Also, provides free steam keys for devs they can sell or give out freely elsewhere.
Imagine if Apple allowed people to sell their apps on their own website, but you’d still get the license on the app store, without Apple getting their 30% cut? Valve literally does this.
Basically the only rule is that the prices should be the same on all platforms.
This is the part that the “walled garden” arguments I see conveniently ignores so often. Humble games and key reselling, good and bad, exist because of this rule. That 30% otherwise covers Steam dealing with sales, key distribution, payment providers, and all the legal liabilities that comes with that for you. Unless you can securely and continuously run your own shopfront below that 30% margin, there’s not a whole lot of incentive to do so… But Steam isn’t stopping anyone, not even Epic in fact. The so-called wall is like a foot high.
The DRM isn’t even that deep either and has known tools to remove it if you want. It exists as a bare minimum requirement for copyright law and Steam friends but not much else, hence why publishers often use things like Denuvo still.
We don’t ‘defend’ Valve’s monopoly so much as they really aren’t doing anything special to maintain it besides making Steam libraries accessible on more hardware. They compete by merely existing in the same space.
Also, provides free steam keys for devs they can sell or give out freely elsewhere.
Imagine if Apple allowed people to sell their apps on their own website, but you’d still get the license on the app store, without Apple getting their 30% cut? Valve literally does this.
Basically the only rule is that the prices should be the same on all platforms.
This is the part that the “walled garden” arguments I see conveniently ignores so often. Humble games and key reselling, good and bad, exist because of this rule. That 30% otherwise covers Steam dealing with sales, key distribution, payment providers, and all the legal liabilities that comes with that for you. Unless you can securely and continuously run your own shopfront below that 30% margin, there’s not a whole lot of incentive to do so… But Steam isn’t stopping anyone, not even Epic in fact. The so-called wall is like a foot high.
The DRM isn’t even that deep either and has known tools to remove it if you want. It exists as a bare minimum requirement for copyright law and Steam friends but not much else, hence why publishers often use things like Denuvo still.
We don’t ‘defend’ Valve’s monopoly so much as they really aren’t doing anything special to maintain it besides making Steam libraries accessible on more hardware. They compete by merely existing in the same space.