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Published: August 17, 2017 | Source: Steam Spy | Author: Mark Campbell

Valve is set to get stricter with 3rd party Steam key sales

Valve is set to get stricter with 3rd party Steam key sales

Valve is set to get stricter with 3rd party Steam key sales

 
Most PC gamers will be familiar with purchasing Steam Keys, game codes that can be purchased from third party stores like Humble Bundle and Green Man Gaming for prices that are often lower than Steam itself. 
 
Valve takes a direct cut of all sales on Steam, which in turn pays to host and distribute games to their users. Sometimes developers get the bulk of their PC game sales outside of the Steam Storefront, giving Valve’s service high workloads for relatively little profit, prompting the company to take action against developers that abuse Steam with excessive 3rd party sales.  
 
To be clear, Valve is not planning to end the practice of 3rd party game sales, though they certainly plan to crack down on those that abuse their service. Valves example here is a developer that sells 500K game codes with only a few thousand sales on Steam, so only developers with a high third party to Steam sales ratio should be affected by this policy change. 
 
Below is a quote from a post on Steam’s private developers forum, which is not viewable by the general public. 
 
 

If we are denying keys for normal size batches it’s likely because your Steam sales don’t reflect a need for as many keys as you’re distributing, and you’re probably asking for more keys because you’re offering cheaper options off Steam and yet we are bearing the costs. So at some point we start deciding that the value you’re bringing to Steam isn’t worth the cost to us.

For example, say you’ve sold a few thousand copies on Steam but have requested / activated 500K keys, then we are going to take a deeper look at your games, your sales, your costs, etc.

 

The wording here indicates that Valve will be investigating developers before taking any action or denying developers Steam keys, looking into sales, the game’s cost to Valve for hosting and other factors.   

 

 

At this time it is unknown exactly how this policy will be applied to developers and who will be affected most by this change. Valve clearly wants to keep closer tabs on 3rd party game sales and ensure that that as many game sales are taking place on their own store as possible, though it is unlikely that the company will ever end 3rd party game sales. 

 

You can join the discussion on Valve’s new policy change on giving developers Steam keys on the OC3D Forums. 

 

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