copygirl

But those can still make or break a game’s commercial success, especially during release. It comes down to the same thing: Discouraging developers from making their game available for cheaper on other stores. I’m also not entirely sure that they would stop here, considering they said they do this, they did not say “no” to threatening the removal of a game from the store, and there are accounts of developers saying concerning things.

Here. And the reddit thread where I found it.

edit: Wait, lemme go ahead and quote the quotes from a previous post of mine:

If we get to a situation – again, this is rare. If we get to a situation where a partner is telling us that the price needs to be lower on other platforms than it is on Steam, then we will typically choose not to run curated marketing during times where that game is being discounted, if that is where the price is lower, or around a launch if it’s a around – if it’s a price at launch time.

and

Q. Okay. And part of these conversations is saying, hey, we’re not going to offer you curated promotions if you keep doing that, right?

A. Part of our approach, if we get to a situation where we can’t have pricing that is fair for Steam customers is not to amplify marketing with curated markets.

Q. But these conversations, as you know, also involve the threat not to keep the game on the Steam store at all; is that right?

A. That is not our typical process.

They must’ve changed their tone recently, because I’ve read an actual leaked court document, and the Valve representative / employee states (very defensively) that this is what they did. There’s accounts of developers confirming this as well, including apparently in the (secret?) contract you sign when you sign up as a developer with Steam.

The real crime is that Valve requires price parity when you independently (no Steam keys) sell your game on a different store, as well as the Steam store. (“Most Favored Nation” clause.) It means that developers are allowed to pocket the profits if a game is sold on a store that has a lower percentage cut, but they aren’t allowed to share the lower cost with the customer, because that could encourage people to not use the Steam Store when buying games.

I’ve looked through court documents for this. They’re sneaky about it, but they implicitly threaten you with your game’s sales being crippled by being taken out of their recommendation algorithm. With Steam being the biggest store, that’s a death sentence for most indie developers.