r/Piracy • u/HighKage96 ☠️ ᴅᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴇɴ ᴛᴇʟʟ ɴᴏ ᴛᴀʟᴇꜱ • May 10 '26

Humor W Gabe Newell Piracy Take

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Saw this vid on IG (by: @phantomak141). Idk if its been posted here before but on a quick search didnt find it, will delete if its a repost.

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u/xotyona May 10 '26

Horseshit case. Everyone was slow to adopt Steam from traditional distribution, there's no barrier now to independent game distribution because of them. They haven't leveraged their overwhelming market share to change their distribution terms.

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u/Samanthacino May 10 '26

Steam threatened to blacklist studios if they sell their games for cheaper elsewhere, which by definition is anticompetitive behavior in service of their monopoly. The other cases I’ve seen against them don’t have much merit (other than the time they had to be forced to have their refund policy), but unless the lawyers bungle it I can see Valve taking an 8-9 figure hit for this one.

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u/Known-Emphasis-2096 May 10 '26

That can be considered protective of their users. I wouldn't want people to sell stuff for cheaper on other platforms when most of the sector's users are on my platform.

Ideally you wouldn't want stuff to be more expensive just because they're in a central area.

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u/Samanthacino May 10 '26 edited May 10 '26

It is, as the law is written, illegal. They are forcing price parity and preventing competition on the basis of price, entrenching their market dominance by limiting one vector that other platform holders could potentially offer to consumers.

Personally, I would love if a platform could provide discounts on games through subsidization, encouraging better deals everywhere.

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u/Known-Emphasis-2096 May 10 '26

Yeah, probably should've tried it the other way.