They can even list there and sell Steam keys on their website and not pay any of that to Valve, with the only stipulation that Steam keys cannot be sold for less than on Steam itself.
So basically:
- You don’t need to publish there
- But if you do, you can still publish elsewhere
- And you can sell Steam keys directly with no cut to Valve
You only pay the 30% cut for sales made through Steam.
That’s incredibly reasonable.
There aren’t many option and all of them except one are predatory. Regulation that would limit the amount taken would be a real boon to the industry. Steam, Epic, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are all guilty of this. The government should step in but they don’t because of lobbying and donations.
No one defends Microsoft when it comes to this. Gaben gets a free pass because he pretends to be a cool guy when he’s just another billionaire essentially robbing his workforce and customers.
Steam is the only store putting the customer first. The refund policy is top notch. Heck just making proton, giving gamers the choice of os, is the best thing for gamers since computers was invented!
Putting the customer first? Call me when I can transfer my license to anyone else I want without valve having to okay it like I can a physical copy then we are talking about putting the customer first.
Microsoft’s refund policy is top notch too and I see proton as leveraging open source to avoid dev costs.
More importantly, everything steam does could be done with 5% instead of 30% and Gaben would still be filthy rich.
Steam is as greedy as the other platforms and it’s us, the consumers, and the indie scene that suffer for it. Are you okay with your favorite indie studio closing and your favorite game not getting a sequel because Gaben wants 8000 million a year instead of 1000 million a year?
There is most likely collusion and soft monopolies, these platforms are clearly not competing in good faith.