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by fc417fc802 354 days ago
Oh hey I wasn't aware of that lawsuit and (IMO) that's really good news. My only real concern with steam as a platform was the off-platform pricing clause.

I figured it was likely unenforceable if a studio simply released a "steam edition" or whatever artificial version differentiation, but at the same time they can always refuse to do business with you for any reason (or no reason even). So at that point the clause feels like them making a blatant threat.

1 comments

People usually mix up things: The clear clause in their ToS is about selling Steam keys. A dev on Steam can generate Steam keys and sell them wherever they want, and Steam does not take a cut on those. For those, there is an explicit clause that says that you need to match the pricing on Steam.

For just selling the game elsewhere, there is no such clause, and there are games that e.g. are cheaper on Epic and explicitly say that's because Epic takes lower fees. But there are also devs claiming that Valve pressured them in private to not do that, and that's what the lawsuit is about.