Actually they can’t. Steam’s TOS has a “most favored nation” clause that forbids developers from charging less for their games on other platforms (at least this is how I understand it, I’m not a lawyer). From a small developer’s perspective, it sucks that they can’t unburden the player from the 30% where it doesn’t apply. From Valve’s perspective, that would turn Steam into an advertising platform for other stores.
Check isthereanydeals for deals on steam keys that aren’t gray market and lower than Steam. How do they get around it? Well it seems to more apply to retail price and not sales price.
That only applies for steam keys afaik. You can not sell your steam keys cheaper anywhere else, since steam is on the hook for the cost and services. That is fairly logical.
A dev can charge whatever if they deal with all that themself on their own webpage forinstance.
They can sell it for whatever price they want on other platforms.
What they can’t do is sell the freely generated Steam keys on other stores for less than the cost of selling them on Steam.
So they cannot put a game on Steam, then generate 100 free keys and put them on Greenman Games for 30% less than Steam. They can definitely put it on Epic for 30% less and let Epic pay the hosting and distribution.
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Actually they can’t. Steam’s TOS has a “most favored nation” clause that forbids developers from charging less for their games on other platforms (at least this is how I understand it, I’m not a lawyer). From a small developer’s perspective, it sucks that they can’t unburden the player from the 30% where it doesn’t apply. From Valve’s perspective, that would turn Steam into an advertising platform for other stores.
This is only true for steam keys sold on other platforms.
Check isthereanydeals for deals on steam keys that aren’t gray market and lower than Steam. How do they get around it? Well it seems to more apply to retail price and not sales price.
That only applies for steam keys afaik. You can not sell your steam keys cheaper anywhere else, since steam is on the hook for the cost and services. That is fairly logical.
A dev can charge whatever if they deal with all that themself on their own webpage forinstance.
edit: had a hrd time finding the video i knew i had seen this on : https://v.redd.it/xnl8xyki4h5d1/DASH_1080.mp4
This is factually incorrect.
They can sell it for whatever price they want on other platforms.
What they can’t do is sell the freely generated Steam keys on other stores for less than the cost of selling them on Steam.
So they cannot put a game on Steam, then generate 100 free keys and put them on Greenman Games for 30% less than Steam. They can definitely put it on Epic for 30% less and let Epic pay the hosting and distribution.