Daily Archives: February 5, 2026

Mixed Emotions Around Steam Getting Sued Again

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Steam has always a bit of a mixed bag for me, something I have had to reconcile myself with over the years.  After an early brush with it at the Half Life 2 launch I stayed away until it became a requirement to play Civilization V back in 2010.

Steam Logo

I have since mostly found peace with the reality of Steam, largely because they haven’t been nearly as awful as their competition.  Sometimes being the least worse choice is enough.

So Valve getting sued over how Steam functions… that doesn’t get much of a rise out of me.

There are two such suits rolling against Valve currently, focused on the 30% cut that Steam takes off the top being excessive.

I feel like we’re a decade or so past that being anything like a new issue.  It also shows the usual misunderstanding of pricing that the average consumer has.  We naively believe that pricing should somehow be a function of cost, and it rarely is.

Sure, when we get into hardware, things with an actual, incremental cost of goods for each unit produced there is a price below which the company is taking a loss.

So when people get worked up about the 30% cut Steam takes my first thought is that the company or publisher or dev team or rando entered into a voluntary agreement with Valve knowing full well what the terms were.  After you sign the contract is not the time to start complaining about the terms.

At the core of both lawsuits is the emotional feeling that Steam is something like a monopoly.

It is not.  But the fact that some devs feel that way is the result of the greatest trick the industry ever played on itself, convincing itself that Steam was essential to success.

Back when Steam was fresh and new, games that were on Steam did very well.  These titles were hand picked by Valve, so they were looking for titles that had a lot of promise.

In the sort of shamanistic belief system that humans build up the make sense of the world, this got turned around to the idea that being on Steam meant success, and later that success required you to be on Steam.

So it became a classic Cargo Cult situation where every rando dev in the universe felt it was their right to be on Steam as it was essential to their success.  Steam lowered the barrier to entry a bit, then just put a fee on entry and let everybody who wanted a go onto the platform.

This is how we ended up with about 54 titles a day landing on the platform in 2025, most of them destined to never make any real money… or any money at all.

Steam is not a monopoly, you do not have to agree to its terms and be on it to launch a PC title.  Many titles manage without it.  It requires some work, because you are paying Steam to do a good chunk of heavy lifting.  But you either do that work or you pay somebody to do it.  That is the way things go.

And this belief in Steam as a necessity has spread pretty wide.  Coverage of Steam and its sales… something even I am guilty of at least twice a year… pales only in comparison to coverage of things like Amazon Prime Day, where sites everywhere compete for clicks by giving Jeff Bezos as much free advertising as he could possibly ask for.

So we have made Steam what it is through our own mild obsession with it.  If it feels like a monopoly it is because we practically venerate it.

Another aspect of these suits that leans on the monopoly angle is the claim that Steam’s power is keeping game prices higher than they otherwise would be.

That, of course, made me laugh out loud because one of the ongoing rando developer complaints about Steam is that it has conditioned consumers to wait for sales and, in doing so, has reduced revenue by suppressing the price consumers are willing to pay.

The ongoing argument “Steam Sales: Good or Bad?” continues!

That said, there are certainly some aspects of Steam that are not ideal.

The whole lock-in aspect, where if you buy a title on Steam you are then required to buy any DLC or expansions or whatever through Steam can be a bit of a kick in the nuts.  For example, if you register your EVE Online or Guild Wars Reforged account through Steam, then you have to use the cash shop through Steam… which in the case of the latter wasn’t even working through Steam last I checked.

The solution seems to be that, if you can avoid buying a game through Steam, then maybe you should do that.  Not only does that remove some headache, but it also means that the developer doesn’t have to pay a cut of every transaction to Valve.

I know, some things are just easier to buy through Steam.  So while I have a host of titles I play independent of Valve’s grip, there are a lot still in my Steam library, a good chunk of which I probably could have purchased directly… like all of those Paradox titles.

Expanding on that, being locked into the Steam ecosystem once you purchase a title isn’t all that great either.  Steam has been good and isn’t in any peril of changing that I know of, but depending on the good intentions of a corporation tends to be a bad bet in the long run.

It does feel like these suits might have some leverage on that front, at least given what the battle between Epic and Apple and Google has indicated, even if we start to get into the whole discussion of how long digital purchases should last.

And there is the whole pricing restriction that Steam does enforce, which says that a company cannot charge less for a title or DLC or whatever when purchased directly than price listed on Steam.  It does feel like there is likely some consumer protection regulations that might influence that.  At least in the EU.  Here in the US we no longer have any consumer protections as the corporations have finally put a tyrant in charge.

Finally, back to the question of whether the 30% is actually a justifiable price.  As I started out above, pricing is not based on cost in almost all circumstances.  It is based on what the seller believes the market will allow… and especially so with software when there is no incremental per unit cost.

On the one hand, as noted, Steam does do more than a bit of heavy lifting for you.  Not only does it provide the store front and manage payments, but if you’re a title like Valheim it is managing controller integration and co-op multi-play from user friends list and probably a half a dozen other things I am not considering.

Steam does add value.

But then I see… and I am going to keep bringing this up… Gabe out there taking delivery on a new mega yacht with a submarine dock… really, it is that submarine dock that is the excessive frosting on this particular cake for me… and I start to wonder if Steam might have too much power.

Valve has the advantage of being privately held, so we don’t get much insight into what they are doing… but is also means we don’t get news stories about them laying off huge numbers on the same day that Gabe takes delivery of a new mega yacht.  But still, when the CEO is making mega yacht money based on a storefront mostly selling other people’s games, you do start to wonder if the marketplace is somehow bent or skewed.

The big question becomes, if being Steam is so lucrative, why don’t they have more competition?

What do we have?  There is the Epic Game Store, which had a stated objective of taking on Steam… in part by offering dev a bigger cut of revenue.  Unfortunately the whole thing is run by the progressively more noxious over time Tim Sweeney, who has the billionaire brain bug and believes any consumer protections are a plot to get him.  For example:

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney Supports Child Porn

So the Epic Game Store has not only failed to take on Steam… the venture loses money and is only held together by Tim’s anger at somebody else making more money than him… but became a repellent destination for many due to the rantings of its founder.  Child porn, not a great branding statement there Tim.

Also, Steam keys don’t work there.

Then there is GoG.com.  I try to buy things from GoG.com to support their mission to keep older titles running and accessible.  I have even re-purchased titles I already own on Steam over there just because.  But they are a niche player.  Nobody is buying even modest sized yachts off of the revenue of GoG.com.

And after that… I don’t know.  There is Amazon’s Luna platform.  Again, another noxious billionaire and a market strategy that seems to depend on fishing for users from Twitch.  I mean, I am a Prime member and I don’t want to use Luna.

There was EA’s Origin platform, which was awful because it was run by EA.  Even they relented and put their games back on Steam when they completely failed to deliver on their plan to be the Nordstrom to Steam’s Walmart or whatever.

Oh, and there is XBox Game Pass, which let’s you play a select range of titles for $30 a month.  That is probably a good deal for a segment of gamers, but the word is that the whole thing is like Spotify for video games, a way for the platform holder to pay the studios that actually make the games less.

So the market hasn’t done very well in its attempts to hinder Gabe’s yacht buying resources.

Another way to pressure Valve is for big studios to push for lower rates… though, they already get that if their sales on the platform exceed specific targets… the rate goes to 25% at $10 million and to 20% at $50 million.  And I suspect that somebody like EA or Blizzard gets even more preferential cuts based on their size, which gives them the ability to negotiate.  But they only cut deals for themselves, not for their smaller competitors.  Why complain about Steam when you can collude with Valve?

Which I guess leaves lawsuits.

I mean, I don’t have any other answers… except maybe don’t buy from Steam or list your games on Steam if you think Steam is ripping you off.  But Steam is so convenient.  I know, it is tough.  So just call a lawyer.

Finally, given how these things generally work out, the only real winners will be the lawyers.  I remember the SOE class action lawsuit for downtime, where the lawyers got millions and we got 450 units of Station Cash… but you had to apply for it and it was for US residents only.

So I suspect that victory in any such lawsuit will result in no changes, a small credit for Steam customers if they can prove they deserve it, and a big fat payday for lawyers who will end up with most of the nearly $900 million being sought in one of the actions.

In the end, I have no good ideas, just the usual observation that when money is involved people seem to go somewhat insane.

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