I have never seen and nobody has ever provided proven that Steam requires price parity for electronic game keys or physical copies that are not steam keys.
As far as I understand it, Steam only requires that you sell your game for the same price on other marketplaces if you’re selling Steam keys. If you’re selling a non-Steam license then you don’t have to match prices at all and can sell for cheaper on Epic, Itch, GoG, etc.
I also want to point out that I believe if you sell steam keys anywhere else except the steam platform you get to keep 100% of those sales. Steam only takes a 30% cut from steam key sales sold on their own store front.
When new video game stores were opening that charged much lower commissions than Valve, I decided that I would provide my game “Overgrowth” at a lower price to take advantage of the lower commission rates. I intended to write a blog post about the results.
But when I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM. This would make it impossible for me, or any game developer, to determine whether or not Steam is earning their commission. I believe that other developers who charged lower prices on other stores have been contacted by Valve, telling them that their games will be removed from Steam if they did not raise their prices on competing stores.
Yep. I read the original statement from the original game dev that sued. Their lawsuit was unsuccessful and they decided to refile it as a class action as a result. Which is why in my original comment I said “This BS again”, and “This has been alleged before”.
Still it seems like no other devs are actually alleging this except 1-2 others. Out of thousands of game devs. Seems suspect.
Plus all of those games are still on steam, so no actual action was taken against them, one support person possibly misunderstood the question thinking he was selling steam keys and answered with incorrect information. I would get it if the game had been removed and that’s why they were suing, and in that case I would be with them, but that’s not the case. And Overgrowth is an old enough game that they could realistically risk it since there’s very likely not that many new sells happening.
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Where did you get this information?
I have never seen and nobody has ever
providedproven that Steam requires price parity for electronic game keys or physical copies that are not steam keys.As far as I understand it, Steam only requires that you sell your game for the same price on other marketplaces if you’re selling Steam keys. If you’re selling a non-Steam license then you don’t have to match prices at all and can sell for cheaper on Epic, Itch, GoG, etc.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys#3
I also want to point out that I believe if you sell steam keys anywhere else except the steam platform you get to keep 100% of those sales. Steam only takes a 30% cut from steam key sales sold on their own store front.
https://www.wolfire.com/blog/2021/05/Regarding-the-Valve-class-action/
It seems it was not explicit in the agreement regarding non-key sales, but allegedly threatened and possibly enforced in practice.
Yep. I read the original statement from the original game dev that sued. Their lawsuit was unsuccessful and they decided to refile it as a class action as a result. Which is why in my original comment I said “This BS again”, and “This has been alleged before”.
Still it seems like no other devs are actually alleging this except 1-2 others. Out of thousands of game devs. Seems suspect.
Plus all of those games are still on steam, so no actual action was taken against them, one support person possibly misunderstood the question thinking he was selling steam keys and answered with incorrect information. I would get it if the game had been removed and that’s why they were suing, and in that case I would be with them, but that’s not the case. And Overgrowth is an old enough game that they could realistically risk it since there’s very likely not that many new sells happening.