This might have been reasonable when everyone was taking the same cut to e.g. prevent publishers from charging more for letting gamers buy games on their store of choice (typically Steam), but right now it seems to be hurting actual competition, so I kind of would like something to be done about it. That said, I do worry it would mean publishers would simply raise their prices on Steam instead of lowering them elsewhere, so there's that. I just can't see publishers lowering prices elsewhere.

I know Finland has this. That said, I don't know how it applies to digital sales because of legislation issues, and I'm also not sure about how well it's enforced.

Devs raising their price on Steam would either allow them to get the same cut and possibly drive sales away from Steam and make the other stores more competitive (that is the biggest reason to offer things cheaper). But having a big marketshare and preventing that from happening isn`t something cool.

Sure, but from a consumer perspective (i.e. my perspective), raising prices on Steam would not be desirable. Competition should lower prices, not raise them. I'm not sure what the ideal solution would be or if there even is one, but at this point there are definitely some concerns with simply allowing lower prices on competing stores. It's something I would ideally like to see happen, but it's also something that concerns me in the situation we've ended up in.

Totally agree. But let's say they increase price on Steam, that will have repercutions and probably price going back to normal which would them make the other services price be lower (like an agreement between dev and store for the lesser fee). The problem currently is that they can't do that because of STEAM, they can only offer promotions (which can't be permanent by principle).

The issue is that this is a perfect example of abusing monopoly. There are alternatives sure. But why would anyone be willing to try other platforms if they have nothing to offer compared to Steam which is the go to store for PC gaming by default. It would indeed be interesting to see a fair competition where let's say Epic instead of buying exclusives could have offered games for cheaper prices.

I don't share your confidence in there being repercussions. I think people would still buy the games at a higher price, and the higher price would become the new normal.

Could very well be. But Steam don`t want that to be the case, thus from the lawsuit they demand that the game is sold at the same price on their store as is in others.

I'm surprised no one on here has even raised an eyebrow at the fact that a number of publishers have been dicking around with regional prices over the past few years.

Oh crap Ka-pi96 as turned into a grammar nazi, he must be an awfully bored masochist to correct this sites spelling, even spellcheck is frightened of VGChartz.

So your saying you feel a professional duty to uphold grammatical standards on VGChartz, all I can say is you will need insanely good luck and a lot of stiff drinks.