this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
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There's a very important detail that is missing here, namely that Steam has a clause where you cannot list your game elsewhere for less than you list it on Steam. Many indie games are published to Itch.io and Steam, but Valve forces them to list both at the same price, meaning thay since most gamers use Steam they will automatically choose the version that invisibly only gives the devs 70% of the revenue. Sure Valve does have lots of nice features, but those features could be duplicated over time by one of Valve's competitors. The problem is that to get a competing platform off of the ground, you need to entice people with lower prices since you can't compete on features. Valve uses its monopoly status to make this impossible.
Epic Game Store has pretty much succeeded with their weekly free (often quite good!) games. I've even bought a few things from them. Unfortunately they fucked up royally and EGS is an unusable slow piece of shit. Really an indictment of modern software engineering practices but they need to ether than entire thing and rewrite it from scratch. Steam is much more performant. Still, EGS shows that it is possible to break in as long as you have a boatload of cash to burn. However, Valve has started to run up the score by making their own their hardware; using EGS on steam deck is a pain.
~~My understanding is that you cannot sell steam keys to your game at lower than steam prices (since they can't/don't take their cut from directly selling those keys). If you had a direct download from your website or from itch you'd be fine to sell that cheaper.~~
~~It's been a little while since I've read in detail about this so I'm open to being wrong about it.~~
I was wrong! Please see the next comment down
What are you basing this on? Looking it up, e.g. here: https://www.create.ac.uk/blog/2025/07/01/parity-and-power-steams-antitrust-reckoning-in-wolfire-v-valve/ it looks like what the other user described in addition to some other underhand bullshit informally policing even discounts.
Just vague recollection of what I thought I had read. I guess I didn't couch the statement enough
Yeah as the other user said, this isn't true.