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Steam is basically a PC gaming monopoly, so why isn’t anyone mad?
(www.digitaltrends.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2026
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Not if they want to sell on steam, if they want steam to issue steam keys for purchases made outside of steam. Yes they literally let you use all the steam infrastructure for sales that they don't get to take a cut out of, with the requirement being you cannot undercut them for those sales.
If you want to sell for cheaper outside of steam you can, you just no longer can ask steam to issue extra keys beyond those sold on steam store.
Did you look at the page I pointed to? It's done irrespective of Steam key use. Look at the "Type of Product" column.
It seems a lot of those content type are regarding promotion on the steam store, so it means their games won't get featured on the front page (essentially steam advertising their game) if they are undercutting the sale of the content. On some it seems to be about in game purchases/DLCs, which also could be a problem if someone could buy those outside the system for far lower price and still use the version launched from steam (particularly if it's a free to play title)
A few of them do they clarify that they would still sell their stuff on steam but not promote them, but most of the other ones lack the context for this.
Their tactics including not only threats to delist but also threats to reduce visibility does not make it any better. If those numerous examples aren't crystal clear about the former, here's another quote from Valve (page 18 here):
When you say "undercutting the sale", I don't know what you mean. They are talking about developers setting lower prices outside Steam, which Valve obviously sees as a disadvantage to Steam. Your DLC example also does not make sense and I don't see that on the list. For a few of the quotes on the list, the type of parity is marked as content, but the overwhelming majority are related to price parity.