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Steams Class Action Lawsuit

A topic by GodwayGames created 13 days ago Views: 455 Replies: 7
Viewing posts 1 to 3

Did you know there was a class action lawsuit against steam right now? did you know there's a good 29% chance that you're enrolled in it? Did you get an email saying there was a lawsuit and you were part of it? I didn't.

of the 109,674 developers on steambase who've ever published on steam, 32,000 of them are supposedly opted into this lawsuit.
Are you enrolled if you're a TBA indie who hasn't published yet? are you enrolled? I have no idea.

if your game is free but you make your money off of ads or micro-transactions are you enrolled? anyone's guess!

do you want the right to sue valve yourself in the future and think you can get a better commission and don't want to be enrolled in a lawsuit against your will? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

god forbid you're a publisher and just don't want any bad blood with Valve.

as it turns out there's no public listing for plaintiffs to inform you that you have been opted in. 

Why are we the developers who just want to put pixels to screen and smiles to face being dragged through yet another political circuit? I have no idea.

have you ever even heard of Wolfire Games and Dark Catt Studios? I haven't, guess they represent us now. 

I'm not going to tell you how to feel about it, I won't tell you what to do but we have less transparency on this issue than a Picasso through frosted glass. if one of you could please fill the rest of us in, that would be great because I have no idea what's going.

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hasn't it been proven that this lawsuit is just some lawyer's method of frivolous lawsuit just to get money off of dumb indy game developers?

no clue, your guess is as good as mine. 

(+1)

To enroll, you must answer the email and send information to the lawyers. It's not just that they can get you involved without your consent. If they do that, those lawyers would be breaking the law and could be sued.

The lawsuit has nothing to do with Steam's percentage, and that's not going to change. It's very, very unlikely to be successful or that the people who participate will receive any money.

The lawsuit is based on a rule Steam had, whereby to publish on Steam, you had to agree to the conditions of not selling your games for less on other stores. For example, if you sold your game for $10 on Steam, then you couldn't sell it for $8 on Itch (assuming you would pass on the percentage difference each store takes to the players).

The lawsuit alleges that this is against the law and that it supposedly harms sellers, customers, and all the other nonsense lawyers tend to use.

Personally, why do I think the lawsuit won't be successful? Basically, because the plaintiffs must prove harm as a result of these policies, and that's very difficult to achieve.

If you sell at 10 on Itch, which keeps 10%, then that 20% goes to the developer; you don't lose, you actually win.

If you really want to pass the price on to players, you lower the price based on the percentage of users per platform.

As far as I understand, Steam has never lowered any game due to this policy.

For all these reasons, it's very difficult for them to prove real harm, but who knows.

If the lawsuit is successful now, it's most likely that the people who bought it (not the distributors) will be the ones who receive the money.

I think they only say not to sell steam keys for less on other stores rather than selling directly on itch or something which seems fair enough. It's made me afraid of putting steam keys in a bundle tho.

ehm but low price non steam key pages have been around shortly after steam was released.... i dont know if this is even possible to get all this guys....but im no expert to this topic but it seems very suspicious that its just another TERROR WE ARE GOING TO DIE shock message, funny fact: a few weeks aago many "science" channels strarted to promot that the PROOF for us living in a situation has been been found lol....well but its just some evidence and up to you mindset....dont get why the media always wants us in a rage mode

I have no idea what you mean, i'm not the media i'm a game developer.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3249500/Thrack_The_Fox/ <- i'm the developer behind this project.

I've never claimed to be a reporter of any kind 

hehe me neither I just wanted to point out that you often hear a lot (steam law suit) of awful stuff going on that could possible harm you.  Until you have definitive proof of somehting bad actually really happenss to you in the form of a lawyers writing, but people hear the rumours and freak out.

however, im just a active thinking person (Human 2.0) and not media or anything closer related to reporters or anything and game ARTIST like ehm you....but your game reminds me of old workshop days lol https://steamcommunity.com/id/xxxxcompany/myworkshopfiles/

anyway best luck with your steam release :)

take a look at the awesome world of -X-ScornGames....


https://xx696.itch.io/

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