this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
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[–] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 4 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Just for clarity: how would it do a disservice to players if a dev can sell their steam keys for any price, no matter which platform?

[–] RandomException@sopuli.xyz 33 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Steam is a service that costs money to keep running - lot's of money actually in their scale. When you sell a Steam key outside of Steam, they don't get their cut which goes toward running costs and whatnot. It doesn't of course matter if it's just some random few keys but if almost all devs started to do that, it could cause some serious funding problems to Valve. That could then lead to reduced service levels of Steam and that would hurt their customers - the players - the most.

So while it's not a big problem currently, it could be if it wasn't prevented properly in contractual level. People who think that is an unfair clause don't probably understand what it actually takes to run a service like Steam or they are straight competitors trying to run them out of business in any way imaginable.

E: And actually if Steam still allows selling the Steam keys in external services but only requires the price to match the price in Steam, it's already a quite charitable policy. I guess they count on not too many people buying the key externally for the same price than in Steam store.

[–] OrgunDonor@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Just think about how this works.

Steam currently allows you to generate keys and sell them for free, only stipulating that they must be sold for the same price as on steam.

Let's say they are told that stipulation can't be enforced.

Valve, will probably go with 1 of 2 options.

1 - you can no longer generate keys. So all the great key sites(GMG, Fanatical and so on) no longer exist, because no steam keys.

2 - Valve charge an upfront fee for keys generated. Now smaller pmdevs and publishers can no longer supply keys to sites, because they can't afford the upfront costs.

What incentive does valve have to continue offering this free service? If it can be exploited for the detriment of steam, they will stop providing it.