to have to do this in order to not be... "shitty?"

For posterity I just opened up Epic and checked out a few games and there's no place where the storefront shows the existence of its availability on other stores. The Witcher 3 has no references to GOG Galaxy, Red Dead 2 has no references indicating to buy it on the Rockstar Launcher anywhere. For that matter, nor does Itch.io or Fanatical, ironically neither of these have links to go buy it on Steam instead either.

I'll happily change my opinion if the arguments in court make sense but as of right now I'm skeptical. Personally when I google a game I discover it from a series of sources and Steam is where I end up choosing to buy it. I choose Steam because it offers the best service. I've regretted buying Control during its hostage situation on Epic because it's caused me nothing but problems (lost saves, validation issues, needing to redownload the game every time instead of pointing to the existing location). Ubisoft and EA only have games that were bought on Humble Bundle and because of it I didn't have access to Need for Speed: Heat for about 2-3 months while the Origin/EA App transition was happening. "You need to play this game on the EA App!" says Origin. "Sorry, we're working on getting this game to the new EA App! Check back soon!" says the EA App. A waking nightmare.

I feel like the chances are high that these are the winners if the outcome of a suit is against Valve, not itch.io. Itch will just get drowned out by Humble Bundle and Epic and only indie indie developers will get sales through itch. I also doubt that the point of this suit is to allow devs to put everywhere else the game is available.

From Valve's perspective I think it's important to note that their ToS seems to indicate that other developers are allowed to sell on store fronts, but Valve does not get any of the commission despite providing Steam keys. However, since Steam keys are being provided, Valve is still providing quite a large service with cloud saves, forums, everything I mentioned earlier. I actually didn't know this, so I can also understand Valve not explicitly wanting to give that service away for free and not get anything from it. I mean, that would basically mean that by advertising on the store that the developer can get 20% more if you buy on Itch while still getting a Steam key and access to all of its features...

All told, I am personally of the camp that I think equal sales on storefronts is fair. If Steam has a sale, other store fronts don't have to have one. Other store fronts are allowed to have sales as long as an equitable sale is had on Steam in "a reasonable amount of time" per the ToS. And it legitimately seems insane to expect one store to advertise an unrelated store just because it's available at both.

Anyway, these are all just thoughts. I don't know anything and no one will until the evidence is shown and it's settled. However, having liked Humble Bundle and the Wolfire team I personally am disappointed to see this suit coming from them. If I'm not mistaken this is literally being funded by Epic Games, they actually are the same case. If you've scrolled by the Epic. vs. Valve lawsuit ad on Instagram or Facebook, I've seen it quite a bit. That's this one.

Fucking Tim Sweeny man.