this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2026
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I remain baffled at how few studios sell their games directly on their own site.
The practical barriers are virtually nonexistent, so I’m assuming there’s some form of capitalist fuckery going on behind the scenes that makes it financially unviable?
There are practical barriers still tho. You'll have to either maintain or outsource maintaining:
And that's for a basic game, if you want feature parity with steam, add on top:
By the time you implement the basic stuff and half of the extras, might as well pay the 30% commission and just focus on what you wanted to do: make games. Instead of having to cosplay as a sysadmin or orchestrate 15 different providers
The things on that list are all technically true but at the same time not really that big a deal? Certainly they’re all solved problems already. Making a good video game in the first place is harder than any of those things.
Yup, that's my whole point. It leeches time and resources that might amount to more than what valve takes as commission
Uhh. It’s that Steam is an effective monopoly?
They hold all the attention, all the recommendations, so if you aren’t on Steam you are practically invisible.
There are a few major games that only self publish. Starsector is one, of the top of my head. Hence it is practically invisible to most.
Ok but publishing yourself doesn’t block you from also listing on Steam, or does it?
It determines the price. If you “self-publish” on a web shop or something with DRM free downloads, you have to price it the same as on Steam, otherwise Steam may delist you. So devs can’t get around the 30% fee by offering a discount on their store.
And… practically, if the storefronts are the same price, most will just buy on Steam.
There can be other complications related to scammers, but that’s not Valve’s fault. Supporting both also takes more dev effort.
Rimworld took this route, at least for some time. It started only self published via the Ludeon Store yet ended up mostly on Steam because that’s where all the attention and mods went. I have the game bought both places, oddly enough.
Common misconception. You only have to price-match when selling Steam keys on another platform. If you sell a non-Steam copy of the game, you can price it however you want
also it didn't particularly make sense on its own terms. Even if I am committed to pricing the same as on Steam, I still get to keep that extra 30% on the sales that I do make.
And it's not as though the sum total of marketing you do for a game is stick it up on Steam and wait for the recommendations to pour in. But still most game promos and ads I see include a Steam link rather than one to the studio's store.
There's over 100,000 games on Steam now, so the notion that you're relying them to market your game for you is highly suspect.