What I’ve read is that devs can’t price games lower than Steam on a non-Steam storefront that doesn’t use Steam keys.

For instance, if a dev has their own little DRM free store page where they sell DRM free downloads, they can’t take the 30% fee off their own store (reflecting what they’d actually make) without risking being delisted.

Maybe it’s an OCD thing, but this bothers me as a consumer. I could pay the same price for, say, Rimworld from Ludeon or from Steam, but Ludeon would get significantly less from the Steam sale.

It’s also anti competitive. For example, it means some other storefront with a lower fee can’t use that as a pricing advantage.

…It’s not a massive issue now. In practice, most little devs just sell Steam keys, and most publishers want to maintain pricing parity (outside of sales) for consistency.