Steam’s policy is to, if a gamedev company gets a better offer in another store that doesn’t add the 30% markup that Steam adds to the price of games and shares that with their customers by selling their games cheaper in the other store, Steam will take their games down from the Steam store.
Now, if Steam was just one amongst many small games stores, the gamedev could just ignore that, but Steam has such much of the Market of digital game sales that gamedevs cannot ignore having their games taken down from the Steam store.
Oh, by the way, this applies to Indies as much as it does to the rest, so we’re not just talking about widelly hated AAA publishers here.
Steam absolutelly is using their dominant market position to shaft both gamers and game devs, including Indies.
So all of the major ecommerce players do this. I’ll get banned from Amazon if i sell my own products i manufacture on my own website cheaper than Amazon.
So we get around it with a different sku.
That’s all you have to do on Steam.
Now I’d love for this to not be the case but no way anyone wins this case against Steam because it’s not about Steam. It’s about all of ecommerce, and they pay (bezos etc) the fucking president off.
Steam’s policy is to, if a gamedev company gets a better offer in another store that doesn’t add the 30% markup that Steam adds to the price of games and shares that with their customers by selling their games cheaper in the other store, Steam will take their games down from the Steam store.
You should use Steam Keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam. It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers.
(…)
It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.
To me, that reads that this is only about selling steam copies of the game on other storefronts (like humblebundle for example), developers are free to sell non-steam copies of the game on other storefronts (like GOG or epic) for cheaper.
Steam’s policy is to, if a gamedev company gets a better offer in another store that doesn’t add the 30% markup that Steam adds to the price of games and shares that with their customers by selling their games cheaper in the other store, Steam will take their games down from the Steam store.
Now, if Steam was just one amongst many small games stores, the gamedev could just ignore that, but Steam has such much of the Market of digital game sales that gamedevs cannot ignore having their games taken down from the Steam store.
Oh, by the way, this applies to Indies as much as it does to the rest, so we’re not just talking about widelly hated AAA publishers here.
Steam absolutelly is using their dominant market position to shaft both gamers and game devs, including Indies.
Which is why simping for Steam is so, so sad.
So all of the major ecommerce players do this. I’ll get banned from Amazon if i sell my own products i manufacture on my own website cheaper than Amazon.
So we get around it with a different sku.
That’s all you have to do on Steam.
Now I’d love for this to not be the case but no way anyone wins this case against Steam because it’s not about Steam. It’s about all of ecommerce, and they pay (bezos etc) the fucking president off.
Does anyone have a source on that? I couldn’t find that clause in their docs, all I could find that is in this: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
To me, that reads that this is only about selling steam copies of the game on other storefronts (like humblebundle for example), developers are free to sell non-steam copies of the game on other storefronts (like GOG or epic) for cheaper.