Selling direct on PC: your own store, your launcher, and Steam's rules

What you can sell on your own site

A PC game has more direct routes than a mobile one, because players already install games from launchers and buy from websites. On your own site or launcher, you can sell:

• the game itself, as a download through your launcher or as a Steam key;
• in-game currency, items, battle passes and subscriptions credited to the player’s account with you;
• supporter packs, cosmetics and ranks on community-run servers, where the game allows it.

No store sits between you and the player on those sales. What you pay instead is card processing, sales tax and VAT, fraud screening and chargebacks. On PC, G5 Entertainment’s own G5 Store, which mostly serves PC players, brought in 22.6% of group revenue in Q1 2026, up from 16.9% a year earlier. G5’s Q2 2026 report no longer gives that share; it reports G5 Store gross revenue up 14.8% year on year.

The limits come from the stores where your game also lives. A player who plays through Steam, the Microsoft Store or the Epic Games Store is covered by that store’s rules while playing that build. Those rules differ a lot.

All as of September 2026.

What Steam’s public rules say

Valve publishes four statements that matter here. The microtransactions page governs any purchase inside the Steam build:

For games that need a paid external service, Valve’s content survey says to collect “payment from your player using a Steam-supported payment method.”

The store page cannot send players to your site either:

Steam keys sold elsewhere carry a parity rule:

An older Valve implementation guide says Steam “places no restrictions on what you sell or how you sell it nor does it preclude the use of whatever other mechanisms your game has for selling items.” It reads as a conflict with the microtransactions quote. Treat the current microtransactions requirement as the controlling statement, and do not rely on the older guide as permission for outside payments.

Steam’s commission is 30% by default. Valve’s 2018 announcement cut it to 25% on a game’s earnings above $10 million and 20% above $50 million, counting revenue since 1 October 2018 and including “game packages, DLC, in-game sales, and Community Marketplace game fees.” GameDiscoverCo calculated Valve’s effective take on games it did not make at 24% in 2025, with 52% of that revenue in the 20% tier.

What Steam’s public rules don’t say

Valve’s public documentation does not say whether you may sell currency or items on your own website to players who play on Steam, or whether the Steam build may honor currency bought elsewhere. The binding terms are in the Steam Distribution Agreement, which Valve does not publish. Anyone who tells you what it says about web shops is reading a private contract or guessing.

For a studio, that leaves three sensible positions:

1. Ask your Valve contact directly, describe the flow, and keep the written answer.
2. Keep all purchases made inside the Steam build on the Steam Wallet, as the microtransactions page requires, and do not show web offers inside that build.
3. Reach Steam players about your site through channels you own: your community, email, social accounts and your own launcher.

Epic and Microsoft: the other two PC stores

Epic’s position is the most open of any major store. Its 2025 year in review says: “Developers are also free to use their own payment systems inside their games, and Epic takes zero revenue from those purchases.” Its distribution page adds the catch for Unreal licensees: “In-app purchases and products using their own payment processor are not exempt from engine royalties.”

When players do pay through Epic, the first $1 million per product per year carries a 0% revenue share, and 12% after that. Epic also runs Web Shops, launched in June 2025, which give players 5% back in Epic Rewards. Epic’s fee for Web Shops is not published on the pages we checked.

The Microsoft Store is the strictest. Its policy 10.8.1 (the same in version 7.19, in force now, and version 7.20, effective 22 October 2026) says games that must use the Microsoft in-product purchase API “must not direct users to a purchase mechanism other than the Microsoft Store in-product purchase API but may enable users to consume previously purchased digital content or services.” Microsoft’s developer agreement sets a 12% store fee on PC games and states that “purchases made on a third-party commerce engine are not subject to the Store Fee.” The details for games are governed by agreements that are not public.

Account linking: what makes a PC web shop work

A web shop credits a player’s account with you, not a Steam or Epic account. So the first build task is an account system that each platform account links to. Valve encourages it: “we strongly encourage you to use Steamworks API to automatically create or link the Steam customer’s account with your system.”

With accounts linked, each platform decides whether its build honors what the player bought elsewhere:

Plan the wallet so you can switch a platform off. If one store tells you to stop honoring web purchases in its build, you want that to be a configuration change, not a refund exercise.

Community servers and player-run economies

Much of PC game commerce happens on servers the studio does not run. Minecraft, Rust, ARK and GTA V (through FiveM) all have communities of player-run servers, and many of those servers sell to their own players. In August 2023 Rockstar bought Cfx.re, the makers of FiveM, a GTA V multiplayer mod it had banned eight years earlier.

If your game supports community servers, decide three things before those servers start taking money:

• What operators may sell, written into your server license.
• Who is the seller. Either each operator sells to its players and carries the tax, chargebacks and support, or you (or a merchant of record acting for you) sell for them and pay them a share.
• How delivery works: a plugin on the server that receives purchase notifications and grants the item.

Checklist before you open a PC web shop

1. List every store your game ships on and read that store’s rule on in-game purchases. Keep purchases inside the Steam and Microsoft builds on their own billing.
2. Write to your Valve contact describing your web shop and cross-platform wallet, and file the answer.
3. Build one account system and link Steam, Epic and any console accounts to it, with a per-platform switch for honoring web purchases.
4. If you sell Steam keys on your site, match your Steam pricing and offers.
5. For community servers, publish what operators may sell and decide who is the seller before money moves.
6. Choose a merchant of record or payment service provider for the site; merchant of record vs payment service provider compares them, and hidden fees lists what each charges beyond the headline rate.
7. Put your expected web revenue and order size into the calculator and compare the total web cost with Steam’s 30% or Epic’s 12% to see what each dollar moved to your own site is worth.