Alright, since you’d rather argue than open up a search engine, let me be the one to do that.
Admittedly, there’s a lot of articles that are on the edge on whether or not the “most-favored nation” clause is a thing, since that’s what the lawsuit alleges. Though as I said, it has been confirmed by developers. Steam appears to indeed be clear about the policy around Steam keys usage and pricing on other stores, where it makes absolute sense. The thing is, otherwise, Valve is specifically avoiding putting this extra rule in writing. Here is a reddit thread where I found this document, which, if real (and I’m not sure why we should assume it is not) does confirm that Valve does this.
If we get to a situation – again, this is
rare. If we get to a situation where a partner is
telling us that the price needs to be lower on other
platforms than it is on Steam, then we will typically
choose not to run curated marketing during times where
that game is being discounted, if that is where the
price is lower, or around a launch if it’s a around –
if it’s a price at launch time.
And also:
Q. Okay. And part of these conversations is
saying, hey, we’re not going to offer you curated
promotions if you keep doing that, right?
A. Part of our approach, if we get to a situation
where we can’t have pricing that is fair for Steam
customers is not to amplify marketing with curated
markets.
Q. But these conversations, as you know, also
involve the threat not to keep the game on the Steam
store at all; is that right?
A. That is not our typical process.
This reads to me as: If Valve finds out your game is priced cheaper on another store, they will approach you to “have a conversation”, after which they might decide to just pull your game from Steam’s marketing system (or maybe off the store) or low-key threaten to do so. After all, they have the final say on what gets offered and promoted on their own store. This is totally within their legal right (MFN clauses are common), but still a dick move, and disadvantages especially smaller developers (who’d like to avoid the “Steam tax”) and consumer, who could benefit from a cheaper price off-Steam.
That’s about as much effort as I’d like to put into this conversation for now. But if you’d like to continue, I ask you to put at least as much effort into this as I have.
Alright, since you’d rather argue than open up a search engine, let me be the one to do that.
Admittedly, there’s a lot of articles that are on the edge on whether or not the “most-favored nation” clause is a thing, since that’s what the lawsuit alleges. Though as I said, it has been confirmed by developers. Steam appears to indeed be clear about the policy around Steam keys usage and pricing on other stores, where it makes absolute sense. The thing is, otherwise, Valve is specifically avoiding putting this extra rule in writing. Here is a reddit thread where I found this document, which, if real (and I’m not sure why we should assume it is not) does confirm that Valve does this.
And also:
This reads to me as: If Valve finds out your game is priced cheaper on another store, they will approach you to “have a conversation”, after which they might decide to just pull your game from Steam’s marketing system (or maybe off the store) or low-key threaten to do so. After all, they have the final say on what gets offered and promoted on their own store. This is totally within their legal right (MFN clauses are common), but still a dick move, and disadvantages especially smaller developers (who’d like to avoid the “Steam tax”) and consumer, who could benefit from a cheaper price off-Steam.
That’s about as much effort as I’d like to put into this conversation for now. But if you’d like to continue, I ask you to put at least as much effort into this as I have.