https://gameclaim.consumercompetitionclaims.com/en/

wow this website is full of lies huh

I've never seen a Steam game that was cheaper than the same game on some other store, but I have seen several cases of something that is normally distributed for free costing $10 on Steam

Valve's cut of 24% (on average in 2025) is much lower than the industry standard of 30%

the platform requires that video games not steal users' credit card information, just like literally every other platform with microtransaction support does

and the last of these four boxes is them blaming Steam for the EU court ruling that says Valve isn't allowed to offer cheaper regional pricing to less-wealthy european countries

were these "quotes" all written by the same person who wrote the website? because none of these sound like the kind of thing a real person would write, and gabe newell owns a company that does marine research and manfuactures super-yachts

This section is so funny to me because it's very clearly written by someone who has never sold anything in Europe, never sold (or bought) a video game, and never looked up what game developers and publishers do.

In this imagined reality, a game developer knows how many copies their game is going to sell and works out that they need to earn 35 euros from each copy.

They then pass that information to their publisher, who works for free and solves one algebra equation and then leaves forever. The publisher figures out that in order for the game to make 35 euros per sale they must charge 50 euros.

So we have some fixed number of purchases and an independently mutable price, in which case: Why not charge 100 euros and make 70 euros per sale? Why not charge 1000 euros and make 700 euros per sale?

No, in real reality, a game developer might decide that 35 euros is a good price for their game because people would expect a game like theirs to cost 35 euros. Not because they want to make a specific amount of money from some magically-pre-known lifetime sale count.

Also this is a European law firm that has apparently never found out that VAT exists. Or that video game publishers don't work for free. Or a dozen other things that would make it very clear that this proposed scenario is ridiculous.

Here's another one: how come Valve is allowed to force game developers to let them handle payment processing?

Could it be because that is the standard thing that literally every digital video game store does in order to protect customers' payment information and make money off of the Free To Play games that cost the platform a significant chunk of its resources?

No, it must be because Valve wants to take 30% (of $1, so just slightly less than what most payment processors take as their minimum fee, which Valve can do because you need to fill your Steam Wallet with at least $5 at a time) and 30% is scary!!! They get to take the money again!!! on this game that you never paid anything to download in the first place.

would the $0.99 donation stamps in AS:RD only cost $0.69 if Valve didn't take a cut? I'll let you figure that out for yourself. you seem smart. and cute. and gay.

@ben also, don't they mean commissions for platforms?the developer isn't the one taking a percentage in this scenario.

@BestGirlGrace "30% is too high!" yells a lawyer who was told that there's probably a lot of money in this potential lawsuit and knows absolutely nothing about it nor about the massive number of failed identical lawsuits that already happened

about Steam's 24% (on average in 2025) cut which is 6 percentage points lower than the industry standard of... oh, that's weird. that number showed up again.

@ben the one part i agree with here is the eastern europe example because that is actually illegal, you can’t sell the same product for different prices to different europeans based on where they are from (unless the offering is meaningfully different or shipping is involved, neither is the case for steam games). not sure who would be liable for that though

@charlotte it was specifically steam keys being sold for different prices to different countries by game publishers and Valve got in trouble because they had a system where activating a key could be allowlisted per country code

which is still used to block games in specific EU countries, like anything that doesn't have an age rating is auto-banned in Germany

@ben eu has a single market though, it’s why they got fined for it before.

and the “ban games without age rating” is something german law doesn’t require at all; games without age rating are treated as 18+ for the most part

@charlotte none of germany's approved age verification methods fit Valve's privacy requirements, so no porn games for germans on steam

@ben i can buy 18+ games on steam with no issues in germany, what are you talking about

@ben like i could understand this if steam didn’t sell 18+ games in germany, but they do

@charlotte https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/contentsurvey/germany

they don't sell porn games in germany

@ben germany doesn’t make a distinction between porn and non-porn 18+ games?

@charlotte apparently they do for the purpose of what their regulatory agencies told Valve

@ben the legal standard is the same from what i can tell. both porn and non-porn games need age verification, regulators however care more about porn and wolfenstein’s use of the swastika than violence

@ben as such for as long as this double standard exists, this is a move that is arbitrarily punishing primarily indie devs

@ben (similar rules are part of the dsa and as such are the law throughout all of the eu, if i buy a key in poland i should absolutely be able to use it in germany)

@charlotte if you buy a key for a game in poland, add it to your polish steam account, and then move to germany, you keep the game, but if it's a game that's banned from being sold in germany on steam and you try to add the key to a german steam account it's going to tell you you can't do that

@ben which, again, is steam being wrong but i don’t think this discussion is productive. valve isn’t allowed to geoblock in the EU (which they already got fined for! literally not even stopping after a judge told them to Not do that). they are also not allowed to do regional pricing here in most cases.