How much control do they take in pricing?
If you also sell your game through other channels, are you allowed to set the Steam price to reflecte the revenue share taken by Steam?
Are you allowed to openly discuss the terms of the contract? Are you even allowed to answer these questions?
What other rights do you need to sign away to participate?
I know that there are NDAs.
However there are plenty of posts around were people strongly sugest what the terms are. At least the companies i know who have products on steam are under non exclusive. ie they are allowed to sell it else where. They never wanted to sell it cheaper than steam. Also steam IIRC can do promotions and sell your game cheaper at times. Since you get advertising these guys didn’t complain much since it increased their total income quite a bit. Their next game they are going to use steam exclusively since its just easier and really quite a good rate (30% was whispered under a table somewhere). Compare to traditional distributors, where they can often take 50% or more and then take advertising and promotion out of your cut!
Cas will probably chime in. But again most of us do take our NDA’s seriously. Even more so with companies where we feel they are at least being honest. Which is certainly steams reputation to a point.
Steam is not exclusive, but remember all the benefits you (and your users!) are getting through steam. I would say sell it at the same price, since their cut isn’t absolutely huge (or so I’ve heard).
Steam is the very definition of “exclusive” in that they only allow games on their that they feel like allowing on there. Don’t be fooled by Greenlight.
Technically we cannot tell you anything about Steam or Valve or how they operate but I can probably get away with saying that a lot depends on just how much clout you have in the world at large. To put this in to perspective, Puppygames jumps when they say jump, and we grovellingly accept whatever crumbs they throw us.
Cas 
Yeah Greenlight is great in the sense that the submitting process is actually well defined now.
But it didn’t make it easier.
Basically to get onto Steam, you already have to be “quite successful/popular”.
But hey, Steam said they may be making it even more easy - but you know, its of course also a good thing: if anyone could just have their games on Steam, it would be flooded and one would hardly benefit from being on Steam. Kinda like Google Play…
It is outrageous that Valve is making demands of an indie developer and collecting a share of the revenue on a completely externally developed game.
Why, do you support this service? Why grovel to them for crumbs? This is an outrage!
I guess princec likes to be able to eat and heat his house.
its the standard price for portals like these and steam is THE portal
if anything criticize the standard market place… but then again that comes from basic economy…
Steam make us 10x more money than we make on our lonesome. They’ve captured a fairly significant % of the mainstream PC gamer market, and by captured, I mean that customers are generally increasingly unwilling to shop anywhere else and finding the ones that do is very very hard and expensive.
Cas
It’s quite good deal that you can sell game by your own and give steam code to customers. See how games at Humble Bundle does. Steam benefit from that by gaining new users. Portals are all about users and Steam have plenty those.
Steam does a great job of giving gamers a place where they can easily find awesome new games, find good deals on those games, and make installing and managing these games pretty much painless (they Just Work… most of the time). Part of the value that Steam offers is exactly in making developers work really, really hard to get their game on Steam. When I’m looking around in the Steam store, I see games that pretty much all have some value, are worth at least a little bit of my attention and I’m not overwhelmed with the gazillionth tetris clone. That does make it worth 30% of the games I buy as far as I’m concerned.
Guilty.
Steam has some annoyances (slow connecting, odd way of pagination that is NOT REMEMBERED WHEN YOU GO BACK TO THE PAGINATED LIST grmbl grmbl grmbl), but I love not having to have all the games not physically lying around or installed, auto-patching, steam workshop, easy play with friends and I’m not too ashamed to say: I like all the commercialism. Give me the offers, recommend me the stuff based on previous purchases, show me what friends are buying and playing. 99/100 times, it is actually prudent information as apposed to other similar services (Google, for example). I figured out that the remake of Another World was available on steam because a friend bought it; I added it to my wishlist to easily buy it later (I buy in bulk) and promptly got it as a gift from someone. I love this shit.
I’ll admit, if I can’t get a game as a physical box or through Steam(And I’d like to be able to add my physical boxed game to Steam too), then odds are I wont be buying it.
(Plus, I think Steam has made it less viable to download pirated games, because it’s just that much easier to get them through Steam, instead of having to deal with loads of cracks, and what not.)
Yes, that is EXACTLY what I have been saying.
The only way to really fight piracy is making the legal way more easy , comfortable and enjoyable.
I couldn’t agree more, and that’s what Steam has gotten exactly right.
Yup, and I’m waiting for the same to happen to the movie rental market in Holland. The legal offerings are still a pile of crap.
Wow.
I see Steam has gotten several things right:
Is that a comprehensive list?
Almost all of these features are standard on smartphone/tablet/console marketplaces but have been absent from PCs.
Traditional *nix app repos has a few of these, but is non-game centric, and is for free, non-licensed software only.
It seems like the effort in building/maintaining a service like this is relatively low to the amount of money they are raking in. This seems ripe for a good competitor.
Well, Steam has been out longer than more or less all smartphones(Steam was released in ~2003), soooo…
But yeah, they’ve gotten a heck of a lot of things right.
With any OS supported by the game.
The games all use the same system, but not ALL games actually have achievements of course. some of them, like Borderlands 2, have Steam achievements AND still maintain an internal achievement system on top of it. Something like global achievements and local (example: per character) achievements.
…
I actually very rarely use the overlay, and I’ve never ever in my life used their voice chat function. 
Didn’t think anyone used their voice chat, to be honest. With Skype, Mumble, etc. etc. etc.