Lockdown!
So what does this mean for platforms like Humble, I wonder.
I’m not sure who this is targeting, but I can understand Valve’s position. It sucks on an individual level though.
No one should have a problem with this. A developer should not be able to use Steam as a free distribution platform and make the sales elsewhere.
But you know they will. :)
And yet it has been Valve’s explicit policy for over a decade to allow just that.
Edit. Well, implicit, at least. I think it’s been widely assumed they were OK with it because Steam users were more valuable to them than the lost sales but I don’t know if they ever said that.
This will probably be updated to reflect the new guidance, but here is the policy:
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
For any of your products on Steam, you can generate keys to enable customers to redeem your product on Steam. Keys can be generated for any packages on Steam, including base products, DLC or free Demos.
There is no fee to generate keys on Steam, but we ask that partners use the service judiciously. In general, if you give keys away in bulk, expect that somebody else than you will make money from your product.
Requesting Keys
Keys are obtained by requesting them in the Steamworks portal. To request keys, click the “Request Steam Product Keys” button on your application’s landing page in Steamworks. If you don’t see that button, your account doesn’t have “Generate CD Keys” permission.
NOTE: Requests for large amounts of keys will need to be manually reviewed by Valve before processing.
Request keys in small batches.
Think carefully about how many keys you need. If a retailer is asking for 250,000 keys and you’ve only ever sold 20,000 units, you may want to work with a lower amount of keys and request more if necessary. If you make a mistake or something happens with those keys, you’ll be in better shape if you don’t have to worry about hundreds of thousands or millions of lost or stolen keys. In general, you should treat keys like cash.
Giveaways and selling keys in bulk
Steam keys are designed to help our partners run their businesses on other retail and digital stores, where the partner is compensated for every unit sold. Keys are not intended to be sold in bulk or given away for free, except for testing. If you want to give your game away for free, we think that’s great, but it should also be free on Steam. If you want to sell copies of your game for pennies or less, Steam probably isn’t the right store for your game, and Steam keys aren’t an appropriate way to distribute your game in that manner.
NOTE: Valve reserves the right to reject key requests.
Wow this is a huge shift in how things were handled before. This could affect a lot of devs.
The gist of it is that this is generally OK, but they should document the exact ratio available, likely tiered by volume, and offer some way to pay for additional keys.
Something like:
- Sold <10k copies on Steam, 100 free keys
- Sold <50k copies on Steam, 250 free keys
- Sold <250k copies on Steam, ratio 1 free : 10 sold
- Sold >250k copies on Steam, ratio 1 free : 5 sold
Then after you run out of free keys, additional keys cost 30% of the average sale price for your title on Steam over the last 30 days. This disincentivizes developers from using Steam for distribution while evading their 30% cut.
So if your title sells 14,000 copies on Steam you get 250 free keys that can be sold on Humble Bundle or whatever. If you want to sell more than that outside Steam, and your game sells for $20, it’ll cost you $6.00 per key, with the assumption that anyone requesting so many keys is indeed selling them elsewhere.
This means you can’t afford to give away unlimited copies of your game in a Humble Bundle “pay over $1 and get these 17 games” type of thing, which essentially screws Steam.
There are many nuanced points to doing this correctly.
Are we sure something has changed, or did this simply never come up because no one was abusing it? At least no one willing to ask on a public forum.
How does this tie in with Steamworks. Now Steamworks is no longer free, you must be willing to sell your games on Steam with a high level of exclusivity. I can understand, if I don’t like, the usage of the steam store. But Valve has tightly integrated their steam works with the steam distribution platform.
I think that’s the gist of it, yes.
Surprising it took them this long.
Humble Monthly may suddenly turn either really bad or really good. Really good in that only the top selling games would get into the bundle because only those would have enough keys available now to be used in the bundle. Really bad in that nothing will qualify for enough keys to meet the current subscriber list.
I guess Valve was reading my posts when I said I’m just going to wait for things on my wishlist to fall into a Humble Monthly purchase?
I agree. This makes sense and they’re right to do it. But it should be done without ambiguity.
Man this whole thing makes me miss Rachel Brown. Having an unambiguous call to arms about how this is total bullshit which devalues all of our steam libraries would be nice. The “cherry on top” of being called sheeple (implicitly, probably) makes it all the better.
I don’t mean this as a shitpost, I really would like her opinion here.
So now that they are tackling the supply side, when will they look at the demand side. Why should Valve support unlimited bandwidth downloads for a game we paid $5 for all lifetime?
They are within their rights to do it, agreed. It doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. It is an anti-competition move, quite clearly, one that they are making after a lot of developers/publishers became dependant on Steamworks and such.
Now, you can say that it makes sense for them to do that, and that publishers can choose to not use Steam. But Steam is big enough that they will feel pressured to do otherwise. It is, in my opinion, a calculated and ultimately anti-consumer move, since it curbs competition, but hey.
For all that I wouldn’t say they’re right. It makes business sense, it’s not illegal (well, not in the US at least), but I don’t think it’s right or good for anyone but Valve.
If they bother to set explicit thresholds I think they would be far more generous than you suggest, 1:1 at a bare minimum. The original quote doesn’t sound like an attempt to squeeze out other retailers, but just to marginalize bundles. And that’d be the smart move: they have little to gain from attacking other retailers, but a lot to lose if it starts to scare away developers.
(The other thing they’d need to do is figure out a good way of handling the launch period. AAA games will need hundreds of thousands of keys up front for the physical copies, before there’s any sales on Steam to establish a baseline).
Well they have finally done what they previously had said they wouldn’t. But I am glad they are being open about it and doing it now rather than later.
Valve is taking a sober look at whether certain developers and games add value to their platform. That is fair.
Developers can choose with full knowledge whether or not they feel Steam adds enough value to their business to publish on that platform. That is also fair.
It will be interesting to see how the market dynamics play out.