The rent seeking on platforms like Steam, the Apple App Store, and Google Play is absolutely gross considering how little value they actually provide. I’ll be very glad to see them forced to reduce it to somewhere similar to a card transaction fee.
Here we go again. Armchair economists bleating “why everything cost money, corporate bad” with no actual expertise to back it up. Steam is not a parasitic middle man, it is a collection of services that would have to be provisioned and operated by the developer otherwise.
- A massive infrastructure to store and deliver the game and its updates, worldwide, and at an acceptable bandwidth that Valve operates
- A storefront that enables monetizing the game
- The audience and discoverability that would not exist otherwise
- The Steam API, achievements, cloud saves
- The client itself, content management, validation, and Linux compatibility tools
- Network and operational security
- (edit) Also keep in mind that Steam and its services are operated by experts. A game developer would have to hire the experts or get training.
That’s where the cut goes.
People should really read the Steamworks documentation to get an idea of the absurd amount of services Steam offers https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/home
Yeah, I think the big difference between Steam and Google Play and the App Store is that Steam does not own Windows and has actual competition.
I think asking for a cut just because you own the OS is despicable, but Steam is actually providing a service.
Steam does own SteamOS but they also bundle a third party software repo (flathub).
The Community > Discussions page for a game is one of Steam’s most underrated features. The amount of times I’ve wanted to know something super specific about a game prior to buying and found exactly the info I was looking for in the Discussions page. Oftentimes with developer comments on said feature clearly labeled. So clutch.
Valve has about 100 employees, Steam is operated by about 40, but I would love to have a source on the “generational wealth” part. Most of the income is likely spent on operational costs, like the aforementioned massive CDN infrastructure. If you’ve never worked in corporate-level networking, it might elude you how ridiculously fucking expensive stuff gets, especially at a worldwide scale.
You forget to mention the cut that goes into the ceo billion dollar worth fleet of mega yachts
https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/gabe-newell-luxury-yachts.php
Success is not illegal. In Valve and Gaben’s case, it’s deserved, and probably as clean as you’ll ever see.
I firmly believe that Steam has allowed fair competition to exist. Epic had the greatest chance to become viable competition, but they fumbled the store’s launch, poached Metro Exodus and fucked over the people who preordered, did not have the foresight to implement some kind of preloading for Borderlands 3, and pissed people off when they refused to allow non-exclusive indie games to exist on the store while they made an exception for Cyberpunk 2077. In that time, the only thing that Valve did that might have hurt EGS is refuse to host store pages and ads for games that weren’t going to launch on their platform. Shortly after that, Valve released the Steam Deck (the most pro-consumer handheld I’ve seen to date), SteamOS (free), Proton (free), DXVK (free), Gamescope (free), and have contributed (for free) to upstream projects like Wine. Of all the billionaires, Gaben is the only one I can think of that I’m okay with being a billionaire.
That’s all nice, but you’re dreaming if you think any of that adds up to 30% of the value of a video game.
I don’t think that’s exactly how it works… It isn’t just the value of the game, it’s the exposure and distribution that it gets just for being on Steam. I imagine that’s well worth the 30% to most, which is why most devs seem OK with it.
It does seem slightly high to this non-expert, but I don’t really know enough to say for sure that it’s anti-competitive or anything.
I am one to always call out rent seeking where I see it… But I don’t really see how Steam fits in there. Some of us are old enough to remember when HL2 came out, and things began transitioning from physical media to Steam. No dev was forced to do anything, and for years most people still bought physical games for everything other than Valve games.
The reason other devs started switching over, and it became dominant, is because it’s just a damn good service (and also because broadband just started getting more affordable).
We can always go back to the old ways of having a download from the company website and downloading directly from them. What? Nobody wants to pay for bandwidth? Nobody wants to have to pay for secure management of credentials and billing? :O
Those days didn’t even exist (or if they did, they were very short). I feel like Steam came out just before the broadband boom (when they released HL2, it was still on five CDs). And by the time other devs started switching, most of them just went to Steam.
However, re: the broadband thing, they could distribute with bittorrent, kind of like how linux distros do it.
Uh, all games had patches and mappacks downloaded directly from the game’s distributor. It was extremely slow, hence the invention of CDNs like filehippo, hwfiles, 2cows etc and some gaming companies (at the time you could rent your own server and host the games. Incredible, huh? You could also have LAN parties and play with your clan against other clans all using LAN, no internet required) were also doing mirroring of those files (in Italy it was gamearena and ngi, for example). Steam wasn’t even a thing.
For bandwidth, it’d absolutely make sense if a game that’s 10GiB+ because uncompressed audio and pre-rendered cutscenes (and likely huge day-1 updates) had to pay more of a cut to its platform than a 200MiB (or less) game. Particularly if the smaller game doesn’t even have multi-player.
Nobody wants to pay for bandwidth? Nobody wants to have to pay for secure management of credentials and billing? :O
They absolutely would if it didn’t mean getting deprioritized on Steam. Those things aren’t that difficult or expensive these days. I could have secure management of credentials and billing up in a weekend if I needed it (correctly), and I’m a single developer.
Steam is better than Microsoft, Apple, Google and Tencent. Using monopoly power to maintain the 30% standard is still a problem.
Eh, there’s more involved with a full storefront and content delivery compared to just a card transaction. But it’s definitely not 30% worth of additional value.
But it’s definitely not 30% worth of additional value.
They’re actually claiming to be adding almost 50% (43%, to be precise) in value, since that’s how much more you have to add to end up at 30% of the final value. (By analogy, imagine they took a 50% cut. That would be claiming to double the value. Something that used to be worth $10 is now going to cost $20 if the original wants to maintain the same cut.)
