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Comment by jlund-molfese | Hacker News Reader

Sales through the store, yes.

You’re welcome to sell Steam keys on your own website, and Valve won’t take any cut at all, while still providing the same services as a purchase through the store.

See https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys , at face value, it’s a completely reasonable policy.

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This is a really good power play - the idea being that if you can get more eyes than Steam can through your own store, go ahead, keep the money.

But if you're getting the sale because of Steam itself, then we get the cut.

You can still debate whether 30% is fair even if Steam are providing the discoverability but still, it's a solid policy and they're putting their money where their mouth is.

That's actually quite good and impressive. I haven't realized that.

Still comes back to "can you sell enough keys on your own to make up for the amount of sales you get through Steam, even after the 30%?" It's great if you think you have a hot game or product that will be sought after by a large enough audience vs people seeing a game show up in their feed or on sale or a friend is playing it or however it ends up in front of you on Steam, a game that maybe you've never heard of before and now you're going to buy it.

You can sell steam keys on your store and sell normally through the Steam Store. The only requirement is to keep the Steam price <= your own store's price. That seems like a very fairy policy.

While that's valid, I want to point out that Steam accepts a wide variety of local payment methods that have exorbitant transaction fees compared to Visa. Pretty sure I've seen them cover a particular payment method with 10% fee. Steam takes 15% for big publishers I think and that's not a large profit margin in those scenarios. A lot of younger customers do not have an international credit card and Steam makes purchasing games accessible to them.

If only Apple and Google could do the same.

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