Valve’s Steam platform plays host to many games, and while some might consider Valve almost monopolizing the market, at the same time one could argue that Steam does help keep things in one place, and also provides a platform for friends to play together, review games, and so on. However Valve does have a problem, which is that some developers are selling Steam games outside of Steam.While developers do have the right to sell their own games on other platforms, Valve is taking issue with developers selling games with Steam access outside of Steam, and to combat that, Valve will no longer be automatically fulfilling key requests from developers, which hopefully should curb these activities.
In a post made by Valve employee Sean Jenkin, “If we are denying keys for normal size batches it’s likely because your Steam sales don’t reflect a need for as many keys as you’re distributing, and you’re probably asking for more keys because you’re offering cheaper options off Steam and yet we are bearing the costs. So at some point we start deciding that the value you’re bringing to Steam isn’t worth the cost to us.”
Basically what some developers are doing is they are taking Steam keys and selling those on other websites, such as bundle websites at a cheaper price, and where Valve does not get a cut, which clearly the company isn’t too happy about. While this clearly affects developers, on the consumer front it seems to imply that perhaps we can expect fewer bundles/bargains from third-party websites in the future.
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