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How to sell PC games directly alongside Steam
June 9, 2026•6 min
At GDC 2026 in San Francisco, Xsolla hosted a session on what hybrid PC publishing looks like in practice. Chris Cheever, VP of Global BD at Xsolla, sat down with Alvin Rabry, Head of Digital Sales at Microids, the French publisher behind the Smurfs, Asterix, and Syberia, to walk through eighteen months of running a direct sales channel alongside Steam.
A direct channel often begins with a campaign problem, not a strategic decision
Microids didn't begin its D2C work by asking a strategic question. The team began with a much smaller, more concrete problem.
The communications group wanted to run an influencer campaign that converted directly from livestream traffic to sales, using vouchers and time-limited discounts. That kind of dynamic, time-bound conversion mechanic was difficult to run through Steam. Rather than redesigning the campaign around platform constraints, the team layered a commerce surface onto microids.com, and discovered that the same surface was useful for pre-order campaigns for games across their catalog, IP-specific landing pages, and broader catalog merchandising.
The direct channel emerged from an operational need, not a top-down strategy memo. For most PC studios considering a direct channel, the path looks similar: a campaign or experiment that the platform doesn't accommodate, followed by an infrastructure decision that makes future campaigns easier.
Hybrid publishing is already the working model at the top of the PC market
Direct-to-consumer publishing on PC isn't a future state. The largest studios in the industry have run it for years. Riot, Ubisoft, EA, Rockstar, Take-Two, Blizzard, and the major MMO publishers all operate direct channels alongside their platform distribution. Path of Exile, Final Fantasy XIV, and Elder Scrolls Online have built substantial direct revenue streams without stepping away from the platforms that anchor their discovery. The more interesting question isn't whether the hybrid model works for PC games. It's how a publisher without that scale of resources gets there. The goal stays the same: be where players are, and on PC that means Steam. A direct channel sits alongside the platform layer, picking up the use cases that don't fit cleanly into a third-party storefront and giving a publisher more flexibility than the platform alone allows.
A direct channel often begins with a campaign problem, not a strategic decision
Microids didn't begin its D2C work by asking a strategic question. The team began with a much smaller, more concrete problem.
The communications group wanted to run an influencer campaign that converted directly from livestream traffic to sales, using vouchers and time-limited discounts. That kind of dynamic, time-bound conversion mechanic was difficult to run through Steam. Rather than redesigning the campaign around platform constraints, the team layered a commerce surface onto microids.com, and discovered that the same surface was useful for pre-order campaigns for games across their catalog, IP-specific landing pages, and broader catalog merchandising.
The direct channel emerged from an operational need, not a top-down strategy memo. For most PC studios considering a direct channel, the path looks similar: a campaign or experiment that the platform doesn't accommodate, followed by an infrastructure decision that makes future campaigns easier.
The first real value isn't margin. It's timing flexibility.
What actually unlocked the move to a direct channel for Microids wasn't platform fees. It wasn't margin. It was control over the campaign timeline. Pre-order availability on Steam varies. A publisher running a year-long marketing plan often needs to open commercial windows that don't map neatly to a platform's pre-order policies. With a direct channel, Microids can stage awareness, pre-order, and conversion phases across the full life of a campaign rather than compressing them into a window before launch. On PC, pre-orders have stopped being a single moment in front of release. They've become an extended phase of audience engagement. For publishers running IP-driven campaigns tied to external events, a movie release, a seasonal moment, a partnership beat, that calendar control often delivers more value than any line-item revenue impact.The differentiator is the experience around the purchase, not the purchase itself
A direct storefront only works if the publisher gives PC players a reason to use it. Players who are already on Steam will default to Steam unless something specific draws them elsewhere: typically, something exclusive that rewards the deeper level of engagement that direct purchase implies. Two campaigns are worth looking at closely. A pre-order campaign for Dying Light 2, run with developer Techland, offered an exclusive digital wallpaper available only through the direct channel during pre-order. Roughly 7% of overall campaign revenue flowed through pre-orders, with the exclusive wallpaper as the primary draw. The indie title The Last Friend ran a bundle in which buyers submitted a photo of their dog, and the studio created a personalized in-game asset of that dog. The mechanic extended naturally to influencer outreach: the studio offered the same treatment to creators, who then streamed the result and drove affiliate traffic back to the page. Creative mechanics around the purchase scale even at indie budget levels on PC. Both campaigns operate within Steam's documented requirements. Nothing inside the game itself is exclusive to the direct channel, and Steam Keys are priced consistently with what is offered on Steam. The room for differentiation lives in the experience that surrounds the purchase: bundles, digital extras, partnership content, personalization, and pre-order rewards. The discipline is treating the direct channel as a creative surface, not a duplicate of the platform listing.A direct channel doubles as a marketing sandbox
Beyond the immediate revenue, the data and experimentation value of running direct is substantial, and arguably underrated in most D2C conversations on PC. A direct channel surfaces the full visit-to-conversion funnel: visits, carts, abandoned carts, and completed payments. That journey-level visibility is harder to reconstruct on platforms where the publisher doesn't see the funnel. Microids uses that visibility to A/B test creatives, iterate on regional campaign hooks, and identify which audience cuts respond to which messaging. The same data informs decisions further upstream. Different markets respond to different price points, payment methods, and creative angles. With a direct channel surfacing those signals, a PC publisher can adjust where promotional budget is deployed, which payment providers are emphasized in which markets, and how microtransaction packs are structured by region. Insights generated on the direct channel feed back into broader marketing planning, including campaigns that ultimately route through other channels.D2C on PC isn't for every studio
A direct channel doesn't generate an audience. It gives an existing audience a place that the publisher controls to convert. For Microids, the substrate that makes the channel work is the broader brand presence: the website, the social channels, IP-specific marketing, partnership relationships, an active Discord. Without that, a direct storefront is just another URL. With it, the storefront becomes the place where the most engaged players show up: the ones who follow the IP, the ones who would rather support the publisher directly, the ones who want the pre-order extras. That's also why the model isn't right for every studio. A brand-new indie launching a first IP without an audience should start where discovery happens: on Steam. A direct channel becomes relevant once a studio has built something for it to extend. For a PC publisher with a multi-IP catalog, an active community, or an IP with consistent partnership opportunities, the calculation shifts.
A second layer, not a switch
The most useful framing is that D2C on PC is a layer rather than a switch. Steam remains where discovery, scale, and the wishlist engine live. A direct channel sits alongside it and carries the use cases that don't fit a platform's standard surface: dynamic campaigns, exclusive pre-order content, creative experimentation, regional optimization, funnel visibility, and timing flexibility that lets a campaign move at the pace of its audience. From our observations across dozens of Xsolla partners, that hybrid posture is the most durable shape PC publishing is taking. It rewards publishers who already have an audience to extend and who approach the direct channel as a long-term investment rather than a one-time uplift. The infrastructure required to run it (payments, store building, fraud protection, regional payment methods, campaign tooling, and game launcher software) is what Xsolla's Publishing Suite is built to provide as a unified game publishing platform for PC. Want to see how to create a game store for PC publishing alongside Steam? Read the full Publishing Suite digital guideFeatured articles
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