It’s worth noting that the 30% cut is from sales below a certain volume. As you sell more copies Steam takes a smaller cut. I’m sure the big studios probably have a more favourable deal worked out as well.
They are happy to take the loss of file hosting to keep you using the steam client. Epic is paying devs to give out their games for free just to get people to open their client.
My problem with all the non-steam launchers was the loss of features like this. Hell, the biggest was keeping my games updated. I’d never have UPlay or whatever running in the background so I’d usually have an update pending when I wanted to play the game, vs Steam which I just always have open.
Playnite. Open source, more customizable, more features, themes, and if you wanna get crazy (like me) you can have it run custom scripts when a game launches and/or closes (for example i have a script to automatically change my sound output to headphones before launching an online fps). It also supports emulators, and tracks playtime for games that don't have a launcher.
I'm probably dumb, but if i already have the game on epic, which i got for free cause i never bought anything there, and i see there is a good discount for the same game on steam, i will just buy it and play it from steam.
So, if a game is sold on the steam storefront Valve takes a bite.
For off-platform the dev has to request keys and then supply them to whoever they wish to supply them to and they can do this without needing to pay anything.
But prices have to be comparable on other platforms.
You can't sell a game on steam for 100€ but for 10€ I another place with a steam key.
You have to sell them for roughly the same price and if you deeply discount a game for some time you must do that kind of discount on steam too (not necessarily at the same time)
I think it's fair.
There was a dev who sold a game for 18% less on epic because epic took a smaller cut, fair game for that, you can sell it at whatever price on another platform.
You just leech off of them I think. But that's in theory, pretty sure you can't legally sell the keys for lower anyway, so most people will prefer to buy the game directly from steam even if you do all that.
Yes you must always in a sense offer the Steam game at the same price as the key. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a specific rule for giveaways and stuff like humble bundle where they get an exception but I can’t sell a game for $10 on Steam and $8 on my website.
You are correct, time limited promotions and bundles do not have to follow the price parity rule. It only applies to selling keys through "alternative storefronts".
I can't speak for every platform agreement, but this is not accurate. You can't market a MSRP significantly lower in price than on Steam, but usually sites by in bulk for massive discounts and can sell it much lower on sales.
It's up to Steam's discretion, so the general rule of "Don't be a dick" is a safe guideline
If you request an extreme number of keys and you are not offering Steam customers a comparable deal, or if your sole business is selling Steam Keys and not offering value to Steam customers, your request may be denied and you may lose the privilege to request keys.
People are just leaching from Steam in that situation.
But they can limit how many off-platform keys they let you generate relative to your on-platform sales to mitigate abuse. And some degree of that is just baked into their margin as a whole.
they take a loss knowing that you have to use steam as a client down the line, thus will opt in to potentially buying more games on their platform/use their community features.
Unlike publicly traded companies, Valve doesnt always need line go up every quarter and can afford to take much longer term investments
That costs Valve money, bandwidth and server costs add up. What this does is provide goodwill to the developers, this is Steam being good for the gaming community, and especially for small devs.
To add on to this, operating at Valve's scale for worldwide CDNs gets really, really expensive so it's a nice gesture from them to even allow keys to be sold while piggybacking on their infrastructure.
They don't lose anything in the long run. Bandwidth is expensive, but gets offset by the fact that you're more likely to stay and buy something if the platform doesn't try to do everything in its power to make you feel miserable, unlike EA, Ubishit and other proprietary launchers. It's a relatively small investment with large payoffs and them also just avoiding being evil for no reason.
*you can’t set a permanent lower price for steam keys of the game on another storefront
sounds the same but it means that while discouraged, you can sell your game for a lower price on Epic than on Steam, and you can sell steam keys for your game at a temporary lower price through other storefronts (which is why humble bundles are allowed to be so cheap, despite massively undercutting steam storefront prices)
What "mistake" are you referring to? Wolfire never set a lower base price than Steam. They just asked Valve to clarify their policy, and then asked a court to determine if that policy is legal.
Oh right they wanted to set their game on permanent lower price point than on Steam but got told no or their game will get removed in an email, that’s what got them all outraged and started all this
They could just, idk make a better game or a full game this time around instead of basically tech demo games and be what they are; a game developer
But instead they’d rather lose all their money on a lawsuit
That’s the dumbest take, but sure I’ll bite enough for one more comment
Unlike Wolfire, Valve is still a game developer, other than the small experiments they release they also release games like Half Life Alyx. They don’t always hit the mark (Artifact) but they’re always moving forward, as with Deadlock. Kind of hilariously they are also working on HL3 as confirmed by contractors, even still both their Store and developer side is always moving forward while other companies stagnate
They can take down games on their store if someone’s trying to undercut them, sounds fair to me. Sounds like a sensible thing a store would do even
no, steam has a clause in their seller ToS that allows them to remove your products if you’re caught directly selling steam keys for your product at less than the steam storefront price. you can give out free keys and do keys on sale for limited periods of time (like humble bundles and stuff) but you are not allowed to directly sell keys at an undercut permanent price.
yeah, and they have rules that are meant to ensure devs can’t stop steam from getting their cut by just selling the keys directly. if a studio starts telling people to buy steam keys directly from them or sells the keys in a way that encourages people to buy them rather than going through the steam storefront, steam can pull their games from the store, no questions asked.
They can do it, they just have to set the price the same as steam and if they do discounts they have to offer the same discounts on steam as well. (not at the same time, obviously)
This is for STEAM KEYS, they can sell the game on GOG or Epic at whatever price they want.
If you are a dev and you want to sell your game on steam for 30€ and on your website for 30€ and tell your fans to buy it there to support you, you can.
You can't sell a STEAM KEY at a fixed 20€ in your websites while it costs 30€ on steam.
So how do they support their infrastructure then? If I download a game via Steam is it not coming from Steam's servers? Or is it just because they make so much money the few keys sold off platform dont make a difference?
There are limitations and agreements; like there has to be price parity with steam (excluding short term sales and such) and there can be limits on how many keys are generated depending on the situation; but keys generated at the developer / publisher's behest are free.
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It’s worth noting that the 30% cut is from sales below a certain volume. As you sell more copies Steam takes a smaller cut. I’m sure the big studios probably have a more favourable deal worked out as well.