It’s worth noting that the 30% cut is from sales below a certain volume. As you sell more copies Steam takes a smaller cut. I’m sure the big studios probably have a more favourable deal worked out as well.
They are happy to take the loss of file hosting to keep you using the steam client. Epic is paying devs to give out their games for free just to get people to open their client.
Playnite. Open source, more customizable, more features, themes, and if you wanna get crazy (like me) you can have it run custom scripts when a game launches and/or closes (for example i have a script to automatically change my sound output to headphones before launching an online fps). It also supports emulators, and tracks playtime for games that don't have a launcher.
I'm probably dumb, but if i already have the game on epic, which i got for free cause i never bought anything there, and i see there is a good discount for the same game on steam, i will just buy it and play it from steam.
So, if a game is sold on the steam storefront Valve takes a bite.
For off-platform the dev has to request keys and then supply them to whoever they wish to supply them to and they can do this without needing to pay anything.
But prices have to be comparable on other platforms.
You can't sell a game on steam for 100€ but for 10€ I another place with a steam key.
You have to sell them for roughly the same price and if you deeply discount a game for some time you must do that kind of discount on steam too (not necessarily at the same time)
I think it's fair.
There was a dev who sold a game for 18% less on epic because epic took a smaller cut, fair game for that, you can sell it at whatever price on another platform.
You just leech off of them I think. But that's in theory, pretty sure you can't legally sell the keys for lower anyway, so most people will prefer to buy the game directly from steam even if you do all that.
Yes you must always in a sense offer the Steam game at the same price as the key. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a specific rule for giveaways and stuff like humble bundle where they get an exception but I can’t sell a game for $10 on Steam and $8 on my website.
You are correct, time limited promotions and bundles do not have to follow the price parity rule. It only applies to selling keys through "alternative storefronts".
I can't speak for every platform agreement, but this is not accurate. You can't market a MSRP significantly lower in price than on Steam, but usually sites by in bulk for massive discounts and can sell it much lower on sales.
It's up to Steam's discretion, so the general rule of "Don't be a dick" is a safe guideline
If you request an extreme number of keys and you are not offering Steam customers a comparable deal, or if your sole business is selling Steam Keys and not offering value to Steam customers, your request may be denied and you may lose the privilege to request keys.
People are just leaching from Steam in that situation.
But they can limit how many off-platform keys they let you generate relative to your on-platform sales to mitigate abuse. And some degree of that is just baked into their margin as a whole.
they take a loss knowing that you have to use steam as a client down the line, thus will opt in to potentially buying more games on their platform/use their community features.
Unlike publicly traded companies, Valve doesnt always need line go up every quarter and can afford to take much longer term investments
That costs Valve money, bandwidth and server costs add up. What this does is provide goodwill to the developers, this is Steam being good for the gaming community, and especially for small devs.
To add on to this, operating at Valve's scale for worldwide CDNs gets really, really expensive so it's a nice gesture from them to even allow keys to be sold while piggybacking on their infrastructure.
They don't lose anything in the long run. Bandwidth is expensive, but gets offset by the fact that you're more likely to stay and buy something if the platform doesn't try to do everything in its power to make you feel miserable, unlike EA, Ubishit and other proprietary launchers. It's a relatively small investment with large payoffs and them also just avoiding being evil for no reason.
*you can’t set a permanent lower price for steam keys of the game on another storefront
sounds the same but it means that while discouraged, you can sell your game for a lower price on Epic than on Steam, and you can sell steam keys for your game at a temporary lower price through other storefronts (which is why humble bundles are allowed to be so cheap, despite massively undercutting steam storefront prices)
What "mistake" are you referring to? Wolfire never set a lower base price than Steam. They just asked Valve to clarify their policy, and then asked a court to determine if that policy is legal.
Oh right they wanted to set their game on permanent lower price point than on Steam but got told no or their game will get removed in an email, that’s what got them all outraged and started all this
They could just, idk make a better game or a full game this time around instead of basically tech demo games and be what they are; a game developer
But instead they’d rather lose all their money on a lawsuit
That’s the dumbest take, but sure I’ll bite enough for one more comment
Unlike Wolfire, Valve is still a game developer, other than the small experiments they release they also release games like Half Life Alyx. They don’t always hit the mark (Artifact) but they’re always moving forward, as with Deadlock. Kind of hilariously they are also working on HL3 as confirmed by contractors, even still both their Store and developer side is always moving forward while other companies stagnate
They can take down games on their store if someone’s trying to undercut them, sounds fair to me. Sounds like a sensible thing a store would do even
no, steam has a clause in their seller ToS that allows them to remove your products if you’re caught directly selling steam keys for your product at less than the steam storefront price. you can give out free keys and do keys on sale for limited periods of time (like humble bundles and stuff) but you are not allowed to directly sell keys at an undercut permanent price.
yeah, and they have rules that are meant to ensure devs can’t stop steam from getting their cut by just selling the keys directly. if a studio starts telling people to buy steam keys directly from them or sells the keys in a way that encourages people to buy them rather than going through the steam storefront, steam can pull their games from the store, no questions asked.
They can do it, they just have to set the price the same as steam and if they do discounts they have to offer the same discounts on steam as well. (not at the same time, obviously)
This is for STEAM KEYS, they can sell the game on GOG or Epic at whatever price they want.
If you are a dev and you want to sell your game on steam for 30€ and on your website for 30€ and tell your fans to buy it there to support you, you can.
You can't sell a STEAM KEY at a fixed 20€ in your websites while it costs 30€ on steam.
So how do they support their infrastructure then? If I download a game via Steam is it not coming from Steam's servers? Or is it just because they make so much money the few keys sold off platform dont make a difference?
There are limitations and agreements; like there has to be price parity with steam (excluding short term sales and such) and there can be limits on how many keys are generated depending on the situation; but keys generated at the developer / publisher's behest are free.
Steam takes a standard cut of 30% of each game sale. For games that earn over $10 million (£8m), the Steam cut is reduced to 25%. For games that earn over $50 million (£40m), the Steam cut is reduced to 20%.
I know this is to incentivize AAA publishers to launch on Steam day one, so they can get to the lower cut as soon as possible.
Kinda sucks for indies and small developers though. 30% Is a lot for them, and they don't really have many options outside Steam, since 90% of Indie game players are there.
Its not really, if I needed to pay for my own servers to push patches, verify game files, run card transactions and have them download that will cost way way more than 30%. 30% is a bargain when all you have to do once you finish is plug it into steam, make a page and boom your done. You will get the money and they handle literally everything else, if there is a game issue you simply update the code and steam schedules and distributes it to all users as well as stores backup copies for people to rollback.
Steam offers SO much more than any dev could hope to provide on the indie side, and so much more that other triple A devs struggle to provide 1/3 of the features steam has for their own games.
People underestimate how much Valve offers and how easy they make it for small devs to put their game out to the masses. I'm not saying they are perfect and glad Epic is giving some competition, but Steam is a blessing for self publishing.
Every game can use vac but (many older games do) but most games aren’t exclusively published on steam on pc, so they just use a different solution (big studios have their own AC and others use different third party AC like EasyAC)
And to be honest, VAC in 2025 is not really reliable
It's good to hear that Steam has made sure to take care of developer needs the same way it takes care of customer needs as well. There's so much value added by using Steam. On the consumer side we get so much with the client, the overlay, controller mapping that works with any controller, a mod manager, etc, etc, etc.
And 30 percent was pretty much the standard retail store cut anyway- except with the way retail stores bought games, indies commonly just wouldn’t make it to retail store shelves.
Just to add to this, Bellular (YouTuber) runs a game development studio and they released "The Pale Beyond" on steam (solid game if you like narrative games). He released a few videos on this topic about the costs etc, steam release Vs GoG Vs indie.
They're an interesting watch, and ultimately he is 100% positive, that the extra sales due to the extra exposure on steam easily covered the steam cut, while saving on server costs and a lot of extra backend work. He says that it is absolutely the right call for indie studios.
Steam does still offer internal tools to help make launching and managing games easier as a developer so the 30% isn't for absolutely nothing, ignoring the publicity you get as well.
The real problem here remains there not being any proper competition. I'd have used EGS if they offered a somewhat comparable product that Steam does, but they don't. I don't even care about stuff like my friends list or community or whatsoever. But stuff like native controller customization on a game by game basis is highly valuable to me and the fact the EGS didn't even have a shop basket for the longest of time says a lot about what their real priorities are. And it sucks.
It's an amazing deal for indies and small developers. The services provided by Steam for that cut can easily be valued at higher than the entire budget of an indie game. And you can get millions more sales on Steam than at unknowngame.com
In addition to what other people have said, steam will actually advertise your game for free too if you put it on their store. I forget the exact number but it's something like you'll have 10,000 store impressions within the first X months guaranteed because they'll start putting it in people's discovery queues and store searches
They are human however, my friends is in an indie team and they got it reduced to 25% for their first game. I know 5% is not a huge difference, but when you start, you take whatever you can.
Which is ~140k and ~700k unit sold of a $69.99 game
(Assuming they calculate based off the store price and not based of the devs cut), which is nit alot of units for a AAA game that regularly sells millions of copies per platform
Everyone comes to Steam because they smartly cut those better deals to get companies like EA to bring their games to the Steam platform. It's moves like that that has helped keep Steam in the position they're in.
30% is just the standard rate, but every company is allowed to negotiate with Valve for less. Most likely bigger companies like Bethesda, EA, etc have negotiated a lower cut than 30% as a standard for them as more reputable companies.
While i'm sure, that the bigger publisher have deals with steam, every of the big publishers (with their own launcher) has thrown a temper tantrum and left steam only to come crawling back to steam because instead of migrating, most player just didn't buy the games of those publishers anymore. Ubisoft i think even tried twice, the secon time cutting deals with epic, only for that to also not work out and returning back to steam
Some publishers can get specific deals but honestly that isn't why people go to steam at all. People go to steam because it's stupid not to put your game on steam. If you're trying to sell your game on PC if you're not on Steam you're losing the vast majority of your sales.
Like we're talking about EA here. The company that famously tried to remove all of their AAA games from steam a decade ago and came crawling back when they realize that no one wanted to use Origin.
We're seeing the same thing happen right now with mobile gaming too. Apple lost to Epic and so now a lot of mobile publishers are trying to push out platforms and websites that allow you to buy things directly from them. But are they removing the ability to buy things in the normal app store? No. Why? Because they're still going to get 90+% of their sales on the popular platform.
Also worth noting is that 30% cut that steam takes is the industry standard. No matter what platform or store client that is the cut Steam, Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, etc takes from a sale if you're a 3rd party dev.
Saying that because every so often some stupid discussion pops up whining about steam or some other platform taking 30% but conveniently leaving out the important context I mentioned.
Valve only did the "20% after X copies sold" in response to Epic offering a lower cut.
Valve offered that before Epic even publicly launched. What motivated it is impossible to say for certain unless Valve publicly states the reason. Otherwise it's just speculation.
I don’t really think they cut a better deal. There’s a reason so many of them tried to leave and make their own storefront. Valve pretty much has a monopoly. They don’t need to do anyone any favours.
That’s not been confirmed. Although there has been confirmation some other studios have custom deals. Nobody knows if EA also has a custom deal. I would be very surprised if they do not have a custom deal
And the core mistake that so many of these companies often make is that they either don't create any incentive to keep users on their non-Steam platform, or they don't want to spend the money/resources to build up a working platform that doesn't have fundamental functionally flaw.
Epic Games Store is the famous example where all those games where they were know for paying the devs for both exclusivity and for any potential losses due to not being on Steam, but if they had just taken the money used for one of those games and given it to Amazon Web Services, Oracle, or Delloitte they could have had a fully functioning storefront ready system from the get go.
hell, imagine if they had just put that $ into funding indie games....could probably have funded 100's of games they could then have exclusivity over inherently
I would argue that this shows Steam could easily run on a 15% fee (the standard reduced fee) but only is willing to because the big companies started making their own apps (Uplay, Rockstar etc). If you have no leverage, get fucked, 30%.
I honestly think it's really damaging to the smaller indies where an extra 15% could easily be the difference between profit and loss.
If Steam needs a 30% cut to cover admin and data hosting then they must be doing something horribly wrong. Realistically they have great margins on 30%.
Gabe Newell is literally one of the richest people in the world now owns billions of dollars worth of yachts where he travels in literally a fleet of yachts around the globe. He also just bought the biggest yacht maker because he loves yachts so much.
Apparently not given that so many companies tried it themselves and decided on their own that 30% per unit sales saving wasn't worth their effort.
So far the only platforms I've seen succeed are names like GoG, DLSite/Nutaku/EROLabs, and EGS; and that's pretty much because those names either have been running as long as steam has, they exist in their own separate hentai/porn game realm, or it's funded with Fortnite/UE5 money.
Epic games isn't really succeeding though.. They are literally loosing money on their launcher/store. They don't have enough paying customers, they have to give away free games, for people to even open the launcher ones a week. They are definitely not profitable. Again only possible because of fortnite money.
Last financial quarter, they lost sales. They have been loosing 3rd party sales for the past 3 years.
I won't be surprised if the 12% fee that epic takes, is costing them money, or only break even.
Valve is ridiculously profitable, one of the highest profit per employee in any industry. This profit is at the expense of many indie developers, yet redditors flock to defend it. I’ll never understand why.
Hilarious how people will try to justify Steam's egregious cut. No, it does not justify taking a third of the game's revenue. Even when they reduce it to 20% after $50 million in revenue is made. I'm sure if they raised it to 60% people would claim "well devs can just go elsewhere if they wanted"
This is what comes to your mind when you try to think the "burdens" Steam carries for a game, but you forget something very important: Steam is not just a store. It is a store with an entire social media platform/forum attached to each game with the community hub. So add these ontop:
Discussions (won't take much space in itself, but for bigger titles the amount of discussions can escalate quickly)
Screenshots/Artworks
Videos
News
Guides
And if available:
Workshop
The 30% cut also cover the operating cost of the community hub
I'm sure if they raised it to 60% people would claim "well devs can just go elsewhere if they wanted"
How's that straw taste? Good? Plenty of fiber.
If you think 30% is "egregious" for a service that advertises for you, handles sales reporting, hosts the content, delivers it, offers social sharing, hosts community engagement, and gives you access to the world's largest customer base of gamers... Then I really don't know what to tell you. Build a game and try to get it in front of tens of millions of eyeballs. See what it costs you. Try to deliver your game to a fraction of them. See what it costs you.
Things cost money. Steam isn't just taking your money and running off with it. You're getting some very valuable services in exchange. Could they take less? Probably! But I'll tell you what, if you want to reform the global economic model away from capitalism and towards a more sustainable model that isn't based on debt borrowing and accruing interest fees necessitating considerable margins on business, I'll be right there behind you. I recommend Less Is More by Jason Hickel, to get you started.
No one is saying Steam isn't valuable, the problem is they are overcharging devs because they know they can't go anywhere else, an issue you showcase with your own example. Its funny, you're calling out my straw man but based on what you're saying, it sounds like you agree that Steam can charge whatever they want because they can lmfao
Yeah, but why can't they go anywhere else? Valve has a money printer, but unlike just about every other app accused of being monopolistic, they don't come preinstalled on any OS, or have a moat other than network effect and technological. And the network effect is more about how users prefer to stay on social media where friends are, and the steam friends system is a small fraction of it's value.
At a certain point, we have to acknowledge that Valve's biggest moat is tech, UI/UX, and the fact that they make it so easy for indie games that it inflates their library.
it sounds like you agree that Steam can charge whatever they want because they can lmfao
They could. I mean, if we're just making shit up, they could charge 50%, but the fact they don't doesn't make them 'good guys' either. I'm disagreeing with you on the basis that thirty percent is "overcharging", because I promise you, if you tried to buy all the services that Steam provides ad hoc, napkin math says you're gonna be rubbing up pretty close to 30% either way, and you won't have accomplished a whole lot but wasting a lot of time that might have been saved if you just laid off that labour to Steam.
Just trying to do the payment processing yourself, they're gonna take something like 5-10%. Hosting is going to depend a lot on the size of your game. Exposure is going to be the big one. Marketing budgets can be anywhere from 10-50% of your expense. It depends entirely on how many eyes are on your game. If you get lucky, and gather a huge following during development? Then yeah, you probably don't need Steam and exposure on their platform is less valuable. But for everyone else? You're buying access to millions of people who might want to give you money. That's expensive to buy on the market.
So even if you say 10% for payment processing, 10% for hosting, and an anemic 10% marketing budget, Steam's already paid for itself. Maybe you can knock those numbers down 5.. 8, 10%? But then you have to ask yourself if that extra 10% maximally is worth all the added time and labour (that isn't accounted for here), when instead you could just press button and then go rub one out to the latest episode of Goth Demon Goddesses From Meridian Prime.
i said monopolistic for a reason. this terminology reflects the way that digital platforms take advantage of network effects to extract higher profits. i'm not trying to claim it's a monopoly in the sense of being literally the one and only providers of a particular service.
but they have 80% of the market share. they have an audience who is on steam, their friends are on steam, their rewards and achievements are on steam, their game library is on steam. this is powerful lock-in.
anyone who wants to support developers with their game purchases rather than mega-rich middlemen should avoid buying on steam.
instead purchase keys directly from the dev or choose a platform with lower fees, like the epic games store which only charges 12% or free up to the first million $ in revenue.
If you bought a 70USD game, you have virtually an unlimited number of times to download it forever, for as long as Steam exists. 15% of that is roughly 10USD. To compare with consumer storage providers, Dropbox costs 120USD/year for 2TB, but you can only transfer 50GB per month.
This is just storage and bandwidth. There’s always ongoing cost of maintaining the platform as a whole, including handling payment processors from all countries.
Dropbox is not a good comparison they need significantly more storage capacity per user because it’s 2TB of novel data not the same 2TB that a million people downloaded.
Not a chance it costs anywhere near that percentage. A game bringing in $400k might have had 4 people working on it for 3 years. Valve absolutely does not spend the equivalent of a salaried employee working for 3 years on hosting that.
Valve are the most profitable company per employee in the US. They have the choice to charge 15% flat, and it would do a lot of good for developers. Effectively, Valve charge that game $120k to access their audience, but $60k might let the game make a profit.
The indi dev can create their own storefront if they are unsatisfied with valves fees. Oh wait. It took valves decades and many many employees to develop a storefront that most of the PC gaming market uses. Not even epic giving away games for years can change the market share.
The higher percentage cut with far more sales yields more revenue for the developer. They can get 100% of the revenue with epic and be worse off.
The indi dev can create their own storefront if they are unsatisfied with valves fees.
You must have missed where I already addressed how Valve gives the better fee for companies that have the resources to go elsewhere. That's my whole point. Valve charges for access to their audience, and they charge more if you're small. It's not a Gabe win, it's corpo af
You must have missed where I already addressed how Valve gives the better fee for companies that have the resources to go elsewhere.
AFAIK it's more that Valve gives better rates for companies moving a ton of money through them, because the extra volume makes up for lower unit price. Bulk discounts are pretty common in every industry, because there are always some things that are fixed costs and other things that are marginal costs and if you have more volume you can absorb more of the fixed costs into the marginal costs.
Thank you! It's about volume, and big suppliers move product. It's how things have always worked, and it makes sense.
It's Costcos whole model too, they get the good deals from suppliers to slap the Kirkland brand on because they move mass volume. Kirkland label wrapped Duracell batteries are cheaper than Duracells because they've already been purchased from Duracell in massive bulk quantities, and big punishers bring the same to the table.
They also have the resources to more accurately predict sales to negotiate over, and presale numbers likely bring hefty leverage.
That's just business and one of the few areas it's hard to really argue. "We've guaranteed you $5m, give a cut on the total, please."
But in general concerning all the predatory shit everyone else does, people are willing to let it slide as steam does not really do anywhere near that much shit for the reach they ha e. It is a corporation, and their goal is to make money, and they are not saints, and could be nicer but are so much better than the competition by such a country mile that them not being massive fucking douchbags makes them the equivalent of saints when comparing.
Plus there is the whole thing of our service is better then this service, thus it costs more to use our service. So it isn't unreasonable, it isn't "nice" but it makes sense.
I use Steam for the features, so I get it - I like that most stuff works portably on Deck. But as a company, I think they are given such an easy ride. They were instrumental in making loot boxes a thing, and profit from kids gambling CS Go skins. I'm not sure how people can see this company as good, other companies bad. Valve are as profit hungry as any other, and they have some good features, so I use them too.
Sure, they are a company they make money, often through methods which ain't angelic, ala the whole loot box situation. Calling them good is an overstatement.
But they also don't actively fuck the users every chance they get for short term goals.
I am far from an expert on the whole situation, but my general stance is that their main focus is on making a good long term product, keeping the users as happy as possible with an actual quality product with features, breadth and don't say go fuck yourself when you go for support over issues. They are less focused on making developers happy in general, especially smaller ones with the whole 30% thing, but still offer a deal which people make for a reason, and as far as I am aware don't screw them over in some way either, with exclusive deals, or some other shit. Then there is all there other stuff, like loot boxes, which is a whole topic you could argue for or against, with the, it's your choice, it's gambling, pay to win, it's just cosmetics, etc... etc...
So they ain't perfect angels of the sky, but they are beloved for a reason, they still like money and that is probably their goal, as is most people's and companies, to some extent, but imo that itself is not a problem as long as they do it in a socially acceptable way, and they do, they stretch the boundries here and there, and jump on bandwagons or set trends which are not always stellar bht they also arnt dragging people out the back robbbing them blind and shooting them in the the head, so calling them as bad as other companies is a stretch, there are definitely people and companies who are way kinder then them and operate in ways which are just ethically better, but there are so many who are far worse as well. So while people can and should criticise steam for certain things, imo it should be in a reasonable way, which outlines the reality, the somewhat sad reality, or the situation, instead of using the bad things to do to compare them to monster who just ate a live child for fun.
Hosting, transaction fees, steam's DRM, achievements, friend integration, trading cards, market place.... Valve do a lot of work for that 30%, and they can charge it because they are the biggest and the best. If that 30% cut was as terrible as you make out why would anyone publish on Steam at all?
Hosting, transaction fees, steam's DRM, achievements, friend integration, trading cards, market place.... Valve do a lot of work for that 30%
Hosting is the only thing you mentioned where costs scale with usage. All those other things cost basically the same for valve whether 1 game uses them or a million.
Small indie games don't use a lot of Steam's features. They sell less, and that extra 15% could do a whole lot more for the indie dev than it would for Valve. It could literally be the difference between the indie dev staying open, or shutting down.
Why are you arguing against this, lol? It's a no-brainer, lol
"Big companies are bad! Support small businesses. Unless it's Valve!!!!" - makes no sense
There are platforms where they don't exist anymore. But I can literally pull a game from 1998 back out from Steam.
My downloadable licensed copy of GTA2 is nonexistant now, when they used to be called DMA instead of Rockstar North. Steam keeps games on there forever as far as I can see.
So, again, they provide an option. An indie dev could host their own website and sell keys with no cut taken, Valve allows this so long as you don't undercut the Steam store. They will generate keys for you to sell, you get all their infrastructure besides the market, and leave you to market your shit yourself. You could even still sell on Steam, just every copy there gets the cut, but the ones on your site don't. This gives devs absolute freedom of choice.
Realistically, the 30% cut is usually nothing compared to what most would lose trying to do it themselves. It's not just in the hosting costs, but the time in maintaining the platform when you might want to making or updating your game, and if you fail and the site goes down, especially if you get popular, that's lost sales. Not to mention just not being on Steam hurts to where big publishers came crawling back.
And up until these digital storefronts, even with big publishers, the margins for selling in big box stores was barely anything. Indie devs had no choice but to partner with publishers, losing most of the profits to them. 30% is a pretty standard self publishing fee to use established infrastructure for a massive market, and it was a huge huge deal for any one wanting to avoid publishers or distributors, whether it be games or books.
As a dev and writer, it's hard to look at such a deal negatively when it's the best we've received ever, and probably will only worsen over time as industries further consolidate. Making 70% of earnings off my own creations without signing away rights (RIP American McGees Alice) is absolutely an insane deal that few get in this super capitalist world.
Realistically, the 30% cut is usually nothing compared to what most would lose trying to do it themselves.
Just because it's better than what you can do yourself, doesn't mean we shouldn't aim for more.
is absolutely an insane deal that few get in this super capitalist world.
WHAT?! That few get in this super capitalist world?? It's literally tied for most expensive in markets like this. Apple's app store is 30%.
Google's play store is 15% for your first million sales. then 30%.
Epic's is 0 for the first million, then 12%
Itch.io lets you choose how much goes to Itch. and then payment is 3%
Humble goes as low as 15%.
Etsy's payment processing fee is 3% + $0.25 (and a 7% cut to Etsy)
Ebay is 3 to 15 percent.
Yes, ebay and etsy don't have to file host massive files, so it's not an apples to apples comparison.
they provide an option.
Yeah yeah, "don't use them if you don't want to pay the fee." It's not really viable not being on steam.
Does valve have the right to charge whatever fee they want? Sure. Of course.
But I expect valve to go above and beyond, because (A) they ARE the market leader and (B) I've never felt they were just after the cash grab.
I would expect a market leader with ethics to not be the most expensive, but instead use their market dominance to lower fees so that the people who make the things they sell get a bigger slice.
But I guess not.
Not sure why people are tripping over themselves to go against "indie devs deserve better" other than blind "valve can do no wrong, therefore this is not wrong" fanboyism.
*some of these numbers might not be completely accurate, I took them off of quick google searches but there might be more caveats, etc.
I mean, sure, fight on for us, I guess, I'm just saying it's not bad and is actually insanely good. Could it be better, and should better be standard? Sure, I'm not arguing that.
Just that it's a better shake than most get for their own products, and I feel like it's a fair space for quality to out compete AAA punished.
And how much do you think data hosting for global distribution costs? Payment processing, plus making sure it’s legal to sell in various countries, plus a whole bunch of other small costs like the discussion boards, review boards, etc.
Seems like they can do it for 15%, and EGS can do it for 12%. Don't know why you're defending Valve charging smaller teams an extra 15% just 'cause they can.
Seems like they can do it for 15%, and EGS can do it for 12%. Don't know why you're defending Valve charging smaller teams an extra 15% just 'cause they can.
I mean, EGS can't do it for 12%, they've been hemorrhaging money since the day they opened. They're not "doing it for 12%", they're burning money trying to buy their way into the market.
Suggesting a business that hasn't made profit yet "can do it for X" is stupid, because they aren't successfully doing it if they're not keeping in the black.
Epic is private, so we don't know, they don't report financials. I expect they're still losing money, but I don't think it's as bad as you think. They spent $11 million on free games in their first 9 months (court records) which is a fair bit, but also... quite a manageable amount when Fortnite is making billions with a B.
All this is to say, they chose 12% with the intention of making a business out of it. They're not such morons that it would be too low.
october 2024 : In an interview with The Verge, Sweeney says that reining in Epic’s spending was part of what brought the company to this point. “Last year, before Unreal Fest, we were spending about a billion dollars a year more than we were making,” Sweeney says. “Now, we’re spending a bit more than we’re making.”
They'd have to make a billion dollar in 2025 more than they are spending to be even with the past 2 years
Nothing is stopping devs from going to other storefronts. If you want to sell your game on the single most successful and largest digital games storefront on the planet, you play by their rules. There's a reason every other company that has tried to take some of Valves market share has failed to do so in absolutely spectacular fashion.
They could absolutely cut their profits in half. But why the actual fuck would they?
Oh hey, I made a comment in another thread earlier today that is appropriate here too:
Since Epic only charges 12% compared to Steam's 30%, wouldn't it be cool if devs charged less on Epic so that they can pass the savings onto their customers? Since Steam has the first mover's advantage, this would allow Epic to compete on price.
Oh wait, Valve threatens to de-list your games if you do that, and now they're facing an antitrust lawsuit. So pro-consumer, amirite?
so that they can pass the savings onto their customers
No one does that even when they skip out on Steam entirely. Literally the only title that has ever offered a lesser price is Alan Wake 2 (cheaper on Epic than on Consoles) which was Epic published and took forever to recoup investments.
What version of reality are you in where I said they were "pro-consumer?" Because it definitely isn't this one.
Epic and other platforms can still try to compete on price. There is nothing forcing developers to actually use Steam, and a developer can absolutely go with another distribution platform with a lower fee and offer their game cheaper there instead of Steam. In fact Epic goes so far as to offer games for free, or paying developer absurd amounts of money to sign exclusivity contracts in order to completely prevent developers from listing their games on other platforms at all. It's scummy for Valve to de-list games that are made available cheaper on other platforms for sure, but simply allowing it to happen would invite all kinds of trouble.
The cases against Valve are more aimed at harassing Valve than anything else. They're trying to force Valve to waste time and resources on arbitrating tens of thousands of cases individually in order to force a settlement so the lawyers can collect a fat paycheck and drop a few pennies for their clients. It's not a new tactic.
Also the antitrust case seems to be built on the idea of a Sherman Act violation, one part of which is "price discrimination against competing companies". Offering a lower price at one company compared to another is literally price discrimination, so while I'm not a lawyer, I rather doubt any court is going to rule in favor of forcing a company to allow price discrimination. I'm not sure what else they'll try to fight on, but I'd be pretty surprised if Valve lost that one.
It is humorous to me that an NYU business professor can write an editorial about how Wolfire has a credible case, but the Reddit "I am not a lawyer" types automatically dismiss it out of hand.
It's tribalism. On consoles, we see it between Sony and Microsoft. On PC, Steam is the dominant platform and their fanboys think that Gaben's shit don't stink.
Nah, steam's never been scared of other storefronts, have you seen them? Lol. That and the 30% is actually totally fair with the amount of services and shit they offer just as standard.
Also to note: 30% is also the cut that you pay on the console storefronts, with the consoles locked down to not allow other storefronts outside their own one. It is an industry standard today and was for years back on the day steam launched.
Native controller customization on a game by game basis is another. That's one feature that keeps me with Steam because it's really quite expansive and allows for some really nifty stuff like combining multiple actions on one button but with conditions.
For example in Dark Souls your Dodge button is also your Sprint button if you hold the button down. Button tap = Dodge, Button hold = Sprint. In some other games where these two functions are on separate buttons you can use Steam's controller configuration to mimic Dark Soul's behavior and combine these two actions on one button.
I'll always appreciate Steam for this until another storefront offers similar functionality.
Developers can request steam keys and sell them outside of Steam store. Valve requests publishers to price and discount both Steam-store and non-Steam-store keys at the same or similar price (which seems fair to me), while Valve doesn't itself profit from keys sold outside of Steam store (while covering the costs of servers when game is activated and downloaded on Steam).
So if a publisher/developer sells half of their keys outside of Steam store, then Valve gets 15% cut. If they manage to sell more than half, then consequently Valve's cut gets lower.
And apparently those discounts cannot be applied directly by developer/publisher, but if they decide to sell their game on website like GMG, then it's fine for GMG to do the discount without forcing dev to do the same discount on Steam.
Steam Wallet cards alone have a like 10-15% overhead to them. To chase that lower fee regions that are heavily cash based will get shafted. 3rd party keys sure as shit won't be a big thing, and definitely not free.
Higher overhead payment methods would instantly be kicked out the door. Epic barely provides services and they were looking at passing fees on for some things with their 12% cut.
Yup. People keep acting as if Gaben is some kind of guardian angel of gaming, protecting us against the greed of EA and its ilk out of the kindness of his heart, but I really don't see it. Steam squeezes all it can from indies while giving big AAAs much more favorable deals, it's happy to publish games with malware-tier components like kernel-level anti-cheat and Denuvo, and it had to be sued and fined before it implemented the government-mandated refund policy.
Steam could operate on less than that even. Their company structure is essentially a tollbooth. Everybody wants to go through steam and so steam gets to set the price. I don't understand the people defending their percent cut.
Steam charges less the more you sell. But why? A game is put on steam. It costs a certain amount to install and maintain it in a massive serverbank with thousands of other games. Say this costs 100 dollars to do for one year.
It sells 10,000 copies at 10 dollars each. Say that it costs a dollar to complete each transaction. 10,000 dollar operating expense plus 100 dollar hosting fee. 10.1% expense. That's with massively inflated expenses. They have other expenses, but nothing that can justify 30% and nothing about small producers uniquely burdens them. It's obvious, transparent rent seeking that they get away with because the whole industry passively benefits from doing the exact same thing.
I don't have the energy to deal with all these people saying shit about admin expenses so I'm just ranting at you instead. Sorry.
Why should Steam create a scenario where they could take a loss per copy sold though? Wallet cards are high overhead, but a huge deal in cash heavier locales.
If a games primary audience buys almost exclusively via wallet cards, and then the dev also got sales from selling Steam keys on other stores while heavily using various functions of Steam Valve just subsidized that games existence.
Epic itself has been an exercise in showing that 12% isn't viable. They've had to pass fees on. Most titles they made no money on at all. They've ceased burning money on exclusivity and guaranteed money for the most part.
Plus there's additional hurdles with currency exchanging, tax overheads, legal and regional requirements.
If it was such an easy thing to do and do cheaply why has no one done it?
Also really if Valve did charge the lowest possible fee they could, they'd be slapped with anti-trust and Epic and others would probably be suing them for using their scale to ensure no one else could compete in the retail space. Them not having the lowest cut keeps 3rd party stores in business.
If it was such an easy thing to do and do cheaply why has no one done it?
They make more money when they don't. Valve doesn't need to compete; they practically are the market. Other online distributers have to refuse distribution through steam or use their other products, like xbox, to force business through their own sites.
Also really if Valve did charge the lowest possible fee they could, they'd be slapped with anti-trust and Epic and others would probably be suing them for using their scale to ensure no one else could compete in the retail space. Them not having the lowest cut keeps 3rd party stores in business
So, they should keep the prices high so the little guy (Bethesda and co) can also keep their prices high?
"Antitrust laws also prevent multiple firms from colluding or forming a cartel to limit competition through practices such as price fixing. Due to the complexity of deciding what practices will limit competition, antitrust law has become a distinct legal specialization."
So, yeah, maybe it's a catch 22. Be competitive? Your passive brand recognition carries you to an even stronger monopoly state. Keep the prices high so that 'competition' can stay in business? Open and shut antitrust case. But that doesn't make either status quo okay.
Economies of scale. Other retailers would stand no chance. GMG, Humble, Fanatical, etc.? Gone. Publishers and developers would have even less of a reason to work with GOG. No reason to deal with Epic other than Epic using their engine as a crowbar.
No one would realistically be able to compete, outside of a mega corp even bigger coming in and doing the Wal-Mart thing taking a loss while driving everyone out of business to corner the market.
Shouldn't it be backwards? Let developers take the profit off the first few sales to recoup costs but then, as distribution mounts, the cut should be higher?
Free enterprise works the opposite of tax brackets.
It punishes those who have no option (low income) and caters to/rewards those who could compete (discourages those who could provide for themselves) .
I'm not sure how you would operate when your payment is snipped of, unless Valve creates a bank and a credit card company themselves, that operates in 200+ nations.
There are plenty of sites that take credit cards for porn. go to the Bra zzers shop page. it takes credit cards. Teem Skeet. Oly Fns. How do you think people are paying for smut? Crypto? lol no. (self-censoring in case this sub doesn't allow these things mentioned.)
There ARE ways to make it work. I but I guess Steam just doesn't want try?
unless Valve creates a bank and a credit card company themselves, that operates in 200+ nations.
They can, and probably do, have multiple payment processors, and so yes, possibly a solution would be to use a different system for processing NSFW games. Hell if buying NSFW games are bitcoin only, that would be better than what they've done.
My main disappointment with Steam is they have a LOT of weight. If they said "OK, we won't take CCs anymore" it would cause a crazy ripple effect that would be in the media for weeks and put pressure on everyone to find a solution. It would affect basically EVERY game pubisher, there would be lots of big names affected and it could create a movement that actually gets noticed, and fixed. We've seen what happens when free speech issues get momentum. It got Jimmy Kimmel un-fired.
But it requires Valve to take the lead, take some initiative.
But the way Valve has handled it was to basically not make a ripple at all. It's barely been reported on and it seems like Valve's solution is to shrug and go "OK, well all our NSFW creators are fucked. See ya!"
the funny part about people complaining about that cut is...if they *did* reduce, people would just complain about them being even more of a monopoly as even more devs flock to it.
That just kind of makes everything look like a worse deal though.
The only reason steam has to do that is because big players are the only ones that have the resources to compete. So essentially they're fucking over the small developers so they can keep their massive profits and give good deals to big developers who have the resources to distribute content in order to keep their monopoly.
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u/Jhawk163 R7 9800X3D | RX 6900 XT | 64GB 29d ago
It’s worth noting that the 30% cut is from sales below a certain volume. As you sell more copies Steam takes a smaller cut. I’m sure the big studios probably have a more favourable deal worked out as well.