Valve could reduce their cut honestly, perhaps some program for independent developers to help them get on their feet. I don’t think the top games or big publishers should be getting cut reductions.
Either way, Valve haven’t been buying out studios for exclusive games, so Epic and Sweeney can go fuck themselves, they are scum.
At the same time it’s not like Valve is not making use of the extra money to use it only for taking in profits. It might of been what made it possible to try entering the hardware market with VR and the Steam Deck and putting resources in trying to make Linux gaming for accessible for regular people. Might of been what allowed them to not be deterred after the failure of the Steam machine and Steam Controller.
Might have, brother. Might have.
Yes no maybe I don’t know 🎶
Can you repeat the question.
Why do I see this online so often? Is it an educational thing? Is it an auto correct thing? Or something other? I am not a native speaker, so I have no clue how this happens.
My understanding is folks tend to gravitate towards that because it’s indeed very close to might’ve and whatnot phonetically. My anecdotal experience as a non-native speaker is we tend to be less affected since we usually tackle speaking and listening more seriously after we’ve already familiarized ourselves enough with writing/reading, grammar and vocab.
Bone apple tea
Pretty much the tl;dr here, yeah 🤣
It blows my mind as well. My native language is Spanish, but for me it’s way easier to follow language rules properly in English. May have something to do with the fact that my native language is my regular language for expression, so I don’t pay much mind to how I use it, but English being a second language, I actually try to make sure I’m understood. Anyway, that’s what I think could potentially be the reason.
Lol. Good to see I’m not the only one that sees the impact in not using proper language rules 🤣
If I recall correctly valve did lower their cut in the wake of EGS having better terms for devs.
For the first $10m earned it’s 30%, then it’s 25% until $50m, then it’s 20% from then on.
Ok yeah that’s still pretty shitty
Why?
If steam has to do the work to host the game then the majority of effort is going to be getting to the published and available to buy step, which is recouped along with server costs early on. As it scales, the efficiencies kick in and the price gets lowered a bit.
A company keeping 70% of retail price is still a higher cut than they would get for a game on a shelf at a store, and most likely with a far higher number of sales through steam. Plus it is digital so they don’t have all the physical distribution costs. For smaller games those additional costs and advertising are going to keep them from being feasible.
Valheim and Palworld wouldn’t have been massive successes on store shelves. 30% for visibility and unlimited scaling if the game is more successful than expected is a pretty good deal for the benefits it provides. It actually does buy something, it isn’t the mob’s cut for pretending to protect your business.
It’s the other overheads too, publishing cuts, marketing cuts, QA etc before you get down to the money made for wages etc.
Valve are absolutely in a position to take less, but the service they provide is like no other.
I don’t give a fuck about EA/Ubisoft etc getting a smaller cut, but independent developers could absolutely benefit from some sort of program.Plus the income lets them take care of their employees, and to the best of my understanding it is a pretty good working environment.
Many studios are in a real pinch right now. I don’t know what valve’s overhead costs are but I’d imagine they could afford to kick back some more to devs.
Why should valve, or sony, or Apple, or Google get 30% of the revenue of entire industries for having a download and payment service.
It’s extortionate and undeserved. When I play a game I absolutely love, one third of the money for that game didn’t go to the people who made it, it went to valves endless bucket of money. It’s not right and we should not be defending these extremely high cuts.
Valve runs a profitable Launcher that allows them to try expanding into ventures like the Steam Deck and pushing Linux gaming adoption even if it ends in failures. That extra cash is what allows for businesses to expand beyond only one field.
Otherwise a company is just stuck being just a reseller, and I think gaming space currently is better for Steam Deck and how it’s pushed more people to try Linux. And even before the Steam Deck work on Proton helped. Having profits makes it easier to absorb failures and put resources towards stuff like Linux that is niche and may never gain a significant enough adoption.
Like epic even with fortnite can’t financially justify supporting Linux anticheat for fortnite, so I guess that’s what happens if a company is not taking in enough profits. And Epic store is only being kept afloat because of fortnite, and is losing money.
Also, it’s worth pointing out that Gabe seems like a decent guy, and Tim Sweeney is a fucking prick. So I think that’s a pretty big difference right there too. Valve has earned respect, Epic has not.
Not just the Steam Deck. It or the Index (or IMO even better the Link and the Controller) are certainly more noticable things they did, but big wins to me are stuff like the integrated modding in Steam, or the ease of user reviews.
And for a newer feature that has become somewhat standard across stores but only because Valve startedi t and they had to keep up, refunding without any questions asked.
When you buy something at the store, did you know that in most cases the company selling probably saw less than half of what you paid? What if they don’t have it in stock?
steam provides a ton of benefits at scale that would have probably eaten up more than 30% of the price for the game company, with the ability to instantly scale with no limitation if it picks up in popularity.
If I buy a single player game, more than likely, valve is making entirely profit on that 30%. The cost of the download is below a penny to valve. Yet they still get s third of that companies revenue.
Charge them for the services if you want. They aren’t doing thst, they are taking 30% of an industries revenue for doing nearly nothing.
Valve is at least helping out to grow a community ofbgamers that want to have nothing to do with Crapple, Google, Microshit, etc. Look at the cost of a Steam Deck. Now to see if you can buy or assemble a computer with similar specs. Why do you think Asus and Ayaneo have similar devices that are way more expensive? Valve sells the decks at a loss (which they make up for by that 30% on sapes, sure). How would they be able to pull something like that off if they weren’t swimming in money? Is 30% disproportionately hefty? Hell yes! But developers and gamers alike get much more out of that cut Valve gets, just Proton development alone is good enough. Can you say the same about Crapple, for example? Valve is a corporation, for profit, like every other corp out there, but at least they do bring innovation (not to be confused with the bullshit that Google and all Tue other crooks want to call that when all they are doing is knocking down walls between them and your money) and value across the board.
Was about to ask what’s with all the shilling here but just realized which community this is. Have fun shilling for a mega Corp. Go tell yourselves that 30% cut isn’t ridiculous.
Okay, so you say a 30% cut is ridiculous.
But let’s move that away from the mega Corp [sic] everyone here is supposedly shilling for. Let’s talk about cuts lost to distribution and delivery for a second.
I cannot answer this for a lot of industries, but for example for board games ~7%-9% go to the actual designer. That’s 91%-93% that is lost along the way. Even if we take Sweeney’s 25% example that the devs get, that’s still 3x-3.5x as much as for physical products.
This would indicate that digital distribution is far better than physical for developers making games, as they get a vastly bigger percentage of the money. Within the digital space, we can compare things a little bit, at least for video games.
Digital storefronts seem to roughly all come out at 30%, for which Valve provides more value than say Google or Apple, as they also give you forums, mod integrations, and various dev tool to use to simplify development of your game’s modding and multiplayer features.
We also know that consoles are pricier, as you have to pay certification costs for updates on top of the original distribution, and in a way this is true of the mobile stores, too.Now, don’t get me wrong: 30% is a ton of money, and I cannot see where a rich company needs this much money. However, I would argue they’re one of the last companies to tackle in improving as far as them not taking excessive money goes, and everyone else (Google, Apple, MS, Sony, even Epic considering how they do fuck all for the 12% cut they take) should get impacted first, plus it’s still difficult to argue that digital cut is excessive to begin with comparing the vastly improved developer cut comparing the physical distribution space - as good as I can compare board games vs video games, granted. But I would estimate that the overhead costs of physical sales for video games aren’t that different, manufacture, shipping, it’s all comparable after all. Video games need less container space, but they also sell for less.
- YouTube takes 30% from fan-funded revenue
- Twitch takes 50%, which was an increase of their 30% cut, and people have called them out on it
- Apple take 30%, but recently reduced that to 15% for apps making under $1M/yearly
- Google Play has the exact same system
- GOG takes a 30% cut
- Epic Games takes a 12% cut, but they are purposely operating at a loss and this comes with a lot of strings attached (exclusive contracts, passing transaction costs to users, etc.). This is not sustainable, and developer should expect an increase as soon as they take over more of Steam’s userbase. (If they take it over…)
Overall, calling a 30% cut “ridiculous” is patently false. It is the industry standard.
Digital marketplaces use a near monopoly to extort developers into accepting these inflated cuts. I simply will never accept an inflated rate caused by a monopoly as a good thing. Without that near monopoly there is no way they could maintain a 30% cut.
Getting paid half as much to be a middleman as the developers get paid to make the goddamn game is obscene. Especially for Steam, a pseudo-monopoly on a platform they did not make. Steam is a program for Windows PCs from a company that makes neither Windows nor PCs.
Well, I guess they kinda do both, now. Nevertheless. 30% to be the gatekeeper is quite a fucking cut.
Tell me you know nothing about retail without telling me you know nothing about retail.
Smug nothing. Try again.
It should be reversed so that small devs don’t get shafted for not being able to sell millions of dollars worth of copies of their game. The ones making tens of millions of dollars should be paying more.
I do think Valve could drop it to 25% and not lose much sleep over their coffers.
I mean I don’t know how much money steam is banking, but they provide quite a good service for their share.
Max download rates at all times (almost).
Amazing steam overlay. Online gaming. Online saves. Workshop. Linux support.
And many more. Some of that epic has too but in comparison epic launcher is shit.
It would effectively not do anything for game devs to reduce it by 5%.
On the dev side steam provides distribution and a bunch of tools while you develop your game. Tomorrow you can pay 100$, and steam will support you with keys, releasing and publishing your game, reviewing it for free etc.
I have a game I’ve been developing for 5 years part time. I have steam keys I share with testers, and can distribute version for free, with all the patch notes and update features from steam for 100$.
When I do release, they’ll have earned the 30%, and if I don’t release I’ll have saved a ton and steam will take the costs. This greatly reduces the barrier to self-publishing. Out of all the companies I deal with, this is by far the fairest and lest predatory model there is. Gaben could have just bled us of our money even more and it would have worked. They are very rich because they are very humble in a sense.
I think Steam’s cut should probably be something like
0.05 * (log(x) + 1)where x is number of copies sold.You mean that games need to have 100 000 copies sold to get to the 30% cut?
Yes. It would mean that small indie games with low sales wouldn’t be hit as hard by Steam taking a cut, and huge hits that sell millions of copies would help subsidize this.
Awesome article, see? Just like Apple and Google… No, wait, I was thinking of a parallel reality. Never mind.
The reason big studios get better rate is because they have leverage. Just as Amazon has leverage against apple in app store
Its based off revenue, obviously more revenue made overall gives Valve more money with less cut than small revenue at a larger cut.
If scale is no longer an issue, why can’t Epic create a store with similar functionality to steam? Because it’s not about that. It’s about Tim not being able to pocket as much.
Epic simply doesn’t want to be consumer friendly. Epic sees the money Valve is making, but not the effort Valve puts into their store. Just how consumer friendly Valve is the reason Valve basically a monopoly. Valve gives so many tools to the devs too such as SteamAPI to make their games better and accessible to a wide range of consumers with a wide range of devices.
Epic knows that the way it can fight Valve is by pointing out their 30% cut. Everything else, involves making their store better, which Epic doesn’t wanna do.
Human rights principles? Tim needs to quit sniffing his own farts. He’s trying to sell digital video games on iPhones, not end human trafficking.
Love how this is “highly confidential”, yet, here we are 🤣🤣🤣 God, I love this community!
People hated Steam and were very skeptical initially. Respect was earned over time
I miss Won network and kali…
Lol I used to be on Kali, and IFrag before that… college days
They were literally selling physical game boxes with a code and an installer for Steam in it instead of the game.
Steams initial tactics are as scummy as Epic’s. The reason they don’t need them anymore is because of their semi monopoly.
Those DVDs usually had the game backup files on it too, so you didn’t even need to download most physical copies you purchased. And I can still download the original CS game I bought like 20 years ago. Seems like a good deal since that game cost me like $40 in store.
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Do you know why steam is dominating? There are no better alternatives. They actively work on projects that benefit everyone, including their competition.
For the time being, there’s nothing to be said other than other companies need to stop being so shitty.
Valve forever more have my support just because of proton. Letting me get off windows to game has been revolutionary for me.
I don’t understand this mentality. It has no loyalty to you, why be loyal to it?
Be loyal to people, not to organizations.
Support is not the same thing as loyalty.
I’d agree with your statement in isolation, but
Valve forever more have my support
sure sounds a lot like the definition of loyalty:
“a strong feeling of support or allegiance“
I think you are reading too much into the word choice, which was phrased a lot more like “I will always be grateful for steam doing this thing” and not “I will follow steam even if they join Sauron’s legions”.
By your logic, it makes sense to be loyal to Gabe, who has long thought to be the driving force behind steam remaining what they are and not falling down the capitalistic hole of exploiting their users for every red cent.
Gabe doesn’t know you, you don’t know him, Gabe represents a concept to you all. To be loyal to him is at best a parasocial relationship. He is not your dad, he’s not your professor, he’s not any kind of mentor to you, he’s just someone who doesn’t speak much publicly, and gets good PR because his capitalist interests happen to align with consumers right now. 15 years ago, Elon Musk fell into the same boat.
Look, I enjoy gaming on Linux as much as the next person, but I’ve also seen gamers make this completely unnecessary fanboy move over and over for decades.
not falling down the capitalistic hole of exploiting their users for every red cent.
The concept of a “hat shop” was literally invented by TF2 and every other game copied them. And they’re arguably exploiting small devs for every “red” cent while cutting breaks to the billionaire publishers. They also make devs eat the full cost of a refund. You’re not going to defend that behavior, you can only say “doesn’t affect me specifically” and ignore it.
But what if we didn’t ignore it? What if instead we praised their good behaviors AND rebuked the bad? What if we just behaved like responsible consumers? Imagine…
I don’t think that taking a cut for the sheer exposure of the platform is the same as exploitation. Even small devs make more money by an order of magnitude through steam than they would if they did not.
Steam costs money to operate. I really don’t understand why people think steam should just be valorous and noble and not make any money. Labeling them the middleman implies they don’t do anything. They provide a service in the same way a grocery store is there to make sure you don’t have to drive to a different farm every time you want a different kind of vegetable.
That’s really the only problem I have with what you said. Of course people shouldn’t be loyal to companies, I’m just pointing out the flaw in your logic that people should be loyal to people instead. Any type of figure that you don’t personally know is primarily a concept.
But also, “Behaving like a responsible consumer” is an idealistic fantasy that mostly fails because of the prisoner dilemma. If not enough people do it, the only people who suffer are the ones doing it. That base mindset might be overcame on an individual basis, but it’s rarely popular enough to gain the traction required for actual change, and it becomes more and more difficult the more people are content with the service.
It doesn’t help that steam is essentially the only game launcher that isn’t tiny or garbage.
Steam costs money to operate. I really don’t understand why people think steam should just be valorous and noble and not make any money.
This is exactly the point I’m making. Or rather, I really don’t understand why people think steam IS valorous and noble and not just making money.
I’m just pointing out the flaw in your logic that people should be loyal to people instead. Any type of figure that you don’t personally know is primarily a concept.
Agreed. I don’t follow why that means you should have loyalty for them.
“Behaving like a responsible consumer” is an idealistic fantasy that mostly fails because of the prisoner dilemma.
Totally agree.
It doesn’t help that steam is essentially the only game launcher that isn’t tiny or garbage.
I agree with basically everything you said. I just think the rational implication is to be reservedly greatful for the parts that benefit you, and readily critical of the parts that don’t. And I don’t understand why people instead reach the conclusion that one or two random alignments in interests means they should swear their allegiance to a corporation that cannot possibly do the same for them.
Being loyal to people can be pretty bad actually (see, idk, Darth Vader’s biopics).
I’m obviously not saying “be unquestioningly loyal to anyone with a pulse”. My point is that, if you’re going to have loyalty, direct it toward a fellow human being, not an ephemeral hive mind whose only “loyalties” are legally required. (And a picture of a person you’ve never met and who doesn’t know you doesn’t count as a person, for obvious reasons).
Yea, steam actually earned their market share through being a solid storefront and game distribution center and not because of exclusive releases from third parties or shady practices beyond promoting games.
Sure, they are the only place for valve games, but that is because those are their games. Yes, some of their games have loot boxes and that is all terrible, but that is the games and not inherent to steam.
It’s as if the recipe for success is not fucking over your customers and provide good product. Huh, weird
Who would have known?
Did they tho? Steam was absolutely terrible in the beginning, the only reason people used it back in the early days is because you needed it for super popular valve games. It had nothing to do with them being a solid storefront or anything of sorts.
I have used it since a few days after release (Sept 13, 2003) because I was playing Counterstrike. It made updates and finding play servers so easy even though it did have a rough start with connectivity. Honestly, it was better than whatever we had to use prior even with the issues.
Once they sorted out the server issues and started adding non-valve games it became even more useful and we end up where we are now.
They are currently still on top because of being a solid storefront and the other things I listed.
And then look what happened after steam of companies saying PC is dead and not wanting to invest in it. It’s not like the market wasn’t open for anyone to enter. All the other companies didn’t care including Microsoft in their own platform. Even look at how barebones the launchers are compared to Steam and how all the companies didn’t care about Linux.
It’s not like these opportunities were never around and Steam just happened to get good will. Companies still are putting in the bare minimum and have more trouble or maybe disinterest in matching the features of Steam than a new company making a smartphone. How ridiculous is that. That companies making a smartphone did a better job of trying to be modern than a companies attempt at a launcher.
my problem is people conflate pro develper and pro consumer actions as the same thing, when they arent. what epic does is very pro developer(better cut, money in advance if exclusive), but the platform is far from being pro consumer(removes consumer choice in platform to buy it on, lower competiuon, inconplete community, store, workshop, and os functionality). I’m in open arms for competition, but it actively is a worse consumer experience, then its very hard to support.
Epic is really only pro-dev in that way though, steam has a lot of perks through its steamworks api
I said this in another place, but the single only reason that Epic is pro developer is because they have miniscule market share.
If they gain significant market share, they will 100% absolutely guaranteed, no doubt, double their cut from developers.
It is the exact scum tactic that has been done dozens of times before like amazon.
Here’s the difference. When we talk about companies dominating an industry, we’re usually talking about practices that keep competition from even forming. Monopolies are formed as a result of big companies buying out or making it impossible for their competition.
Steam doesn’t do that, which is a big reason they won their monopoly suit. They just provide a better model than anyone else is willing to, and they rake in the cash because of it.
Compare this situation to books-a-million in the states. Books-a-million doesn’t have a monopoly on books, they just have created a better environment for selling them. They aren’t stopping other book stores from opening or buying chains to shut them down, they just sell you a cup of coffee and give you a place to sit while you browse their massive selection.
That’s not a monopoly, that’s just better business.
Valve isn’t dominating an essential industry. They could control 100% of the game market and it would make no difference to anything important.
Neither is Tiktok. But the US Congress is still freaking out about it.
The US congress is freaking out about TikTok because of national security concerns about china potentially harvesting data on americans and influencing politics, not because TikTok is a monopoly.
This is not at all the same thing.
If they want to harvest data and influence politics they will have to pay an American billionaire to do so, like Russia and everyone else does. Good work, Congress.
But social media is an essential industry in how opinions are formed.
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It matters if people are captive consumers of the product. It does not matter if they can simply stop using the product with no ill consequences.
The same goes for movies, TV, music. You can simply stop buying these commercially with no ill effect.
Wrong. There is an “ill consequences” effect added to this. For most consumer media (games, TV, music, etc) there are very few options. You either get most of what you want by surrendering to the bullshit scummy practices of the few huge ones, or choose to cut the options dramatically by moving over to some platform that’s all but doomed to fail or be purchased by the “huge ones”. There is one third option, do not consume anything. There’s you “ill consequence” right there.
Take electricity or communications, for example. I have yet to see one of those companies that does not work exclusively on predatory practices. If you know of any, please, enlighten us. Fine, go live in a cave without electricity and/or communication in this day and age. You won’t, you’re using a device that you paid for, which uses electricity that you paid for and a connection to be able to transfer these hits of data, that you also paid for. Guess what, like the rest of us, you’re a captive consumer as well. You’re welcome.
Again, valve is a corporation, their function, before anything else, is to be viable, and the only way to achieve this, at least that I’m aware, is making money.
Very few of the comments here actually defend the 30% cut, which is the main subject of the whole thread (fully deviated from the OP post, granted). But the fact remains that Valve is, and has been (nobody knows about the future, so no “will be”) the one consumer media distributor with the best rap across the board, because they do bring a lot of added value with their offering, to both sides of the gaming industry (devs and consumers).
Make no mistake, they are after our money like every other business out there is, they just have been wise enough to build trust among it’s stakeholders (not to be confused with “stockholders”, just in case).
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Yup. I’m not a Dev, so I can’t tell what their panorama looks like, I believe 30% of anything is hefty, but I also know that Steam has a platform and perks so solid that they don’t have to worry about competition, since evidently no other consumer media distributor is willing to follow Valve’s business model. Having said that, from a consumer point of view, I challenge anyone to show me a more beneficial platform than Steam.
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I don’t like Valve. I don’t like the non-ownership model of game distribution.
Users aren’t captured at all, since none of them need to purchase video games. Game developers may be captured by Valve, but game developers aren’t producing anything of importance.
I’m for legal restrictions on industry practice that are predatory towards the users, but there’s no need to protect the industry itself from control by Valve, since nothing important is being controlled.
Valve also can’t control the gaming industry if they don’t control the OS gamers use. They may be trying to control the OS, but they haven’t done it yet. Until then, they can’t prevent users from installing games outside of Steam. If Developers are locked in to Steam, it’s because users buy games in Steam and refuse to buy games outside of Steam. The users behave this way because Steam provides lots of value to them.
If Steam starts to abuse users instead of serving them, there’s nothing stopping them from purchasing games some other way.
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I’m not arguing none of this matters.
This is what I’m arguing: if Valve had control of the gaming industry, which it doesn’t yet but might later, it would matter so little that we’d need no public policy to address it. Anyone who isn’t in the industry needn’t concern themselves about it.
While you may have a point that we can’t know what any company will do in the future, the fact remains that Valve has earned their place by 2 factors alone:
1.- Constant innovation to make their platform a place where everyone wants to be, without crippling the competition, despite having the means to do it. 2.- years of building trust with their users and providers alike by being transparent and clear on what they offer, while adding value which costs money that they absorb.
Yes, 30% of so much money is a shitload of money, but I have yet to see one good reason why that’s a bad thing other than the usual “it’s too much” bullshit argument.
Unity, Reddit, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, these companies have 1 common denominator: they have gone out of their way to destroy anything that would present a risk to 10 cents of their revenue, including, but not limited to, absorbing any potential competition, regardless of if they represent a risk to their dominance or not.
Do not compare valve to these assholes. Valve is making tons of money? Unless you can show me, with evidence, how this is detrimental to anyone else, other than the fact that you are not making as much, all you have is bullshit and a fucking tantrum.
We worry about companies that aren’t anywhere near as dominant as valve. Just because their interests align with ours today doesn’t mean they will tomorrow.
Valve is dominant because they treat users well. Is your argument here seriously “Yes, Valve is a better platform that treats you well, but you shouldn’t use it because other people already do! You should use a platform that’s not as good because competition!”
A competitor in any industry needs to do more than “exist” to be worth using. If Valve starts acting shitty I will stop using it, much like how I have stopped purchasing or playing Blizzard games.
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Weekly reminder for everyone to go get their free epic store game of the week…
And never install the launcher or play any of said games.
Not a lot of people know the troll face is used by pedo rings to identify each other. It was true back then but its common use muddied the water and gave them a lot of plausible deniability, but nowadays that it’s fallen off from common use it’s almost exclusively used as a symbol.
Sweeney is a third-rate Carmack
That’s insulting to Carmarck considering how intelligent and talented the man is. Sweeney is a mediocre programmer and a hack businessman at best.
Time Travelling Interdimensional Energy Being John Carmack!?
The “you mad bro” is found among internal Valve communication (Valve COO Scott Lynch to Erik Johnson and Newell, i.e. in the sense Johnson/Newell being “mad”, not Sweeney). It was particularly not sent out as a response to Sweeney. Another outlet already got tripped over this and had to make a correction: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/03/valve-coo-on-epics-tim-sweeney-you-mad-bro-when-launching-the-epic-store/
This is not quite as sensational as some people are framing it.
If “Newell remained magisterially above the fray.” wasn’t hint enough this is garbage fucking journalism, this fact would tip you over the edge.
Less drama more context would be nice from headlines, but man does it feel like I’m asking too much
Lmao common steam W
Steam community or not, the glib defense of rent-seeking behavior on lemmy.ml is wild.
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The 30% cut is an obscene standard that needs to be reduced on PC, console, and mobile. Taking an entire third off-the-top as nothing but a middleman and file-server is indefensible. Valve doesn’t even control their platform - they shoved their way onto computers via HL2 and now perpetuate an overwhelming market share. Then as now, it is a problem that games require any online DRM launcher.
Tim can still get bent.
EGS by all accounts does fuck-all to attract users or sellers, beyond adjusting that cut, and it is still a project that exists primarily as rent-seeking for that cut.
Same deal for Fortnite on iOS: their excuses are pretense for taking 30% of everything spent on an app or IN an app, on every iPhone. They once strongarmed Facebook out of even mentioning that. Furthermore, people must have software freedom. It is intolerable that Apple ever restricted what you install on your own goddamn phone.
Fortnite should be unavailable because Fortnite should be illegal.
Nothing inside a video game should cost money. Real-money charges make games objectively less enjoyable. Maximum revenue comes from addiction to manufactured discontent. It is infecting every platform, genre, and price point. It is in single-player games. if we allow this to continue there will be nothing else.
Steam is just perfect at keeping the gamers behind them as they are only assholes behind doors to the Devs on their platform.
30% is an absurd cut for a store that has such a monopoly that if you don’t release there your game is pretty much cancelled even if you release at your own store without DRM and with additional goodies (Looking at GOG and The Witcher - they released the Gwent standalone like a year later on steam because it didn’t sell at all on GOG and then it apparently outsold the GOG version without a week)
People are just too lazy and Steam is keeping them happy enough to not bother looking another way.
Epic isn’t a good guy in any case but the exclusive deals on AAA Games they do is probably the only way to get someone to buy the game there instead of Steam
Correct! Minecraft would never have been successful if not for Steam!
An outlier makes systemic problems disappear.
Or league, or WOW, or BF4, BF1, overwatch, fortnite, genshin…
A short list of the biggest fucking games in half a dozen genres. Do you know what an outlier is? There’s not just the one.
As a direct comparison: Fortnite probably installed a lot of Android copies outside the Play Store. But surely 99.9% of Android games are still installed through the Play Store. No matter how hard any particular ultra-popular game could have gone, the reality for an overwhelming majority of cases is that being outside that one store is death.
I know we happen to be a minority, but given how much valve has done for linux gaming, I’m happy to vote and support them with my wallet.
For reference, before they started giving a good linux experience I didn’t buy games for more than 15 years, so is not like the game developers were going to get 100% of the money I’m paying for games now, the choice is to get 70% or nothing because I wouldn’t play their games. Not only that, if the proton compatibility layer fails, I’m very confident that steam’s refund policy has my back, again, without this policy I wouldn’t buy games.
Remember, not everyone is you, and not everyone plays games the way you do.
I recently moved my main desktop to Linux (everything else has been for a long time), and - aside from some problems with Wayland (due to NVidia) - everything has just worked. Every game I’ve played has been working flawlessly. They’ve been doing an amazing job with Proton.
This is me too. I’d moved away from PC gaming completely when I dropped Windows from my PCs back during the XP era. The Steam Deck has brought me back though. I really like the experience, and I get a kickass Linux handheld PC for a great price.
I’ve stayed with Windows just because of that, but I can’t think of any games I regularly play that haven’t worked on my steam deck.
30% is the cut only if the sale happens on Steam itself. Devs can sell keys through other means and Valve gets 0%.
An offer made generously because they know it won’t matter. They’re basically a monopoly.
75% is not “basically a monopoly”, especially not when there are so many other ways to buy and sell games. Plenty of games have been incredibly successful without ever being on Steam.
They have an overwhelming majority that makes assorted competitors individually irrelevant. Jesus, do I hate having to say “they have an overwhelming majority that makes assorted competitors individually irrelevant,” just because people get in a snit about the word “monopoly.”
You know Standard Oil didn’t own all the oil - right? They peaked around 85% of sales. They had many competitors. Those competitors did not matter.
For every game that’s done well outside Steam, there’s ten that eventually came to Steam and sold massively better than before. That jump is the power Steam wields. That is why we regulate competition, beyond ‘do competitors exist.’
The barrier to entry is a huge concern on whether something should be considered a monopoly or not. Extracting and refining oil is nowhere near the same as selling your videogame online. Today the barrier of entry for digital distribution incredibly low.
And yet: 75%.
They can hand out keys with no strings attached, and it does not matter.
It definitely does matter. Some games effectively pay Valve about 15%, which basically nullifies Sweeneys whining since it’s roughly the same they’d pay on the Epic store.
You’re right about Steam being the dominant game store, but the narrative around it is all wrong. Steam offers far more functionality for their cut than any other competitor could even come close to.
Only for companies as big as Epic.
For the overwhelming majority of developers: it’s 30%. Keys sell, but who’s buying?
Steam’s primary functionality is its market share. They could do a lot less and nothing would change. They stay big because they are big.
People are just too lazy and Steam is keeping them happy enough to not bother looking another way.
You say that like we are making any kind of sacrifice by using steam. I used Epic and Xbox Gamepass or whatever on PC for like a year or two but stopped using either because the steam experience is just better and the exclusives weren’t worth changing.
I will buy from other storefronts if the deal is good, I have bought plenty from GOG. Epic are just anti-consumer and I refuse to support that store.
Steam just offers peace of mind with refunds and the feature set they provide is next to none, I haven’t been given a reason to look elsewhere primarily.
30% is an absurd cut for a store that has such a monopoly that if you don’t release there your game is pretty much cancelled
That’s exactly why they take 30%. Because having your game on Steam is a huge deal. Because Steam is very popular and lucrative. Because it’s well-made and useful. Little Timmy wants to skip to having a popular and lucrative platform without first doing the step of making it well-made and useful.
The exclusive on epic game store is a cancer that should not exist. And epic should remove their parody of launcher from existence because they somehow managed to make this a cancer too.
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It seems you think some of that is valve’s fault.
The 30% is.
What, did a wizard curse this number upon them? Gaben could say “make it twenty” with a shrug, and it’d be done by close-of-business.
people use ‘u mad bro’ like it’s some great insult. people get mad. it’s a human emotion. it exists for a reason. it’s not a glitch. anger is a motivator, and a damn good one. get mad, folks. use that energy. most people aren’t mad enough these days.
u mad bro?
maybe. whacha gonna do about?
Cry :(
With that handler? Highly unlikely (see what I did there? 😜)
See https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/u-mad, in particular the “Due to the agitating nature of the phrase, it is often considered a form of trolling.”
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u sound mad
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Their criticism of Steam seems pretty valid
How so?
I mean it’s not like Epic does anything to help sales, they just give devs slightly more of the money. Or at least it cannot prove that. Their store is so badly organized that the reduction in discovery and the Sweeney-created (and in fact at this point seemingly deliberate) negative association of the epic store and in particular exclusivity on it, it’s impossible for a company to judge whether the 25.7% increased money (70%->88%) is not easily eaten up by the loss in sales compared to other stores.
Valve can also trivially point to all the stuff Steam provides like forums, mod integration and streaming to justify higher cost, and Sweeney suspiciously never talks about that. I bet if he had to, he’d have to admit that he actually provides less value with his baby store considering how little devs get for the 12% taken compared to what Valve provides for the 30% they take.
Is it cool that stores take 30%? No.
Can I, as a gamer, judge whether it’s a valid amount of even one worthy of critique in particular comparing brick&mortar supply chains (his 75%-loss-criticism is a false equivalence, as the extra costs he adds existed with physical stores, too)? No, I cannot.
Does it feel to me as a gamer that I get “more” buying a game on Steam than on Epic? For sure! Sometimes I can get it cheaper on Epic, which might be worth it compared to having stuff like workshop integration or prompt updates on Steam. Or it might not be, that’s something everyone has to judge.
For me personally, my takeaway from Sweeney’s baby trantrum antics and aggressive exclusivity has been this:
- I window-shop on all digital store fronts.
- I select where to buy based on isthereanydeal, with no particular weight given to any store except a little one towards GOG because I get actual installers for offline storage there.
- However, Epic is explicitly excluded. I browse there, I take the freebies, I don’t buy there. The only money Swine-y ever got from my was the 7€ when that bug around Death Stranding happened and I didn’t realize my free game actually cost me money instead of being free.
His criticism might be valid. Or not. I cannot judge that. Regardless, he’s an asshole and his shop is terrible for me as a customer comparing the alternatives.
How so
Well
Then Sweeney adjusts his flight goggles and gets ready for takeoff on one of his pet peeves: the 30% platform fee on Steam. “There was a good case for [such fees] in the early days,” writes Sweeney, “but the scale is now high and operating costs have been driven down, while the churn of new game releases is so fast that the brief marketing or UA value the storefront provides is far disproportionate to the fee.”
Sweeney opines that, if you were to strip away the top 25 selling games on Steam, “I bet Valve made more profit from most of the next 1000 than the developer themselves made.” The maths to get there is 30% to Valve, 30% on marketing, and 15% on servers / engine costs, so “the system takes 75% and that leaves 25% for actually creating the game, worse than the retail distribution economics of the 1990s.”
Sounds valid, it’s a really high cut
“Right now, you assholes are telling the world that the strong and powerful get special terms, while 30% is for the little people,” writes Sweeney. “We’re all in for a prolonged battle if Apple tries to keep their monopoly and 30% by cutting backroom deals with big publishers to keep them quiet. Why not give ALL developers a better deal? What better way is there to convince Apple quickly that their model is now totally untenable?”
Sounds valid, making deals with the big publishers for smaller cut and taking the big cut from smaller publishers. Sounds pretty shit
Yeah but OTOH I can easily see this be discussed away. Economy of scale is very much a thing in physical distribution (so smaller board games have to set aside significantly higher percentages to manufacturing, logistics and marketing), and I lack the business knowledge to know how this does or does not translates to digital distribution.
In other words I cannot judge that, but I have two indicators to suggest it might be a thing:
- Physical distribution mirrors it.
- Sweeney is an absolutely untrustworthy source, and him so vehemently poking at it suggests it’s a false narrative.
(Plus let’s not forget that Sweeney would take a 105% cut if he could get away with, he himself is a money-greedy bastard)
I think their claims seem credible. I think Steam lowering their take shows that 30% was indeed higher than necessary. And lowering it for those selling shitloads of copies and keeping it high for smaller sellers does sound a bit backwards and scummy.
But both Epic and Valve are businesses. Of course they’re going to be greedy and scummy. I wouldn’t really expect anything else. I just think in this case the specific arguments towards Steam seem valid.
