Forcing you to sell at the same price as on steam when customers will be downloading from steam servers anyway is not sketchy but very fair.
As a developer you could set the game price on steam to a high number and sell keys on your own site for cheaper. Anyone who buys a key then used steam resources to download it. The dev keeps the 30% since its not a sale through steam. Yeah id like free file hosting with terabytes of bandwidth too please.
If you sell the game yourself and provide the files, you can set lower prices. This is fair and valve doesn’t restrict that.
There was a indie dev, the Spiderweb games guy, who refused to use Steam for years and he sold his games on his website. I think it was from like 2008 all the way to 2022. Refused to give Valve a cut.
Then he finally released it on Steam and he wrote a blog post how his niche games sold extremely well and regrets leaving so much money on the table for years.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Forcing you to sell at the same price as on steam when customers will be downloading from steam servers anyway is not sketchy but very fair.
As a developer you could set the game price on steam to a high number and sell keys on your own site for cheaper. Anyone who buys a key then used steam resources to download it. The dev keeps the 30% since its not a sale through steam. Yeah id like free file hosting with terabytes of bandwidth too please.
If you sell the game yourself and provide the files, you can set lower prices. This is fair and valve doesn’t restrict that.
What about setting lower prices on other stores like GOG or Epic Games?
There was a indie dev, the Spiderweb games guy, who refused to use Steam for years and he sold his games on his website. I think it was from like 2008 all the way to 2022. Refused to give Valve a cut.
Then he finally released it on Steam and he wrote a blog post how his niche games sold extremely well and regrets leaving so much money on the table for years.
I tried to find the blog post but no luck.