this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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Incidentally Wolfire Games—the studio that founded Humble (but no longer operates it)—is currently in class-action litigation against Valve for this very issue.
The Steam Distribution Agreement AFAIK allows temporary sales on other platforms to undercut Steam, but requires the "resting" price matches that on Steam. By specifying "non-discounted" I meant to indicate that although sales do exist on other platforms, the normal price of an item always matches on Steam. A quick few spot checks show the non-sale price of games on Humble, Steam, and Fanatical are equal.
"Cheaper is cheaper" kind of overlooks the core issue. Ultimately a publisher on Epic Games Store—which has a fee of 12% instead of Steam's 30%—can have a lower price for a game as part of a promotion, but can't just sell every game 18% cheaper always without violating Steam's terms and being risk being de-listed.
Okay, gotcha. Yeah, I misunderstood. For Steam Keys it's pretty clear that Valve should be able to control the price since they provide the services after that key is purchased.
But the PMFN applies to all copies, even those distributed outside of Steam (e.g. the direct-from-publisher option I mentioned). Last time I was in a thread on this, another user found the following in the complaint (page 55) from the Wolfire v. Valve case mentioned above:
You said this:
I don't know why you need them to be cheaper before the discount, but okay, I don't care.