this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2026
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Your friends can just request Steam keys and sell them outside of the Steam Store. Then there's no 30% cut. That cut only applies to games and software sold on the Steam store.
Valve does offer the best features on their storefront by far, thus the 30% cut. And honestly comparable storefronts (Sony also 30%, Microsoft also 30% up until August 2021, and Nintendo also 30%) all take comparable cuts. This isn't anything new or unique to Valve.
As an indie dev myself: Indie devs forget during the brick and mortar days up to 80% or more of revenue is consumed by middlemen before reaching the consumer. Steam absolutely makes indie dev sales easier.
The real crime is that Valve requires price parity when you independently (no Steam keys) sell your game on a different store, as well as the Steam store. ("Most Favored Nation" clause.) It means that developers are allowed to pocket the profits if a game is sold on a store that has a lower percentage cut, but they aren't allowed to share the lower cost with the customer, because that could encourage people to not use the Steam Store when buying games.
I've looked through court documents for this. They're sneaky about it, but they implicitly threaten you with your game's sales being crippled by being taken out of their recommendation algorithm. With Steam being the biggest store, that's a death sentence for most indie developers.
They don't. Only if you are selling steam keys do they require price parity and only for steam key sales. You cannot sell a Steam key for less than you sell your game on Steam for. You can sell a non-Steam game key on other store fronts for any price you want.
This is what is being alleged in court by only a handful of developers but there are countless examples of the exact opposite thing being true.
They must've changed their tone recently, because I've read an actual leaked court document, and the Valve representative / employee states (very defensively) that this is what they did. There's accounts of developers confirming this as well, including apparently in the (secret?) contract you sign when you sign up as a developer with Steam.
Is that the case? I didn't really ask much about it since it becomes a heated discussion.
YES
Also your friends should figure out how much it costs to host and distribute themselves with infinite scaling in case their game catches on.
Only restriction I know for this scheme is you can't sell the keys outside steam for less than you sell on Steam. Otherwise you can just undercut them while still using their services