if we ignore the whole "cant buy because too pricey" thing, wouldnt adding live for speed to the steam store (considering scawen added a 30% price increase to cover steam's share and still get the same amount as he would selling licenses here) give greater recognition/advertisement? i'll be honest i have no clue how that process would work but i feel steam would give atleast a considerable boost in sales
i typed that a few hours ago and forgot to post but thinking about it, due to how lfs and the whole license system works maybe just leave only demo content avaliable and instead the game directs you to https://www.lfs.net/shop
If steam takes 30%, u would need increase your price 42.85% to earn same profit (steam will take 30% of the price increase u need to cover the 30% of steam share)
And now u need 1.5 day of hard work to buy lfs s3 on steam. Nice move.
Being on Steam wouldn't magically make features unlocked either. Plenty of games on Steam offer subscriptions or DLCs. Assuming Scawen wanted LFS to go on Steam (he's indicated consistently against it) the exact same business model that LFS currently has could be implemented.
LFS could be a "free" game as the Demo with each S1/S2/S3 as their own DLCs to unlock each level. Added bonus is that each stage would need to cost mode to keep the existing margins.
Unless you somehow think that being on Steam would make it easier to steal which you'd also be wrong.
There's a lot of work that would need to go into managing how Steam and LFS accounts interact. The "simple" way would be for each "DLC" on Steam to just give a 12GBP voucher code and leave licensing entirely on the LFS side to unlock. But that can be clunky and still has a labour cost ensuring Steam has a suply of voucher codes. A "better" integration would be to have an LFS account be linked to Steam and then some mechanism of syncing DLCs to LFS.
IIRC there's also some incompatibilities to how LFS is structured as a business that Steam doesn't like. Not sure if that state has changed given the changes in tax codes over the years (as well as GB leaving the EU). If this was still the case, there'd be costs to restructure the business as well.