[Closi]

The reason the 30% rate is sustained though IS the abuse of market power with the PMFN clause, which ensures that competitors cannot price lower.

Everything else is an attempt to stay the primary shopfront. Sure you can sell your game and give away steam keys - but you can't sell it for a lower price than on Steam, and we still want you to encourage your users to come to steam and buy things. We will give you free matchmaking - just not for players who have bought on another platform, so if players buy on another platform they can't play with their friends. This is just a way to stay default, not some sort of charity.

Yet somehow they have convinced lots of gamers that they should get c25% of all transactions for offering very little value and that that's a good deal (taking payments, serving games, having refunds(!) and adding a chat panel isn't big and complicated in 2026).

They are like everyone else, abusing network effects to achieve excess profits, unnecessarily taking £12 from a £40 game sale just so that Gabe can get another yacht (despite already having 4). I don't see why this is needed? If the market was efficient and this wasn't down to monopoly power and network effects, the fees would equalise, the £40 game can drop to £35 so people get cash back in their pockets, while the developers still get more money, and epic's store and steam would STILL be a gravy train. But they aren't the good guys - if they have a chance to cement their power or get an extra few bucks by being anti-consumer they will.

[throw10920]

> should get c25% of all transactions for offering very little value

"Very little value"? It's clear that you've never developed a game before. Don't speak so confidently out of complete and total ignorance - it leads to making utterly insane and totally factually wrong statements like this one.

[Closi]

State where the value is then, without just stating features that cause lock-in.

You can't blindly just call me an idiot and say there's loads of value without stating what it is (I mean you technically can, but it's not a brilliant way of getting your point across).

[throw10920]

> without just stating features that cause lock-in

That's a false dichotomy. Features that cause vendor lock-in can still be incredibly valuable.

> You can't blindly just call me an idiot

Sorry, that was a little harsh. I wasn't meaning to call you an idiot - I'm sure you have domains of expertise that you're highly proficient in. But you clearly have little (if any) experience with gamedev, and my point is that you should be far less confident when speaking about it.

For instance, you said something just factually wrong:

> The reason the 30% rate is sustained though IS the abuse of market power with the PMFN clause, which ensures that competitors cannot price lower.

...which was debunked by another comment:

> Steam's official price parity policy applies only to Steam Keys, which are free to generate and cost Valve nothing.

As for features that are actually useful to devs and users:

Local currencies, regional pricing/payment methods, gift cards, Steam Wallet, game gifting, product keys, wallet/credit system (Steam wallet), bundles, DLC, complex storefront (topics/labels, discovery queue, wishlist, sale notifications), user reviews, game refunds, CDN, a really good download/update system, player metrics, shader pre-caching, shared runtime management, cloud saves, game management across multiple drives, LAN downloads/updates, beta/release/build management, DRM and anticheat, game collections, developer updates, forums, Big Picture/Steam Deck UI, Proton, Steam Input, a complex social system (friends, text chat, voice chat, add codes, profiles), social integration with games, account 2FA, and many, many, many more things. (go and ask a LLM and I'm sure it'll be more than happy to give you a far longer list :)

These are all things that developers and players benefit from. The value added is immense and blindingly obvious even to people who only play games, let alone to developers who have some idea of how difficult it is to actually implement all of the above.

[inexcf]

> The reason the 30% rate is sustained though IS the abuse of market power with the PMFN clause, which ensures that competitors cannot price lower.

Steam's official price parity policy applies only to Steam Keys, which are free to generate and cost Valve nothing. The actual written rule, from the Steamworks documentation, says: "It is important that you don't give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers." It even allows discounts at different times on other stores, as long as Steam gets a comparable offer within a reasonable period. There is no written policy preventing a developer from selling a separate, non-Steam-key version of their game cheaper elsewhere. The claim that Valve informally enforces broader price parity beyond Steam Keys is the unproven allegation at the center of the lawsuit.

And the broader claim, that lower commissions would lead to cheaper games for consumers, has already been tested and disproven. Epic exclusives like Borderlands 3, Control, Metro Exodus, Phoenix Point, and The Division 2 launched with no Steam version at all, complete pricing freedom, and a 12% commission. They were all priced at full retail. The hypothetical £35 game you describe has been possible for almost a decade. Nobody has produced it because developers and publishers set prices, and they choose to maximize their own margin regardless of what the platform takes.

> We will give you free matchmaking - just not for players who have bought on another platform, so if players buy on another platform they can't play with their friends.

Steamworks matchmaking requires a Steam account and Steam does not force developers to use Steamworks. This is how every platform-specific networking layer works: Xbox Live requires an Xbox account, PlayStation Network requires a PSN account. They offer a free matchmaking service if you want other platforms use other platforms. But i guess it is because of:

> Everything else is an attempt to stay the primary shopfront.

Yeah this sounds a lot like:"How dare they deliver a better service in the pursuit of user retention."

> taking payments, serving games, having refunds(!) and adding a chat panel isn't big and complicated in 2026

This lists surface features and ignores the infrastructure: global CDN serving petabytes of downloads, payment processing across dozens of regional payment methods, fraud prevention, Workshop mod hosting, cloud saves, anti-cheat, regional pricing tooling, Proton development, Steam Deck compatibility, discovery algorithms. But the real test is simpler: developers are not forced to use Steam. If the value were as thin as claimed, the lower-priced competitors would be winning. They are not.