Amazon is a seller. Steam is (aside from selling) a service provider with their workshop, forum, etc
While it would be way better if those were all in a different tier for devs, so for example they can select to get less of a share for those features, what they are basically doing is sidestepping a provider
Or in the case of photography:
You go to a Photo shop and lend their camera equipment and services for free, but they take a 20% cut for every copy of that picture sold.
If you buy a picture, you can download it indefinitely and get some services like changing the color grading on the website. The photo shop hosts the picture for free and only makes a profit through selling licenses. The owner also has an option to get infinite licenses for these services for free.
What youre allowed to do is host the picture on your own, pay your own cloud provider, and sell the picture that way.
What youre not allowed to do is generate infinite licenses for free and sell them without ever paying the photo shop for their services, while still using them.
The service part only applies to copies sold that include steam keys and therefore use the steam-API related things (workshop, cloud saves). I haven’t read about this specific case in detail, but as long as that use of steam for copies sold is part of what they wanted to leverage but essentially not pay for, that’s obviously bull.
This honestly is somewhat unexpected and I had to re-read the comment I replied to to understand it correctly, hence my misunderstanding of that aspect. It’s unexpected cause ubisoft in particular for the longest time had their own “store” and games required at least their own launcher. I haven’t played Ubisoft games in at least a decade, so I don’t know/remember if the games reuired your own ubi-account, or if the games relied on Steams systems (workshop/cloud saves/…). I would’ve assumed no, and that they only use it as a downloader cause players essentially wouldn’t buy it outside of steam (or at least not enough).
Top be clear: if steam allows copies of a game listed on steam to be sold at an arbitrary price as long as that doesn’t include a steam key, this is perfectly fine. Actively thinking about it now I would assume it does, as I’m pretty sure I bought games without steam keys for less than the listing on steam was.
That is another situation
Amazon is a seller. Steam is (aside from selling) a service provider with their workshop, forum, etc
While it would be way better if those were all in a different tier for devs, so for example they can select to get less of a share for those features, what they are basically doing is sidestepping a provider
Or in the case of photography:
You go to a Photo shop and lend their camera equipment and services for free, but they take a 20% cut for every copy of that picture sold.
If you buy a picture, you can download it indefinitely and get some services like changing the color grading on the website. The photo shop hosts the picture for free and only makes a profit through selling licenses. The owner also has an option to get infinite licenses for these services for free.
What youre allowed to do is host the picture on your own, pay your own cloud provider, and sell the picture that way.
What youre not allowed to do is generate infinite licenses for free and sell them without ever paying the photo shop for their services, while still using them.
The service part only applies to copies sold that include steam keys and therefore use the steam-API related things (workshop, cloud saves). I haven’t read about this specific case in detail, but as long as that use of steam for copies sold is part of what they wanted to leverage but essentially not pay for, that’s obviously bull.
This honestly is somewhat unexpected and I had to re-read the comment I replied to to understand it correctly, hence my misunderstanding of that aspect. It’s unexpected cause ubisoft in particular for the longest time had their own “store” and games required at least their own launcher. I haven’t played Ubisoft games in at least a decade, so I don’t know/remember if the games reuired your own ubi-account, or if the games relied on Steams systems (workshop/cloud saves/…). I would’ve assumed no, and that they only use it as a downloader cause players essentially wouldn’t buy it outside of steam (or at least not enough).
Top be clear: if steam allows copies of a game listed on steam to be sold at an arbitrary price as long as that doesn’t include a steam key, this is perfectly fine. Actively thinking about it now I would assume it does, as I’m pretty sure I bought games without steam keys for less than the listing on steam was.