Yet fleecing game developers with 30% cut on sales at the same time. It's a soft big cushion to talk profound thoughts from. Reminds me of billionaires giving advice like "you just have to believe and work hard"... yeah, but that's a low baseline you have to have anyways.
You’re welcome to sell Steam keys on your own website, and Valve won’t take any cut at all, while still providing the same services as a purchase through the store.
This is a really good power play - the idea being that if you can get more eyes than Steam can through your own store, go ahead, keep the money.
But if you're getting the sale because of Steam itself, then we get the cut.
You can still debate whether 30% is fair even if Steam are providing the discoverability but still, it's a solid policy and they're putting their money where their mouth is.
Still comes back to "can you sell enough keys on your own to make up for the amount of sales you get through Steam, even after the 30%?" It's great if you think you have a hot game or product that will be sought after by a large enough audience vs people seeing a game show up in their feed or on sale or a friend is playing it or however it ends up in front of you on Steam, a game that maybe you've never heard of before and now you're going to buy it.
You can sell steam keys on your store and sell normally through the Steam Store. The only requirement is to keep the Steam price <= your own store's price. That seems like a very fairy policy.
While that's valid, I want to point out that Steam accepts a wide variety of local payment methods that have exorbitant transaction fees compared to Visa. Pretty sure I've seen them cover a particular payment method with 10% fee. Steam takes 15% for big publishers I think and that's not a large profit margin in those scenarios. A lot of younger customers do not have an international credit card and Steam makes purchasing games accessible to them.
How do you think they got to where they are? by not believing and not working hard? Valve has been working at what they do for longer than some people commenting here have been alive. Steam has been around for 19 years.
Do you believe developers should be able to use something a company has spent the last 19 years investing in and building... for free or cheap? Is there a competitor in the market that would bring them as much exposure while not charging as much? The only thing I can think of are platforms like EGS, where they basically pay people to sell their games on there, so they can grow the platform.
I haven't done the math myself, but I'm guessing indie developers would be hard pressed to make the same money without using Steam as they do using Steam, even with the "fleecing" you're talking about.
Few projections there, alas yeah I remember how Steam sucked ass when it appeared and how it was forced upon customers of their popular game(s) initially to spread it around. There were competitors, but without much strategy or foresight (Ubisoft, EA). These days you have gog (30%), epic store (12%), itch.io (10%), google play store (15%, after epic's push), apple app store (30 and 15% through small business developer program). Steam holds the position still, no need to move if you have the power of inertia. Even damn google and apple moved. Epic did good there, albeit unconventionally.
