Monopoly control is a hot topic in the games industry these days. Lawsuits against Apple, Valve, and Sony all take slightly different tacks in arguing that these companies exercise unfair monopoly control over their platforms' market for downloadable games.
Each suit also argues that this monopoly control leads to higher game prices for consumers. Platform holders charge higher commission fees than they would in a truly competitive environment, the arguments go, and those higher-than-normal publishing costs are passed on to consumers via higher-priced games.
The Epic Games Store's two-year-plus experiment in reduced platform fees provides plenty of evidence on this score. Just look at any of the dozens of games available on both the EGS (where Epic charges publishers a 12 percent fee) and Steam (where Valve charges a 30 percent standard fee).
In almost every case, those games will be offered at the same base price. Instead of passing on the savings, the publishers just pocket the 18 percentage-point difference between the EGS cut and the Steam cut. The only real exceptions come when a store is having a temporary sale, after which the games revert to identical prevailing pricing standards in almost every case.
Wolfire's David Rosen expanded on that accusation in a recent blog post, saying that Valve threatened to "remove [Wolfire's game] Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website, without Steam keys and without Steam's DRM."
Sources close to Valve suggested to Ars that this "parity" rule only applies to the "free" Steam keys publishers can sell on other storefronts and not to Steam-free versions of those games sold on competing platforms. Valve hasn't responded to a request for comment on this story.
Regardless, even if we remove Steam's alleged price-fixing from the equation, publishers still seem reluctant to pass on the savings from the EGS's lower cut. This is apparent when you look at the Epic Games Store PC exclusives that are also sold on consoles, where the platform holders each take their own 30 percent cut.
An Ars analysis found that out of 41 such games, only five were offered for a lower price on the EGS. The rest of the games were priced identically on PC and console, except for eight that were actually cheaper on console thanks to a temporary sale. Again, publishers largely aren't lowering their prices even though Epic has lowered its relative platform cut.
Steam’s “price parity rule” isn’t wreaking havoc on game prices
Game publishers aren't "passing on the savings" from "cheaper" online storefronts.
arstechnica.com
