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.
I am not going to pretend to understand the economics involved but 30% is an absurd amount of money to charge someone to do nothing but provide a storefront to sell games. I’d wager Sweeney is correct that Valve makes more profits than the actual developers. You know, the people who do the actual work of creating and maintaining the game.
Valve is exploiting their market dominance to rake in absurd profits for what is in all likelihood, very little actual work.
Valve makes more money per employee than fucking Apple. If that’s not an indicator of giant profit margins, I don’t know what is.
And while they do use that money to improve the gaming industry, and they’re a relatively ethical company, that don’t make those profit margins any less ridiculous.
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 I’d argue that’s also exorbitant and that there are far more logistics and other costs involved.
Valheim and Palworld wouldn’t have been massive successes on store shelves.
They could have been significantly more successful if Valve charged 15%. And Valve would remain extremely profitable.
Also want to note that Sweeney would absolutely begin charging 30% if and when he could, but right now that’s literally all they have going for them.
To be fair, Steam provides a lot more than “just being a storefront”. There’s large feature set there in Steamworks which is ‘free’ for developers to use.
The game developers would probably spend more than 30% of revenue hosting their own game on their own store, so the value is there already.
It would be strange if Valve’s cut went up the more money your game made, but it would be better for independent developers.
That tells me you don’t understand what they offer or the value of it.
And if you think hosting a CDN across the world is cheap, you have a surprise coming. Ignoring the fact Steam has a large audience and hosting your own game would bring in a lot less revenue than you would through Steam (even with the 30% cut), it’s a lot of work to host and market a game online. If there’s updates, you have to alert people the game has been updated and direct them to download it again.
Valve Index was successful, Steam link was great, Steam Deck is great, the Steam controller was good in it’s own right and it’s trackpads are now one of the best features of the Deck. They can experiment with hardware because of the profits, they can afford for them to “flop”. Now Linux gaming is a lot better because of Proton too.
Not that I agree with the 30% cut in it’s entirety, I think they could subsidise more for small independent developers.
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.
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.
I am not going to pretend to understand the economics involved but 30% is an absurd amount of money to charge someone to do nothing but provide a storefront to sell games. I’d wager Sweeney is correct that Valve makes more profits than the actual developers. You know, the people who do the actual work of creating and maintaining the game.
Valve is exploiting their market dominance to rake in absurd profits for what is in all likelihood, very little actual work.
Valve makes more money per employee than fucking Apple. If that’s not an indicator of giant profit margins, I don’t know what is.
And while they do use that money to improve the gaming industry, and they’re a relatively ethical company, that don’t make those profit margins any less ridiculous.
And I’d argue that’s also exorbitant and that there are far more logistics and other costs involved.
They could have been significantly more successful if Valve charged 15%. And Valve would remain extremely profitable.
Also want to note that Sweeney would absolutely begin charging 30% if and when he could, but right now that’s literally all they have going for them.
To be fair, Steam provides a lot more than “just being a storefront”. There’s large feature set there in Steamworks which is ‘free’ for developers to use.
The game developers would probably spend more than 30% of revenue hosting their own game on their own store, so the value is there already.
It would be strange if Valve’s cut went up the more money your game made, but it would be better for independent developers.
Meh. I wouldn’t call it “a lot”. And most of the hardware they’ve made has been a huge flop, SD being the (amazing) exception.
…what? How do you figure that?
That tells me you don’t understand what they offer or the value of it.
And if you think hosting a CDN across the world is cheap, you have a surprise coming. Ignoring the fact Steam has a large audience and hosting your own game would bring in a lot less revenue than you would through Steam (even with the 30% cut), it’s a lot of work to host and market a game online. If there’s updates, you have to alert people the game has been updated and direct them to download it again.
Valve Index was successful, Steam link was great, Steam Deck is great, the Steam controller was good in it’s own right and it’s trackpads are now one of the best features of the Deck. They can experiment with hardware because of the profits, they can afford for them to “flop”. Now Linux gaming is a lot better because of Proton too.
Not that I agree with the 30% cut in it’s entirety, I think they could subsidise more for small independent developers.
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.