Technology

Amazon literally does this if you sell on their platform as the manufacturer or just at all. My source: Hi, that’s me, and I can confirm this is standard practice at Amazon and I’m the manufacturer of my own product.

No company should have that kind of market leverage, no. The issue though is saying this makes them a monopoly. It's shit behavior but then if that ability makes a company a monopoly, we should be busting down a lot of company doors that do/did the same thing. Looking at Wal-Mart, nearly every major ISP in the USA, there's a lot of that going on.

Regardless of what you folks think about Valve, does anyone believe that a marketplace should have this kind of leverage over their suppliers?

On principle, no, and Valve should not be above criticism.

I'm cautiously in favour of uniform retail pricing, such that no sales platform could either gouge customers or undercut to win more people over, such that the competition is determined by the available selection of products and other amenities, but my gut says that kind of price fixation would end up a minefield of complications, exceptions and loopholes. Few things are ever as easy as a layperson may think, and I sure am one.

Either way, one retailer dictating the prices for all others definitely seems unfair.

For instance, should Amazon be permitted to force manufacturers to set the price of a product outside of their marketplace?

Aside from the obligatory "fuck Amazon", that would open the door to a particularly vicious level of fuckery. They would set their own price, sustained by cheap, fucked-up working conditions and the capital to afford selling at a loss, which they already do and which is bad enough, but to also dictate that price to other vendors that definitely can't afford to operate at such a loss? If they're currently on the road to monopoly, that would turn it into a bullet train: fast, on rails and with no stop to get off at.

I don't think that's what people are arguing.

If I manufacture your product from a product version prototype you provided me and give you unlimited access to that product to use outside my manufacturing plant and store front, then say, you can have and sell all this free product I manufactured for you, but you have to price it the same in my store as you do where you sell it elsewhere, that's makes sense.

What doesn't make sense and what isn't right, is if they say "you can't price your product that someone else is manufacturing for you at a price lower than the one your price my manufactured product of yours at.

But people keep thinking that those two groups are saying the same thing, that Valve should be allowed to do it regardless of who manufactured what when that's not what they are saying.

If Valve is doing this, they obvious should have the book thrown at them. But we haven't seen evidence of that that isn't tantamount to hearsay. So we are doing what you should do when you hear something and can't determine the veracity of what is being said. You wait for proof and don't make up your mind based on rumors.