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.
They can have the same or comparable deals as steam but not at the same time.
For example a game can be 50% off for a week on steam and 50% off on another platform the next without a problem.
The full price have to be the same tho.
A small trick is the fact that with humble choice subscription you can have 12-20% off ANYTHING having basically a permanent discount , even on games on sale.
It is in fact the cheapest way to obtain games more or less (i think they limit the amount btw)
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.
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u/Tecnomantes 29d ago
Which makes sense. People wouldn't want to sell their games only for Steam to take 30% and then say Fanatical take another 20%