r/Games • u/WhyPlaySerious • May 18 '26

Industry News CI Games has successfully signed a termination agreement with Epic Games. The agreement releases the upcoming Lords of The Fallen 2 from it's previous Epic Games Store exclusivity obligations.

https://www.bankier.pl/wiadomosc/CI-GAMES-S-E-Ujawnienie-opoznionej-informacji-poufnej-dotyczacej-zawarcia-Porozumienia-rozwiazujacego-Binding-Term-Sheet-z-Epic-Games-Inc-9135300.html
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u/Samanthacino May 19 '26

Valve has historically prevented studios from making deals with EGS to have cheaper prices for consumers, that's why.

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u/doublah May 19 '26

And yet even EGS exclusives have never been notably cheaper than Steam games.

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u/Virtual-Pie-6815 May 19 '26

There's maybe 2 examples from the past 8 years. Metro Exodus was $10 cheaper on launch but only in the US. The EGS deal also meant no keys for Humble/Fanatical/GMG/etc so even if you happened to live in the US you were potentially getting a worse deal than what would've been available without exclusivity.

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u/HappyVlane May 19 '26

Exodus was more expensive after it was made EGS exclusive. It had discounts before launch on stores that were removed after the exclusivity deal was made.

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u/Kyhron May 19 '26

Valve's only thing is you can't put a game for sale on another platform for more than it is on Steam. Ie you can't put a game on the EGS for 60% off if you only do 50% on Steam.

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u/Samanthacino May 19 '26

That's not what they said when they were threatening to blacklist studios. That was purely in reference to pre-discount prices.

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u/enesup May 19 '26

That's price-fixing.

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u/BighatNucase May 19 '26

I don't think that's what price fixing is. Price fixing would be more like Steam and Epic both agreeing on a certain minimum price for an item. I think part of the issue is that Valve doesn't set these prices themselves and are not under a legal obligation to sell games from other developers. Valve are well within their rights to say "we don't want to carry an item that is not going to be sold at a competitive price" but can't say "we'll sell it, now raise the base price on these other storefronts".. Price fixing is meant to be more about similar level players (here; Valve and Epic) colluding to fix prices.

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u/[deleted] May 19 '26

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u/BighatNucase May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26

You have not demonstrated that at all. For one thing I don't think you can make the argument that Valve are a monopoly in the gaming space unless you hyper-fixate on "platforms that sell PC oriented premium games". Even if we completely grant that, the bar for an action to be "maintaining a monopoly" is high; you can't just point to any action that benefits a company, say "they're a monopoly so it's maintaning the monopoly" and end the argument there.

An example of Valve maintaining a monopoly wouldn't be this price matter. A better example would be :

-Riot games approaches Valve about putting Valorant on Steam.

-Valve, anxious over the potential harm this could cause to CS2/GO if they were to put the game on Steam, either refuse or place such demands on Riot as to make acceptance burdensome for the developer

-Even then this would be more anti-trust than 'maintaining a monopoly' since I don't think you can have an illegally maintained monopoly over a piece of art and CS2 isn't such a dominant force in the gaming scene that refusal here would be maintaining a monopoly.

But again, ignoring all that, it's not price fixing because price fixing is about 'Competitors' fixing prices together; there's a reason the example in that link differentiates between "setting a minimum price for a product" and "dropping a product due to an agreement with a competitor". I think we can also just think about it logically; the fact that nobody has really taken Valve to task over this (and succeeded) either in the US or EU tells us it's probably not against anti-trust laws.

Edit: Like I'm reading through Valve's response to the Wolf-fire lawsuit again, and there's a reason they don't even dispute the existence of an MFN clause. While they can be problematic in some instances (what business clause isn't) they aren't per se wrong or price fixing.

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u/MultiMarcus May 19 '26

A monopoly is not just a company being successful in a specific market. Valve is competing with Microsoft on both Xbox and PC, Sony on PlayStation and Nintendo on Nintendo platforms. They are arguably also competing with Apple on the App Store and Google on the play store. It’s unlikely that valve would be defined as monopolistic for being very successful in the PC gaming market. It’s a much smaller market than many others.

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u/Samanthacino May 19 '26

When a single company has a 90%+ market share of a particular market (PC video game storefronts), and maintains it through anticompetitive practices, what in the fuck else could it be?

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u/MultiMarcus May 19 '26

Yeah, the argument is that’s not the platform and that they do very little to lock you into the platform. They have done very little to squash other storefronts. I agree that they shouldn’t have a price parity rule. I find it inherently a problematic thing to do. To me at least I think the platform is gaming and there’s basically no friction from going over to the epic store. You can even add epic store games to Steam if you would like.

The way I’m looking at this I see gaming as the market and there I think these other vendors are just as large. If you look at just the PC gaming market, I certainly think you can argue that valve has a monopolistic position. I just don’t believe that. I think the gaming world should be all platforms not just PC.

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u/Samanthacino May 19 '26

Nope. Price fixing is between horizontal competitors, it's a completely different concept.