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Debunking the grey market beyond Steam (www.gamesindustry.biz)

submitted 1 day ago by misk@sopuli.xyz to c/games@sh.itjust.works

132 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Despite facing increased competition in the space, not least from the Epic Games Store, Valve's platform is synonymous with PC gaming. The service is estimated to have made $10.8 billion in revenue during 2024, a new record for the Half-Life giant. Since it entered the PC distribution space back in 2018, the rival Epic Games Store has been making headway – and $1.09 billion last year – but Steam is still undeniably dominant within the space.

Valve earns a large part of its money from taking a 20-30% cut of sales revenue from developers and publishers. Despite other storefronts opening with lower overheads, Steam has stuck with taking this slice of sales revenue, and in doing so, it has been argued that Valve is unfairly taking a decent chunk of the profits of developers and publishers.

This might change, depending on how an ongoing class-action lawsuit initiated by Wolfire Games goes, but for the time being, Valve is making money hand over fist selling games on Steam. The platform boasts over 132 million users, so it's perfectly reasonable that developers and publishers feel they have to use Steam – and give away a slice of their revenue – in order to reach the largest audience possible.

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[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 4 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

It is true. Valve does not enforce price parity for non Steam keys. Here is an example where the dev says that they are offering a better price on EGS because of the better cut:

https://twitter.com/HeardOfTheStory/status/1700066610302603405

https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/heard-of-the-story-ff3758

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1881940/Heard_of_the_Story/

Pretty clear example of the same game having a lower base price on Epic than on Steam.

Wolfire claiming Valve does this is something different from Valve actually doing it, and that's where the dispute lies. According to Valve, Wolfire's explanation of the price parity policy is incorrect.

Here's the policy itself: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys#3

You should use Steam Keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam. **It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers. **

The policy is pretty leanient regarding the "worse deal" aspect. You're allowed to have a sale on one platform but not on Steam, as long as you offer "something similar" at a different moment to Steam users too.

It's OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.

Even if you violate this policy, Valve will still sell your game, they may just stop providing you with Steam keys to sell.

I don't see Wolfire winning this tbh.

[–] Toribor@corndog.social 1 points 14 minutes ago

So can developers just 'create' steam keys out of thin air that can be used to activate their game on steam? Does Valve get paid when the keys are created or activated? Or not at all?

Seems fair maybe if it's using all of Steams infrastructure, considering developers can distribute the game themselves without steam keys.

[–] stevedice@sh.itjust.works -1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Yes, Valve enforcing price parity only when it's convenient for them is also addressed in the lawsuit.

The rest of your comment refers to Steam Keys. That's literally not what we're talking about.

[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

But that is what the policy is about. Steam doesn't have a price parity policy regarding general game sales.

[–] stevedice@sh.itjust.works -1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

No, it's not. That's an entirely different policy that you keep bringing up for no reason. That policy is also anti-consumer bullshit but I digress. What I'm referring to is the following shady wording:

Initial pricing as well as proposed pricing adjustments will be reviewed by Valve

[–] ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 2 points 1 hour ago

What? That wording isn't even relevant to the case. That's just Valve saying they will do a review of the price changes on Steam. They set out no specific requirements (other than a minimum price of $0.99, but will try to catch errors based on their pricing recommendations. It's similar to how Valve reviews new store pages and provides recommendations to devs on how to improve them. They do have rules against games set up for card farming scams, but that makes sense.

Wolfire's case is about how Valve as an extremely large player is impossible to go around, so game devs have no choice but to accept their 30% fee if they want to reach most of the market out there. Valve then uses these fees to entrench this supposed monopoly position (Wolfire specifically cites the acquisition of WON back in the day, which Valve eventually shut down and merged with Steam).

Wolfire argues that a fair price is much lower than 30%, and that Valve should lower the fee and therefore have less funds to fight their competitors, creating a more competitive environment.