What’s the efficiency in taking 30% of almost all game sales on a platform? I know we all love valve, but the efficiency here is having a store that everyone has to use if they want to make sales at all.
Valve’s 30% is high, sure. But you’re not seeing the total cost of selling a game.
And yes, I’ve done this before.
Besides the user count, besides all other factors. Digital sales are kinda hard.
You need to offer the actual game. If you’re selling an indie game that’s a few hundred megs, well you get to go sign up for a service to deliver it. Could be as simple as a google drive link, but because this is business use you get to pay business prices.
Are they charging a flat rate per month, per gig? Per download? Some combinations?
Now there’s updates and patches that need to be delivered. Same deal as before, but also now you need to handle the actual patching. Do you ship one big patch that checks for previous patches? Small individual patches that your users have to figure out what one they need?
Does your game have multiplayer? Well damn have fun with that.
What about support and refunds and GDPR stuff? Gotta factor all of that in too.
Now we get to do payment processing. You get to pay a company to accept payments on your behalf because you are NOT doing that yourself you WILL get stuck on inane and silly laws.
That’s part of it. Paying steam 3 bucks on my 10 dollar game to handle ALL of that? Yeah that’s fair. Could it be cheaper? Sure. a lot of things could. I don’t spend months on a game and then cheap out on the most important part: sales.
My time is valuable and worth 30%
Nobody is arguing that valve shouldn’t be compensated for the value they provide. Many of us do, however, argue they are taking too much. Their revenue per employee being so much higher than anyone else in the market supports that argument.
Uh huh, and I’m sure you’re privy to the exact financial breakdowns?
If someone could actually provide a better service than steam at a better price point, they would. The epic games store is shit, uplay is shit, origin is shit.
Not to mention Valve’s effort with Proton, allowing non-Windows gamers enjoy what they pay for on multiple platforms with great ease; their efforts have been massive for gaming on Linux, and without it, I wouldn’t have paid for a lot of games, earning their developers a whole lot of absolutely nothing.
Also the community hub, the workshop, the review system, the cloud saving, the functional wishlist, the gifting system, the shopping cart, the anti-cheat (you’re better of with it than without it), the discovery queue, the sales dedicated to specific types of games that actually help people discover games and drive the revenue up for the developers, the (I think) complete transaction history, the refunds system, the friends and the chat and profiles - and probably many more things that I’m either not aware of or couldn’t list off the tip of my tongue, combined with internal works that, again, do help the devs in the end.
Steam is much more than a place where one pays for a game to then simply download and play it. It’s much greater and more functional than that. None of the developers have to put their games on Steam - nobody forces Epic Games Store or GOG to be this subpar in comparison. Same way nobody forces gamers to use Steam. People use Steam because they love it - or because there’s no good-enough alternative, but that’s hardly Valve’s fault.
Steam charging 30% is not just worth it, but also surprising, given what putting your game on Steam gets you as the developer, and what it gets us, the players.
Not to mention Valve’s effort with Proton
And their VR efforts. VR seems to have lost popularity lately, but I was really glad that someone out there was competing with Palmer Luckey, especially once he sold out to Facebook.
And… holy shit, I just found out he’s Matt Gaetz’ brother in law. That explains a lot.
Let’s not describe this as “paying valve three bucks” because that’s not accurate and is misleading.
It’s paying valve 30% of your revenue.
It is misleading. It is 30% of the entire revenue of the game. And it is objective whether Valve deserves 30% of that revenue. It’s also true that games aren’t locked to the Steam platform and can absolutely make money outside of Valve’s influence. History has shown though that it is less profitable then being inside the Steam ecosystem.
You’re better off never learning how little of what you pay your food actually goes to the producer, then…
They didn’t frame it as “paying valve three bucks”. They said “paying valve 3 bucks on my 10 dollar game”. The phrase “paying pennies on the dollar” comes to mind as a common idiom for saying you’re paying a small fraction of the total, and neither literally means nor implies paying actual pennies.
Steam does more to promote and support games than many other platforms out there. Epic does not have workshop and forum, Google Play does not promote games as good as Steam.
The efficiency is doing it so effectively that on an open platform competitors can create there own store, pay for AAA games to appear on their store, take the smallest of pay cuts, pass it on to the consumer, and still have customers prefer to pay more to be in the Steam ecosystem. I’m against monopolies but Valve’s is absolutely efficient.
That’s not how monopolistic marketplaces like Steam (and Amazon) operate, though. They have “Platform Most Favored Nation” (PMFN) clauses in their terms that mean products sold on the platform can’t be sold cheaper elsewhere…
Which means the whole “pass it on to the consumer” can’t happen, unless a product risks being de-listed from Steam. It literally removes the ability to compete on price.
You can find games sold cheaper than in Steam in many places. You can even buy games outside of Steam and they see 0 revenue from it.
Find me a game that has been de listed from Steam because it was sold cheaper elsewhere. You can’t, so don’t bother.
30% is more or less the standard. Not just in the games industry, but everywhere.
It’s actually not the standard, the standard was iirc 70% for in-store at the time. These days I think it’s closer to 50%, assuming no 3rd party losses/licensing.
Nintendo/Sony/Apple/etc are all 30% too, by the way.
Epic is 12%. Yeah, Epic store sucks and all that. Whatever. There’s two marketplaces that aren’t first party. One takes 30% and one takes 12%. How is there a standard? You can’t look to other markets or other distribution methods to compare it to, because they’re all different with their own things.
Edit: GOG is 30% for indie developers (there’s a little more to it than that, but basically that). It sounds like with other publishers/developers they negotiate contracts on a case-by-case basis and don’t say what they get.
Man, Epic must be patting themselves on the back for all the money they paid getting people to believe 30% was outrageous, because it’s paying massive dividends.
It may shock you to know that before Steam, your options were to fuck off or offer your product in a store where you would only get 30% of the profit, with the rest going to the publisher, the retailer, licensing, etc. These days it’s closer to 50% for physical copies, and Apple/Nintendo/Sony/etc all standardized with Steam on you getting 70% for digital.
Don’t like it? Pull a Valve and make your own alternative that’s better. If you build it, they will come… which is why nobody uses EGS.
I don’t believe if you build it they will come anymore. People are fucking lazy and will put up with whatever the fuck is happening with Twitter for convenience.
EGS is like walking around a grocery store offering free samples and leaving without buying anything.
Did you know that almost every other marketplace out there (except that fucked up one) has the same 30% revenue split?
The whole debacle over it is artificial. It won’t change much if it looked better to people who complain now. It won’t remove Valve’s ability to provide the best service.
