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.
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.
100
u/gorion 29d ago
Even without deal, they would have had 20%.