Hey, your games are unavailable on Steam in Germany because of some stupid German laws that Steam was forced to follow. I could still buy your games here tho. Unfortunally you don't sell them here. If you ever plan to release your games on itch.io let me know. I will happily buy some of them.
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Unfortunately I am aware of this issue. I'm in touch with my local tax lawyer and I was advised not to put my games on other storefronts because of different legal basis and payout systems - Steam pays each month, itch.io whenever I ask, which kinda messes up accounting.
But as with everything, things might change, so I might be releasing games on itch.io too, in the future. Or Steam changes their system to comply with German laws (or maybe German laws will change).
In theory - probably. In practice, it's not that simple. While I can request Steam Keys from Valve, there's no guarantee they'll even give them to me, and then there's a question if they would even sell at all anywhere, given that my games do not get much visibility. I would also have to look into the tax side of things, as it would fall into digital goods sales without intermediant entity. TL;DR - too much hassle for probably little gain.
Well, your german customers would benefit from it, aswell as customers from other countries with the same issue. If your game is blocked due to law, obviously it doesn't get visibility. However if you would include here a link to buy the keys, then it would sell itself more. I would assume you have the tool to compare the itchio downloads and Steam downloads.
Itch has minimal views/downloads and from tracking links, there is almost no interest in full versions. That's why I stopped uploading demos for most games, made no difference.
From my point, having keys for sale is too much trouble and most likely not worth it. I think it makes sense if the game is already popular on Steam. If it's not a hit there, then nobody will get keys for it, and Valve is also less likely to give out keys for a game that didn't make enough money on their platform.
Then we have the payment processors issues and Itch rules that make selling directly on Itch even bigger problem, so Steam is best option for me. Patreon/Subscribestar are also not an option to distribute in my case due to my local laws.