A new Dutch class action has been filed against Valve Corporation, the company behind Steam. The case is brought by the Stichting Consumenten Competition Claims (CCC), which has launched the proceedings under the name GameClaim. The foundation acts on behalf of all Dutch PC gamers who have purchased games through Steam or other PC distribution platforms since 2013, IGN Benelux reports.
This is false. Even if I put the game up on my own server, letting you download a zip directly from there, cutting valve fully out of the picture service-wise too, I am still not allowed to sell it cheaper on my site then on steam.
Edit: Based on the score of my comment it looks like I need to provide some more evidence to back this up, I thought this was already common knowledge. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bwajZMNAof74mSNRMcTAVlF8m0fplHkA/view This is just an excerpt of the full testimony, I don’t know if the full file or an unredacted version exists anywhere else, feel free to share if you found one.
The first part is about steam keys, but it starts to get more interesting from page 16 of the pdf onward, so feel free to skip to there. TLDR: According to the testimony, valve does not actively check for price parity, but if they become aware that a game is sold cheaper elsewhere, they contact the publisher asking for the reason for the price difference and may threaten to reduce promotion of the game on steam or straight up remove if from steam if they do not match the price.
I have not found any of the E-Mails that were mentioned during the testimony, but it seems this happened more than just a few times for something “That is not our typical process.”.
So why is Mindustry $5 on steam, but free on itch?
I’ve updated the original comment with a testimony about the topic which also contains an answer for your question:
I guess no one has made them aware yet.
That’s quite demonstrably false. There’s so many games that do this, and are and have been part of steam for decades. i can think of is IL-2 sturmovik Battle of X series. They have sales almost every month on il2sturmovik.com and the account there is linked to the steam one. Same for other sims like Microsoft etc, selling through the Microsoft store…
It’s not about sales, it’s about base price. And yes, Steam does consider “perpetual sales” a base price. They nearly kicked Ubisoft off Steam for that trick.
and yet, these games have a monthly sale. If that’s not perpetual sales, I don’t know what it is. And some are just linked to the Steam account, not just a separate competing store. Basically you buy the game cheaper in a different place, and then play on steam.
I’ve updated my original post with a testimony proving my point. For this case, I can only guess that it is the same case as with Mindustry: Because they have not been made aware that they are getting a worse deal.