Forced price matching could be considered a abuse of their position. If a dev cannot sell on another store for less (even if that platform takes a smaller cut) then that makes reduces the need for others to use a different platform to get a cheaper deal. Devs cannot use pricing to save you some money while drawing you to a platform that gives them a larger margin. All of which means that there is less incentive for valve to reduce their cut of the sale to be more competitive. This is what some lawsuits against valve are arguing ATM I believe.
I’ve seen this being said mostly on reddit but haven’t seen any source/reference to this claim. Is this like an NDA that devs sign ? Has anyone reported on this/archived it ?
Yes (or at least it was how it used to be, don’t know if it has changed) if you were selling steam keys outside of steam you should price match the steam price. If you are distributing the game some other way you can set any price you want.
Forced price matching could be considered a abuse of their position. If a dev cannot sell on another store for less (even if that platform takes a smaller cut) then that makes reduces the need for others to use a different platform to get a cheaper deal. Devs cannot use pricing to save you some money while drawing you to a platform that gives them a larger margin. All of which means that there is less incentive for valve to reduce their cut of the sale to be more competitive. This is what some lawsuits against valve are arguing ATM I believe.
EDIT : Found it.
I’ve seen this being said mostly on reddit but haven’t seen any source/reference to this claim. Is this like an NDA that devs sign ? Has anyone reported on this/archived it ?
OK, where?
But that rule is only when using steam keys for distribution on other platforms no?
Yes (or at least it was how it used to be, don’t know if it has changed) if you were selling steam keys outside of steam you should price match the steam price. If you are distributing the game some other way you can set any price you want.
I think this is true, because I’ve definitely seen games on sale at Epic that have lower price than their Steam version.
But then I get into the quandry if I want to “own” it on Epic’s platform over Steam, and I usually don’t 🫤