30% is the industry standard across the board, with the exception of Epic which takes 12%. However, Epic has already shown that it’s ready to dump loads of money into store exclusivity deals and tons of free games, so I will argue it’s for the sake of growing the number of users and developers using their platform.
But do they, or any other competitor or similar store, offer the same functionality as Steam? rtxn already mentioned some. And there’s more. And then there’s the fact that Valve is using all that money not only to stuff the pockets of alread rich people (not that Gabe isn’t a multi-millionaire if not billionaire, idk), but actually puts it back into the industry: Their own store, Linux/Proton (you may not care, but Microsoft becoming a monopoly in PC gaming is no good), and hardware (with their Steam Deck handheld, and VR stuffs).
Steam might be the biggest player when it comes to storefronts, but it’s because they’ve actually earned it. And they’re not actively preventing other competitors from entering the scene (other than existing). In fact, they keep trying, and keep failing, and then going back to Steam.
I’m not opposed to more money going to developers, but let’s not single out Steam, who (perhaps besides GOG? I am not familiar enough with it) is doing the most for users and develpers.
Epic is in stage 1 of enshittification. They will offer a great deal (at their economic expense) to capture users and providers.
It isn’t enshittification because they never had a high-quality product to offer.
Can’t have enshitification if your product was shit to begin with
That’s just called capitalism. And yes, it makes everything shit.
I wonder who are the people buying games from the epic game store over Steam or gog.
I’ve gotten a ton of free games on epic but I’m pretty sure I’ve yet to buy a game on there.
Same! I’ll take the free games. But there is no point in buying from them until their client has feature parity with Steam and has given back the way Steam has.
Until then, it’s just a bad value.
The EU has a term for what steam is: a gatekeeper. Sure our current overlord is mostly benign, but at the end of the day that doesn’t mean they should be allowed free reign.
“On 6 September 2023 the European Commission designated for the first time six gatekeepers - Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft. In total, 22 core platform services provided by those gatekeepers have been designated.”
That’s a direct quote from their website. Perhaps you can elaborate on what specifically makes Valve a gatekeeper in this space, and why they have not been labeled one under EU law by the Digital Markets Act and those who enforce it?
I’m especially curious about how you came to this conclusion. I’m also curious about the do’s and don’t section of this article and what you might feel Valve has fallen afoul of as their obligations to the public and their competitors under this law.
Gatekeepers are large digital platforms providing any of a pre-defined set of digital services (‘core platform services’), such as online search engines, app stores, and messenger services. These companies have: - a strong economic position, significant impact on the internal market and are active in multiple EU countries; - a strong intermediation position, meaning that they link a large user base to a large number of businesses; - an entrenched and durable position in the market, meaning that their position has been stable over time.The only reason steam evaded the label is that they’re too small and the EU has bigger fish to fry atm.
I read the article. You don’t expect me to just take the quote at face value? You asserted that they fall into this category. So show us your work. How and why? A quote is not sufficient.
They clearly fall into all 3 of these requirements. The only requirement that falls somewhat short is their size, and given the current growth of the pc market and their entrenched position, either they’ll hit it naturally or the EU will widen the net first.
They don’t. Look at the first paragraph you quoted. “Significant impact on internal market” what significant impact does Valve exert on the internal gaming market? Specifically, what do they do that Nintendo, or Epic or GOG don’t do that exerts pressure on the gaming platform market?
Even if they were to meet those requirements and actually be a gatekeeper in the space, you still haven’t answered the second question. Look at the do’s and don’t’s. What don’t’s are they actively using to hurt other platforms in the space? What part of their business practices specifically do you feel falls afoul of the Digital Markets Act?
Look at the first paragraph you quoted. “Significant impact on internal market” what significant impact does Valve exert on the internal gaming market?
Their very existence is the impact, they have cornered the pc market and have an entrenched position as an intermediary between every game publisher and player.
Look at the do’s and don’t’s. What don’t’s are they actively using to hurt other platforms in the space? What part of their business practices specifically do you feel falls afoul of the Digital Markets Act?
Their current practices are mostly fine, although i’m sure a couple of these could worked on further for valve. The tricky part is ensuring that they toe the line.
Your quote contradicts your claim. Steam is not a platform, it’s just a store. The platform is Windows, Mac, or Linux.
No. Platforms as used here by the EU is just an intermediary between the business and the client. It has nothing to do with the OS. If you want a counter example look at meta and tiktok which are designated gatekeepers.
And they’re not actively preventing other competitors from entering the scene
Doesn’t Steam also mandate that a game on Steam that’s also on other platforms MUST have the lowest price on Steam? So if a game goes on sale on another store, the Steam version must also match that sale within a given time period.
That’s a pretty big road block, especially if a developer might be willing to sell for a lower price on another storefront that takes another cut.
THAT is actively blocking competition.
That requirement only exists when you also offer a Steam key for the game that’s being sold. So Valve is actually the good guy here: You can sell on another store, where Steam doesn’t get any money, and give the user a Steam key, provided by Steam for free, and the only thing they ask is to match the price on Steam.
Don’t offer a Steam key, and you can pick any price.
That is my understanding of the issue.
There is a claim by some developers that Valve was pressuring them behind the scenes (“don’t offer your game for cheaper elsewhere or else we’ll take it down from our store”) a while ago, but I’ve never seen appropriate proof of it, and that was part of (an earlier?) lawsuit.
They absolutely pressure developers to not sell cheaper elsewhere, even without a Steam key.
http://blog.wolfire.com/2021/05/Regarding-the-Valve-class-action
Steam might be the best of the gatekeepers, but they’re still anticompetitive.
I’ve looked into Wolfire’s claims multiple times in the past, but it was never confirmed elsewhere, so I don’t know what to think. Maybe this was a thing Valve did in the past (in which case, yes, boo!), but they couldn’t get away with it anymore, with the volume of developers that are now on their platform.
We should regularly be seeing lower All-Time-Lows for most multi-platform games on non-Steam platforms then, right?
I don’t think we do. Why not?
Because that’s not beneficial for companies. They want to make (more) money.
The only option most developers and publishers would have is to move to another store, where the cut is usually the same, with the exception of Epic Games Store. And as pointed out elsewhere, setting up and managing your own store ends up being more expensive than a 30% cut. And then you still don’t have the same features as Steam.
setting up and managing your own store ends up being more expensive than a 30% cut
No, it absolutely does not. But if you’re not on Steam, your indie game doesn’t sell.
As a counter example, Vintage Story seems to be doing okay regardless.
They delibarately decided to not be on Steam.
edit 2: They do run their own store, but it’s a bit janky, has less payment options if I recall, and no regional pricing.
edit: Besides, one of the reasons indies like to be on Steam is because Steam basically does free advertising for you, with Discovery Queue and just generally pushing games that do well to more people (beneficial for Steam also, of course). But that’s a service that’s paid for by that 30% cut (among other things).
Because that’s not beneficial for companies. They want to make (more) money.
If having a lower price means you make more sales, then yes, it definitely can be beneficial for companies.
If you want to make $40 per copy, you could sell for $60 on Steam, or about $47.00 on Epic.
Being on sale for $47 would “unlock” more customers than you’d get if your game was only available for $60 everywhere. Some customers won’t ever buy the game at $60, but they would at $47, and the company makes the same amount of money.
That is beneficial for companies.
But you can sell for 47 on epic. You just cannot sell for 47 on epic giving a key that redeems on steam.
Exactly; this whole price restriction on Steam is for games that will be hosted and downloaded from Steam.
It makes no sense for Steam to allow developers to sell Steam keys for cheaper via other stores when Steam has to then shoulder all the bandwidth and Remote Play/etc.
As long as you never want your $60 game featured on Steam, you can absolutely do that.
Which do you think is worth more?
Why are you making it my responsibility to explain why companies are not passing on their savings to consumers?
As a bystander I appreciate you. I learned some things I didn’t know.
Or they could sell on Epic for $60 and just pocket more per sale because most players are used to new games being $60 anyway.
Besides, Steam itself also unlocks more customers even at same or higher prices because it can be a pain to get EGS games working on Linux sometimes, whereas Steam’s seamless. Maybe we’re a non-existent market force, but personally I’ve been maining Linux for my gaming PC for 4 years and now about 2 years ago I deleted the Windows partition I’d only kept around because I had Forza on the Microsoft store rather than Steam.
Or they could sell on Epic for $60 and just pocket more per sale because most players are used to new games being $60 anyway.
For AAA publishers, definitely. For indie developers or anyone who’d be wanting to try to bring customers to Epic, that wouldn’t be the ideal long-term strategy.
Why should we see that?
How much income per sale a seller is willing to accept is a big part of the equation that goes into pricing
And? If they sell at the same price as Steam but with the store taking a smaller cut they’ll make more money per sale.
A lower price may attract more buyers, leading to more money overall (rather than only seeking to maximize each individual sale)
They don’t and it would be faster to fact check yourself than spreading this misinformation further.
The other comment points out that it’s only a case of selling steam keys where steam must have the lowest price.
I released a game a while back and while reading the terms it sounded like I couldn’t link my Steam store page to another storefront where the game was available cheaper. Which, honestly, also kind of fair.
But again, I think that’s really only if you’re selling steam keys. If you sold the game DRM-free on your own website, I can’t imagine they’d take down your company website.
If you link to an Itch page or something similar that might be a thornier issue because they’re primarily a storefront.
I’m of the opinion that my game costs X unless it’s discounted to Y. I don’t see the appeal to the end user of having a dozen different prices on a dozen different storefronts.
I could see a situation where a developer wants to always earn, say, $10 from their game. So on Steam it might sell for $13, on another platform it might be $11 to show the difference in platform fees. But I wouldn’t do that because it’s putting me before my players, and that’s not why I make games.
There are some open source games that are purchasable on Steam but which are freely available elsewhere.
I could see a situation where a developer wants to always earn, say, $10 from their game. So on Steam it might sell for $13, on another platform it might be $11 to show the difference in platform fees.
Yeah, this is the kind of thing I was picturing.
I’ve looked into it and this actually does happen in some other regions’ pricing! But not many people seem to be talking about it happening in USD/CAD, at least at a glance.
I’m still curious as to why that difference would be.
Thank you for sharing your experience!
Steam singlehandedly stopped piracy overnight for me.
Developers were getting $0 from me before steam, and thousands of $$$ from me after steam.
The 30% cut is well worth it for developers, plus all the other services steam provides. Kids have no idea how buying, installing, modding, patching games used to be like.
You cant compare this to the apple app store
Name another platform that has gone 20 years without completely enshittifying itself.
We can start shitting on steam when they turn evil
Name another platform that has gone 20 years without completely enshittifying itself.
Wik*pedia?
I mean a for-profit corporation owned by an ex-microsoft employee…
Everything about that screams enshittification, but they’ve done a pretty good job to be relatively consumer friendly.
Not being beholden to share holders demanding ever increasing growth figures goes a long way.
But 30% is still a figure for 2004 not 2024. Maybe scale it up to 30% based on game size. I don’t give a fuck about Ubisoft and Activision, but give smaller devs a break.
Sure, i’m not against developers keeping more of their own money, i’m not even against valve getting sued…
What i am against is this blind hate of every corporation. Even the ones like valve who are doing some good things. (bUt tHeY’Re nOt dOInG goOd oUT oF tHe gOOdNeSs of THeiR oWn hEaRts! It’S aLL ABouT ProFiT$$$$!!!)
I get it, capitalism sucks, corporations suck, profits suck… We are on lemmy after all
But until you throw out your computer, your phone, disconnect yourself from the internet, and move into the woods… You live, breathe, and contribute to a capitalist society, so stop letting perfect be the enemy of good and shitting on every corporation, even the “good guys”. (I dont mean YOU… I just mean the fediverse)
This is just lesser-evilism. Though I do agree that Valve is a lesser evil than say Microsoft or Apple.
Steam singlehandedly stopped piracy overnight for me.
This is similar to what Netflix did to their part of the industry for a time. Everyone I knew who pirated just got a Netflix subscription. Fast forward to now and the movie industry is manning the cannons to try and take on the pirates instead of realising it was content fracturing and profiteering that brought the pirates back.
You cant compare this to the apple app store
True. Almost none of the iOS games I bought run anymore. It is why I stopped buying apps, specifically games, on iOS years ago. But others did a good job maintaining backwards compatibility whether through hardware or software.
That’s like saying “the landlord fixing my plumbing, so I’m thankful he’s charging me so much in rent.” Fuck no. I like Steam and what they’ve done, but I’d rather more money go to the people actually creating the content. Steam is useful, but they aren’t doing 30% of the work of game development, so they shouldn’t get 30% of the cut.
They’re doing 100% of the distribution though. And some of the marketing, when they promote a trending game or feature one in a collection.
I don’t know if a 30% cut is fair, but from my perspective, it seems to be working.
Sure, it seems to be working. That doesn’t mean developers should be complacent. You shouldn’t settle with an owner doing something that’s in their best interest but charging more for it. Stopping piracy and promoting games gets Valve more money. They aren’t doing it out of kindness. Just as they’re doing what’s in their best interest, devs should be too. They should be trying to get that 30% knocked down.
Valve is doing a lot of good stuff right now, but accepting them as some kind of hero is how you get fucked over. Don’t be complacent. They’re a capitalist company trying to make as much money as they can. As long as their goals align with the consumer it feels great, but don’t think it always will.
They’re a capitalist company trying to make as much money as they can.
Unlike publicly traded companies, Valve is not beholden to shareholders, so they, unlike most others, are in a unique position to not JUST maximize profits. I think it’s okay to point at Valve as an example for other companies to be more like, because most are still worse. But obviously we can always strive for better, as well.
(Also, out of curiosity: Under a capitalist system, can you have anything BUT a capitalist company?)
This is, at least in part, the topic of the book Capitalist Realism – basically the Reagan-Thatcherite thinking that no other system could exist https://archive.org/details/capitalist-realism-is-there-no-alternative 10 min vid using fallout to explain that
Now, Valve could today make the company entirely a worker-owned cooperative, with sociocratic decision making. They could even extend these to consumers, a gaming collective. That’d still participate in capitalism, but it would do a lot of good systemically, compared to other options.
Yes, they’re privately traded, so all the profit goes to the owners. I don’t know why that matters. They’re still trying to maximize profit, which is at the expense of the consumer.
(Also, out of curiosity: Under a capitalist system, can you have anything BUT a capitalist company?)
You could have a worker owned collective or many other things. They’d still be capitalist under capitalism, yeah. It wouldn’t be beholden to the ideals of capitalist individualism though.
Regardless, the point was that they aren’t special. You shouldn’t hold them above other companies. They’re going to exploit you and developers. They aren’t working for you.
It matters because they are not forced by law to maximize profit. They can and do make decisions that are good for the future health of the company, such as making sure developers and customers are happy, and unlike other companies they put that 30% cut toward at least some things.
Regarding worker coöps, I wanted to respond to the other commenter and didn’t know how to phrase it. I’m currently leaning towards describing myself as an anarcho-communist, though I’m not well-read at all. However I question a coöp could grow to a size comparable to Valve. From some things I’ve read about the company, their internal structure might not even be THAT far off from that, allowing employees to choose what to work on and such, even if it’s far from ideal.
Finally, Valve has done much more than any other company considering they push gaming on Linux. Also their handheld is dope.
It’s a myth that publicly traded companies must maximize profits.
For now, you (and I) like the product, but it won’t last forever. The developers should fight as much as possible to do what’s best for them to allow them to invest in themselves just as you praise Valve for doing. They are providing more than 70% of the labor. If Valve wasn’t making money off their labor they wouldn’t even have a product to sell.
I’d also consider myself somewhere in the anarchist side.
Publix is a worker-owned company. They operate nationally and are doing very well for themselves. It can be done just fine.
I have said multiple times in this thread that I appreciate what Valve has created. I don’t deny that. However, just as my landlord fixing my plumbing, I recognize that they aren’t doing it out of a desire to help me. They’re doing it to help themselves. They’ve made a very good product, so good that people rush to defend them from developers who want to be exploited less. This is to dominate the market and increase sales though, which they get 30% of. They done a lot for Linux, but they did so to make a product using Linux that they sell, and also allows them to sell more games to Linux users. It’s all self-serving. They aren’t doing it out of a desire to help us.
I find it frustrating people can’t separate themselves from liking a product and criticizing the company that makes it. You don’t have to defend them just because they make something you enjoy. In fact I’d say it’s important not to. If they know their users are going to fight any criticism, they know they can exploit you more and you’ll get a worse product that asks even more from you.
Then stop complaining and go buy the game directly off the developer’s website. Many large publishers have their own storefront. Or you can tell your favourite Indie dev that they can set up a virtual storefront (with diacoverability so users find their game), distribution service with CDNs, support forums, online user reviews, customer support, and who knows what else for their own game. If this sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is. Alternatively, they are allowed to pay someone in the form of profit sharing for all of this if they want to. But no one is forcing you to use Steam.
It just seams the majority of pc gamers find the service useful, so they tend to buy the games there.
“There’s a systemic issue harming developers.”
“Stop complaining, just don’t engage.”
How does that help with the systemic issue? Imagine saying “just down own slaves if you don’t like slavery.” Bad argument, right?
It just seams the majority of pc gamers find the service useful, so they tend to buy the games there.
And they still would if the cut was 20%. I’m not sure what your argument is except that developers aren’t allowed to fight to benefit themselves and we should all bow down to Valve because they’re making a good product (for now). Microsoft once made a good product. They used their market dominance to shove Internet Explorer onto all devices. They also still are the only option provided if buying a computer. Market dominance is always a bad thing. It’s only a matter of when.
I like the Steam platform. I have no issues with it. As a Linux user, I really respect what Valve has done for Linux compatibility. (Although, again, they did this for their own benefit, not out of good will.) I choose to use it because I like what it provides. This doesn’t mean I think we shouldn’t point out flaws or fight for better outcomes for those on the platform, like you seem to. I want it to continue to be a better platform, not to line the pockets of people at Valve.
It’s really dumb. So much in this site is anti-corporation or anti-owner-class, but if you dare to even say developers should fight for better compensation of Steam you get downvoted. It’s the most bootlicker mentality. Steam isn’t trying to help you. They’re trying to make as much money as possible. That is all. They make stupid amounts of profit. They don’t need (or deserve based on percentage of labor done) 30%.
What systemic issue? If you as a player don’t like steam, you can just not use it. It’s not like apple where the hardware is locked to a single storefront. Even the steam deck is open for people to get games from anywhere.
Developers are allowed to do whatever they like too, including not putting their games on steam as a form of protest. No one will stop you. They can even sell their games on multiple platforms and reduce the price where the storefront cut is smaller. The only thing they are not allowed to do is sell steam keys on their own store below the price on steam, which is completely understandable. The fact that they are allowed to sell keys directly (AFAIK for no cost) is already a huge boon.
The one’s actually behaving in anticompetetive behaviour is Epic with paying devs for exclusivity to their store. This is forcing you to use the platform to play certain games without having any other options. Of course the devs taking the deal are also complicit but that is somewhat more understandable, being a gamedev is difficult these days.
The difference is obvious,
you don’t have to be a genius to see it. Epic is the plague of modern capitalism and greed, where the product is kept afloat by an unsustainable inflow of investor money. The service is ready to enshittify the second the amount of users crosses a certain threshold. Then they will continue to fight with dirty tactics to keep users locked in for as long as they can. How long do you think giving away free games weekly to anyone can last. (Aswer: as long as the fortnite money is coming in)Steam is an old type of corporation (for now anyway). They focus on making a good product for a “fair” price. Fair as in this is what makes the platform sustainable. If they were to charge exorbitant prices, there would be a huge developer exodus. But there isn’t. Most devs seem to have come to a conclusion that paying this optional fee is worth it for that value that steam provides. This money allows them to reinvest in the platform to make upgrades, and yes, make profit too. What other reason would they go through all this trouble for?
Steam is also a privately held company, meaning they are not beholden to the short term vision of investors’ pump and dump schemes. But to reiterate, literally no one is forcing you to use steam.These days you have to capture a large user base with unsustainable prices/practices and then extract every cent for infinite growth. This is not just bad for users in the long term but also means setting up a “normal” company offering a good product at a “fair” price is impossible because everyone is buying the cheap unsustainable products essentially below cost.
I miss the times when a company would make a good product at a fair price and that would be enough.
Edit: that was unnecessarily harsh. I can see you want positive change but unless someone opens a FOSS storefront and pays for the work/distribution, steam is the best we have for now (as gamers). And reducing costs by ~10-20% is not going to make it better for us long term.
I’d rather more money go to the people actually creating the content
This was the argument when EGS came, and it’s been known for a long time that for the most part devs don’t see a cent from that extra cut, the publishers keep it. Unless they self-publish, of course.
That would depend on the contract they signed with their publisher. Sure, some contracts may be like you said, but that can be taken up with them. That argument (which you provided without context) is just you trying to provide cover for marketplaces taking a larger cut and it’s bullshit.
It’s not a larger cut, it’s the industry-standard cut.
The “industry standard” is made up and can change. There isn’t some dictated industry standard.
Valve’s role is more that of a custodian I’d say. And one that is really competent.
The 30% cut is well worth it for developers, plus all the other services steam provides. Kids have no idea how buying, installing, modding, patching games used to be like.
You cant compare this to the apple app store
As a mobile app developer who has been in the business since before the iPhone was even announced, this is hilarious.
No, you can’t compare it to the App Store. With the Apple App Store you get so much more for that 30% cut than you get with Steam, it’s not even close. You kids have no idea how bad it was in the before times.
Can I ask what you get? I’d like to understand what steam provides for a 30% cut vs what app stores like Google or Apple provide and what you value more from one vs the other.
Stockholm syndrome, it sounds like.
Well, a complete development toolchain for example. Does Steam provide an IDE, compiler, debugging tools, etc? No. You got to license that shit from someone else. Does Steam provide developer support for any of the OSes their client runs on? No they don’t. If I’ve got a question about Windows internals, I have to pay Microsoft for help. Then there’s lots of services my apps can use for free, like the push notifications service.
People like to shit on Xcode, but they likely didn’t do any mobile development before the App Store was a thing. I’m talking 2005-2007 era. Development tools for S60, J2ME and BlackBerry were so bad, it was like they were built by someone who hates developers. The software was actively developer-hostile.
You want on-device debugging? Haha, why don’t you go fuck yourself instead? Oh no, I need to sign my iOS app. which takes all of 1 second and is done locally. With BlackBerry your app would be split into dozens of small chunks, and each chunk would need 3 different signatures to be able to access all APIs. Of course this signing wasn’t done locally, no it was done on one of BlackBerry’s servers which was slow as molasses, and each signature, which any non trivial app would easily need 100+, was requested separately. Of course you needed to do this every time you wanted to run your app on a device. To add insult to injury, the signing server was down all the time, to the point that someone made a website (something like ‘isthesigningserverdown.com’) to easily check its status.
Of course, that was if you were lucky and even got access to the signing server. You’re not a Fortune 500 company and want access to BB api’s that require signing? Why not go fuck yourself instead?
Of course you’re thinking, if testing on device is so painful, I’ll just test in a device simulator, right. Hahahaha, no. Because fuck you.
Also, all phones were super buggy to the point that our codebase was full of device-specific workarounds. We actually had a kind of database that kept track of which specific bugs were present in which device that was used in combination with a pre-processor to build a device-specific version of our apps. We didn’t upload 1 build to an app store, we built 200+ versions of our apps (which took hours btw). We didn’t have to buy a few ‘expensive’ iPhones to test on, no we literally bought every single phone that had any significant market share. We literally had to test our apps on hundreds of phones. We’d buy new phones every week. We had an entire team of people who did nothing all day but test our apps on different phones.
Also, since there was no app store we had to host the apps ourselves, that meant we had to buy and maintain our own servers (including writing all the server code) just to let users download the apps. There was no app store to handle payments, payment was usually done through reverse-billing SMS (a.k.a. premium SMS). You text a keyword to a shortcode and you’d get an SMS with the install link. We had to write and maintain the code to handle that. We had to pay to receive the SMS. Then the mobile operator took a 70% cut. Not for any kind of app store, there wasn’t anything like that. Not for hosting the app. Not for providing development tools. No, just for sending the premium text message with the install link.
So when Apple announced the app store. With good development tools. With them handling payments. With them handling the download. With an actual good OS that wasn’t buggy as fuck and actually got updates. And they only took a 30% cut? You bet everyone in the mobile app industry was jumping for joy.
You are giving props to the Apple store (among others) for a couple of things here 1. Good Development Tools. 2. Handling payments. 3. Handling downloads. 4. A good OS.
So okay. Let’s break this down a bit. Apple is a closed system. It provides a lot of the tools you reference because you literally cannot get those tools anywhere else and meet the standards required to publish anything to their store. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it is important context in comparing steam to Apple and their ecosystem.
I’m also not sure what debugging tools you’d expect to get from Valve in regards to Microsoft as a platform. You have to pay Microsoft for help because they’re the ones with the source code and other system elements. Steam doesn’t have control over those. The same goes for Apple. So for the record I don’t know that this is relevant unless you’re specially comparing their steam OS and what it should provide as a platform for designing games for steam OS and working within the steam ecosystem with that of other players like Microsoft, Apple, and Google.
Steam handles payments and even refunds.
Steam handles downloads.
My understanding and use case is that steam OS is pretty decent as far as gaming OS’s are concerned and I haven’t seen them catch a whole lot of flak for that. However I actually don’t know and can’t speak to this but would be happy to have you or others elaborate on the experience of developing for steam OS specially or just Linux. I’m sure it has its own set of pros and cons.
Followup question. Do you receive any of this stuff from Nintendo? Sony/PlayStation? They also take an 30% cut. They also have closed ecosystems as far as development. They also appear to handle payments, and downloads. I know that devkits have historically been exhorbitantly expensive but don’t know what the barrier to entry is now or how that compares.
Borg is arguing in bad faith, don’t give him more attention.
A good part of what the said about Apple is not even true, and nothing he said has anything to do with Steam vs Apple Store.
From the first line, recently Apple released an OS update that broke some software from the Apple Store, like MS Office. They made people call the support from the app developers, Apple did not help anyone with that.
Borg went on an unhinged rant about how bad they are at deploying software to specific hardware, and how little they know about the industry. Completely unrelated to what you are asking.
It is not worth spending time, please don’t feed the troll.
If you want to talk seriously about the industry, there are better places to do it.
I mean. On the one hand you may have a point. But I wouldn’t have learned any of what I have learned in this thread by not engaging with the people making comments here. I’m not sure that Borg intends to be a troll. The rant was unhinged but Borg is correct in that Apple and their app ecosystem aren’t comparable to Steam and their storefront. They obviously have some feelings about development for app stores vs development for steam and obviously this wasn’t the place to do it, but I’m not sure they were intending to be a troll.
Some people in this thread are obviously laboring under some pretty interesting and unfounded assumptions. We can’t understand how they came to such conclusions without interacting with them. Some of these discussions may be worth it. Others may not.
SteamOS can really only be a good thing for devs, as I understand it. The steam deck gives them fairly limited hardware to target for development if they’re inclined to do so, and Valve’s effort with Proton have done wonders for general Linux compatibility, even in the absence of a native Linux version of their games. That’s opened up a sizable market for them that was previously unavailable.
So for the record I don’t know that this is relevant
My point was that you can’t really compare them because Steam provides a lot less value than Apple to developers, yet they still take a 30% cut. With Apple you get a lot more for your 30% than you do at Valve.
Followup question. Do you receive any of this stuff from Nintendo? Sony/PlayStation? They also take an 30% cut.
I don’t develop for consoles but a quick Google search shows that PlayStation provides support and even free development kits (special console hardware for development) to indie developers. They all obviously provide SDKs as they are the only ones who can.
Steam is great, but it’s just a storefront. Steam doesn’t get involved until your game is done and ready for sale. This is very different from Apple/Google/Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo who are much more involved in the entire development process than Steam.
I guess I’m trying to compare the bits and pieces that are the same across these platforms and that’s why I was wondering about developing for things like the steam deck. I agree that providing a development space and tools for development when you are the entity providing the hardware is different than acting as a management and aggregation tool with appropriate included services. I’m still reading this https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/home
And seeing if I can find answers to some of the questions I have about what services they do provide on the development side for the hardware they do sell.
Steam has multiple dev kits and various other tools available for free. Steam also has enormous resources available for after you publish that the companies you list do not have.
Really? Never heard of it. How does it compare to e.g. Visual Studio, XCode, Android Studio and the like?
As a developer who has done mobile development, I agree Xcode is solid. Still doesn’t excuse Apple for killing backwards compatibility and losing access to iOS games that aren’t even 10 years old.
The key feature of Steam to me is that it is better at game preservation.
This seems like such a nothing case. Steam is optional. It’s optional for publishers to use, it’s optional for users to install. Steam provides many many benefits for even free games or games not purchased on the Steam store.
Any publisher can publish their game on their own site, on other stores, on physical media. Even though Steam is dominant, you can buy games somewhere else as easily as you can download and install Steam itself.
I hope this case gets thrown out.
You can also use steam as a distribution platform completely free of the 30% cut by selling steam keys through your own site. Steam specifically gives developers unlimited free steam keys and games no cut from the sale of said keys. And it’s not even a work around, it is intentional.
Indeed, the only limitation is to not sell the keys for less than Steam sell them for.
Technically, you can sell Steam Keys for less. But if you sell Steam Keys somewhere else for cheaper, you need to plan giving Steam Customers the same opportunity at some point.
Steam Key Rules and Guidelines https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
I bought Steam Keys for cheaper in different stores, like Humble Bundle. I also got Steam Keys for free from devs/publisher (events, giveaway, press).
And If you don’t mind Steam Keys, you can buy games from GOG or Epic and the price is not always the same as Steam.
You can compare prices in “is there any deal”, they only allow authorized vendors. https://isthereanydeal.com/game/shadows-of-doubt/info/ You can see how the base price of Steam Keys are very similar, but the discount changes from vendors.
Technically, you can sell Steam Keys for less. But if you sell Steam Keys somewhere else for cheaper, you need to plan giving Steam Customers the same opportunity at some point.
True, but I would consider that as technically the same as my statement.
I agree, and I am glad we are on the same page.
I just think it is important to highlight missing key-points, that people often misunderstand and can misconstrue, like the devs and lawyers from the now class action from the post. So it is important to clarify to prevent further misinformation.
- Steam does not care how much you sell keys for different platforms(e.g. GOG, Epic), just Steam Keys (i.e. keys for the Steam platform).
- And when you sell Steam Keys in different stores, you need to give Steam Store Customers comparable, but not necessarily at the same time or same price.
If you check the historical low on “is there any deal”, often stores have games with historical low lower than Steam’s historical low. From what I saw, the prices are usually around 10%~12% lower.
How the fuck is it optional? You mean like in the sense I don’t need games to live, I assume? Because it’s not optional otherwise.
It’s optional for publisher to put their games on Steam. Games like Starsector seem to do ok not on Steam. Helps if the game is really good.
Put down the games and pick up a reading comprehension lesson
I don’t have a problem with Steam but if they lose, games can get cheaper, and/or game development becomes more lucrative. You can’t lose by looking into the case and not throwing it out.
You can look at literally any other storefront that takes 10% less than Valve does with Steam and see they’re not 10% cheaper. Which is also one of many ways you can tell this case is bullshit.
That’s why I added the other possibility of game development getting more lucrative. Also, with games, people should really be waiting on a discount. And how often a discount will be offered depends on multiple factors like how big the cut of the storefront is.
When Ubisoft left steam and created their own store front their games not only didn’t get cheaper but they also laid a bunch of their staff off. Did they hire bigger better talent? No. They laid off 1700 people when they were making record profits.
What you’re saying might be true potentially of indie developers but in the event that they could hire more staff/talent. But indie games aren’t expensive for the most part both because of the cost to make their games and subsequent game quality, and because they have less staff to pay and investors to please. It’s like you have no idea at all how this industry works and you’ve got a layman’s understanding of economics from the 1920’s.
Ubisoft can fuck itself. There are so many possibilities for indie devs. There are still passionate developers out there.
That’s naive. People already pay 80$-90$, publishers will pocket the cut and keep the price the same.
There are people who pay full price for games, yes. I do too for games I really love, but I wait for discounts. I’ve also profited from buying MSFT and SNE shares during console releases.
games can get cheaper,
Hahahahahahahahaha
Not all developers are gigantic and beholden to shareholders.
Devs don’t complain about the cut anyways. Publishers do because they’re the one affected the most by the cut.
Sure they do. There are solo developers out there.
Yes but no solo developer with a single brain cell is complaining about steam taking 30% of the cut because they know that the value steam offers them is way less than that 30% cut.
That doesn’t say anything. They’re not complaining, but it doesn’t mean they won’t benefit from Steam taking a smaller cut.
What substantiates the claim that games will become cheaper? We already know games are one of the few commodities that are getting cheaper over time when taking inflation into account. I’ve seen this claim everywhere but I don’t understand what makes people think it’s true and nobody has been able to show me the logic or reasoning of it. Also, you claim that game development becomes more lucrative. It only becomes lucrative at all with a return on investment which requires that a developer be able to afford to make the game, market it, advertise it, and sell it to a wide audience all while handling the financial side of things (licensing agreements, handling the financial details of consumers in a secure fashion, providing refunds within the constraints of laws worldwide, etc).
These cases and the litigation process also cost money. You absolutely can lose by looking into it.
What substantiates the claim that games will be cheaper? You’re having to pay less money to Steam? Games go on discount all the time, and with less entities to pay, developers can afford to discount their games more often, or pay more talented developers.
I want you to draw me a line to connect the dots between some assumptions I’m seeing here.
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Valve lessening the percentage of a developers profit per unit from 30% to 25 or 15 % would make the developer put the game on sale more often or make the developer pass on those savings to you the consumer by lowering the price.
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That Steam doing so would somehow affect the price elsewhere (consoles, online retailers like Amazon, other online store fronts, physical brick and mortar stores).
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If Valve were not in the picture to take this cut (and to provide the services they provide) the developer would not otherwise have to provide such services for themselves (point of sale transactions and security, the production and distribution of product keys or physical media, services to market the game or product in question etc).
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That the 30% cut is strictly profit for Valve and they offer nothing for that cut.
Just because Valve is charging less doesn’t mean that that cost savings will be passed on to the consumer. We’re living in a time where companies have record price increases and are seeing record sales numbers and profits that have eclipsed inflation meanwhile gaming prices are actually on a continual downtrend as far as value for money and aren’t rising with inflation at all and pretty much never have been.
If what you’re supposing is true then games sold on Epic’s game store would be cheaper. They aren’t. Humble Bundle only charges a 25% cut of developer profits for a game. There are obviously some games available on both those store fronts. Point me to one of those and show me definitively that this has happened. That the developer of that game used that 5% savings with Humble Bundle to hire better talent to develop their game, or discount their games more often.
Simple economics says that the more plentiful a thing is, the more likely it is to be cheaper. By that metric we might extrapolate that games would be cheaper the more readily available they can be made (for instance not having to publish a game on physical media making game distribution cheaper and easier). We have not really historically seen that.
We might be able to conclude that it is a factor in why game pricing has stayed the same (meaning that games haven’t much gone above being $60 since the 80’s and so when taking into account inflation they are in fact cheaper). But that’s only one singular factor and there’s probably tens or hundreds of other factors in the mix.
Simple economics also says that there is a point where when something is in demand it will be more expensive. Because demand for it will drive up what people are willing to pay. In this instance the less competition there is, the worse prices get. If Epic and Humble Bundle didn’t have to compete with steam, would the cut they take decrease or increase?
Without steam enacting certain sales seasonally or during certain holidays, would those other storefronts have more sales or less sales? If steam didn’t exist would gaming storefronts treat consumers better or worse?
Too long, didn’t read. Cost savings probably won’t go to consumers, everything may go to the executives. But not all companies are beholden to shareholders. Smaller devs do offer games on discount more often. There are still passionate developers/non-managers out there that could take benefit.
Don’t be lazy. You only needed to read the 4 annotated summations of your points and back them up in a comment. If you can’t even do that I guess suffer in ignorance.
Think of it like the opposite of tariffs…
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I’m happy to pay a premium for convenience. Steam is a great product that saves me from having 20 different store-fronts clogging up my computer, most of which wouldn’t have proper Linux support. If developers don’t like Steam’s terms of use then don’t use it, and best of luck selling your game that nobody ever sees.
“I love this DRM monopoly. It is my friend and it will never harm me ❤️”
Steam isn’t adding in the DRM. Stop buying games with DRM and you won’t have this problem.
When was the last time since you actually saw something get cheaper?
Haha not while I’ve been alive! Capitalism baby. 🫠
Yes because Steam is not part of capitalism. We all know if Ten Cent were the ones getting sued, we’d be all over it.
What about now with the Black Friday discounts? Also, I indicated two possibilities: games getting cheaper or game development getting more lucrative. More money means the gaming industry getting software dev talents.
That this is the only counter example you came up with should tell you enough.
I could’ve given more. If we’re only thinking of the industry giants, of course a slight reduction in expenses don’t matter. But the smaller devs will definitely benefit.
Epic Games promise cheaper games with 12% cut, but most of them have same price as Steam or even console release.
If everyone switched to epic games store, do you honestly believe they wouldn’t push that 12% up to 30%?
Source?
No shit they’d price the games the same.
There’s plenty of store that have pricing differences even from same country. For example, Vintage Story on itch.io and Humble Bundle has higher price than the official direct purchase.
No store cut, cheaper price.
I bet you believe in “free market” as well huh
For indie devs, yeah.
It’s kinda funny to read through this thread ngl.
Everyone claiming: “OH WOW PRICES WILL BE LOWER” or “OH MAN DEVS WILL PROFIT SO MUCH MORE!!!”
You know who profits? Publishers. The ones already taking 80 - 90% of a games revenue. Devs don’t see shit of that. And for indie devs that don’t have a publisher, the 30% cut is a godsend considering that steam is handling everything in the distribution chain.
You guys are fighting for corpos that want to buy their 5th luxury yacht.
People who genuinely believe game prices will get lowered if stores take a smaller cut are delusional. You can literally look at the Epic Game Store and see that it isn’t even remotely true. The only games on there that are cheaper than on Steam are the ones Epic invested in specifically to entice developers/gamers to use their services. The ones that don’t have exclusivity deals are the same as on Steam.
Edit: changed “take a cut” to “take a smaller cut”.
IMO the only way game prices will get lower is if people just stop buying them at the higher prices. If the price of a game goes from $60 to $100 and people complain but still buy the game, then the next one’s going to be $100 too (or more.)
The wonderful side effect of buying cheaper games is you never have to worry about buying a game that is the result of a megacorp dropping $400 million into a metastasized web of sweatshop developers that comes with a "micro"transaction store where you can spend $240 on a new pair of shiny shoes for your avatar.
Bingo. We even saw price increases on the EGS instead of reductions lmao.
People are coping so badly because they want to hate valve or something, idk. It’s cringe beyond believe. Of all the shitty semi-monopolistic companies you could hate, valve is at the bottom of the list.
Tbf, any game that’s on both steam and Epic Game Store will be priced the same, because anything other than steam having the lowest available price is against Steam’s terms of service. You cannot be priced lower on another platform. GOG and a few others like it get around this by selling steam keys.
While that’s in place, you definitely can not see prices go lower.
Nope, that’s a misconception/misinformation. That’s just for Steam Keys (i.e. you can’t sell Steam Keys cheaper than on Steam). Everything else is fair game.
You are in the wrong here, Steam have a term where you can’t mark the sale cheaper on any other place, including your own website as you can generate your product keys.
I constantly see people saying this.
Explain the pricing on virtually every non-Valve-published game on IsThereAnyDeal at any given time. Steam is almost always being undercut by another legit store selling legit Steam keys.
Except those are grey market keys and Valve can just take the game away from you once they detect it.
ITAD only lists retailers that are fully legit. No grey market.
Unless you can point us to that term, is it worth considering that you may be in the wrong here?
I’ve been searching for someone who can give me more than “yeah, but I saw someone say it online” for a while now… I’ve read the public facing docs and have found nothing that says you can’t sell your game cheaper - though there is something that says you can’t sell your free generated Steam keys cheaper without an equivalent deal on Steam ([here] (https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys#3)).
It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam key purchasers.
It’s not even that strongly worded.
Even if there was a super secret policy, how do you think it is communicated to developers so they know not to do it?
Nope. This is, at best, a misconception. At worst, it’s an intentional misinterpretation. They have a term that prohibits the sale of Steam keys cheaper elsewhere. Game publishers are welcome to put their game up for sale on other sites for cheaper; They just can’t sell Steam keys cheaper. Basically, Steam wants to protect their own product keys from being undercut.
Ubisoft has their own storefront, and their own launcher. If you buy games on the Ubisoft Store, you get access to them via Ubisoft’s launcher, called Ubisoft Connect. Ubisoft is free to sell their games at whatever price they want on the Ubisoft Store, as long as they’re not granting access to the game as a Steam key. If you buy it on the Ubi Store and get access via Ubi Connect, then everything is fine. The only way it would be a breach of contract is if Ubi ran a sale on the Ubi Store, then gave players access via Steam. If you buy it cheaper than Steam on the Ubi Store, you won’t get a Steam key.
You can even sell DRM-free versions of your game for cheaper. As long as you’re not selling Steam keys, you’re fine.
It’s a major part of the lawsuit itself.
I did not set out with the goal of suing Valve, but I have personally experienced the conduct described in the complaint. When new video game stores were opening that charged much lower commissions than Valve, I decided that I would provide my game “Overgrowth” at a lower price to take advantage of the lower commission rates. I intended to write a blog post about the results.
But when I asked Valve about this plan, they replied that they would remove Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM. This would make it impossible for me, or any game developer, to determine whether or not Steam is earning their commission. I believe that other developers who charged lower prices on other stores have been contacted by Valve, telling them that their games will be removed from Steam if they did not raise their prices on competing stores.
http://blog.wolfire.com/2021/05/Regarding-the-Valve-class-action
So before saying they are wrong, see what happens in the lawsuit alleging just that
I’ve joined one of the Steam Dev Days conference in Seattle. It’s around time where people was still doing things like cross buy etc. (so buying the game on website unlocks both steam, dev’s own drm free version, maybe even console version.) I do not know if any of the actual developer term is updated after that time, but during the conference, one dev asked question exactly like this, can he sell his version without the 30% cut from valve if it does not going through Steam while giving away the steam key for free. The answer is no.
During the time it was explained that if you sell on different platform, that gives better sale %, steam can also impost that sale % on it’s platform. At the time EGS was still not a thing but people asked about can they have different price on different platform, I think the answer is also no or not recommended, as they can request you to match say the base price of itch.io but they don’t mind if that sale and software never use anything from steam. They specifically mention if any steam feature, like invite steam friend is used, then no, even if your game are not downloaded or use any steam distribution feature.
Incorrect, steam allows for lower prices and give aways if steam keys you request… As long as it’s not the base price. That’s how humble bundle works. That’s how every dev give away works.
The “devs” in this case want to sell access to the steam version of their game for lower than the steam price, on a permanent basis. Which is against steams rules, because steam provides a service that needs to be paid for, one that is worth far more than the 30% cut.
I find your 30% cut being less than adequate a very opinionated response. Steam gets to double dip repeatedly with anything that gets sold on their platform. Got a steam key? Now be prepared to always open their app which is defaulted to land on the store page and give you multiple pop ups when logging in. We also harvest your data for “advertising purposes” and you will need to constantly keep our client running if you wish to enjoy your game.
Imagine you had to go into the IOS or google play store every time you wanted to open an app and it started with suggestions for other apps you could use instead. If you wanted to use your app account on another device, even a pc, you need to download the playstore and link your mobile account to it just to then login to the app. Everyone would be shitting bricks.
A) they don’t double dip on the marketplace, developers (or publishers) get the steam tax on all items sold there.
B) maybe, but they provide unlimited nonrate capped downloads for eternity for your game, including free unlimited downloads and uploads of workshop items. Bandwidth isn’t cheap at scale, you could spend >50% of your income as a small dev on distribution, or for 30% you get everything steam provides for eternity for all your players.
I meant double dip as in they get to advertise and force you into perpetually using their software on any device you own that you wish to play your “subscription based” games on (you don’t own the games through steam).
Are we really celebrating Steam taking away distribution? That was a whole industry that’s been completely destroyed by companies like Amazon and now Steam.
So imagine you sold in-game currency for 100 EUR. The distribution costs consist of Value Added Tax, which stands at about 20% in Europe and payment processing fee, which could be around 2-4% depending on the payment method. After all the deductions, the developer keeps about 76-78 EUR.However, if the game is sold on Steam or the likes of Google Play, the developer must pay the store a 15-30% commission in addition to the Value Added Tax.
Yes, marketplaces do calculate and pay VAT for the game developers/publishers. They also add their own commission of 15-30% on top, which leaves the developer with about 50% of the revenue generated on the platform.
(link)
If you just want all of your stuff under one umbrella, well that’s your prerogative but you’ve been misinformed on what steam does or how horrible it is for a company to become a monopoly in a sector of the economy.
you get everything steam provides for eternity for all your players.
statements like these are just scary. It’s like everyone has just completely forgotten how companies run in the modern age. Thinking any company has an “eternal” footprint and will always uphold their highest standards just aren’t paying attention to anything.
To be fair, Gaben himself already has a ton of luxury yachts.
Taking money away from one billionaire and giving it to another billionaire is completely irrelevant.
Also, of all the billionaires we have, gaben is one of the few I like. Steam has brought linux gaming ahead like nobody else ever did before, and there was no profit incentive until the steam deck which was like 5 years after the first release of proton, and that’s something I’m genuinely thankful for.
Valve had a Steam Machine before the Steam Deck which went down like a lead balloon but did get enough indie interest to continue to support a Linux version of the client. The Steam Deck is basically a continuation of that in a small form factor. I wouldn’t be surprised if Valve ever decide to offer cloud gaming that it is also derives from some of these efforts, if for no other reason than to avoid a Windows license fee on the server.
The steam machine was good in concept, the problem was that the software was not ready at ALL and the market was too niche. Most people alrady had a PlayStation or XBox for couch gaming and most games back then that were available on steam were not that well optimized for controllers.
They basically built the foundation over the past few years with steam input and proton so they could bring it all together to make an amazing handheld device.
You gotta fail somewhere to be succesful, and valve did just that.
You gotta fail somewhere to be succesful, and valve did just that.
you aren’t wrong, but I don’t even view them as failures so much as future investments.
I think another problem with the Steam Machine was that it was still trying to be like a PC ecosystem, so there wasn’t a universal Steam Machine. It was just a PC running a specific OS, and everyone who was making Steam Machines had wildly different builds. It didn’t make it any easier for a non-tech consumer to get, and there was nothing to get excited about as a tech-minded person other than the software.
The Deck is a perfect entry level PC, and, aside from the added bonus of portability, should have been what a Steam Machine actually was.
Valve already does cloud gaming. It’s called Steam Cloud Play (not to be confused with cloud saves) and they currently work exclusively with GeForce Now.
Agreed on Gaben. So what if he hasn’t given us the third [pick game]. At least he hasn’t gone out of his way to fuck over society for another penny.
The solution is the same as every other industry IMO.
Worker owned and operated cooperatives that are integrated throughout their respective industries by a organization such as Mondragon.
Worker-owned businesses do not work on a large scale. If it would, more people would do it.
Please go back to lemmy.ml
Did you look at the linked Wikipedia page? Mondragon is big, it has 70000 workers. Wikipedia says it is one of the biggest companies in Spain.
I’m well aware that mondragon is big, it’s the prime example that’s always brought up when “MUUUH WORKER SHOULD OWN THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION!!!”
Doesn’t change the fact that the overwhelming majority of businesses are not ran by the workers themselves.
the overwhelming majority of businesses are not ran by the workers themselves.
And do you have any sources to back up your assertion that that’s because they “don’t work”? Because the way I see it it could just as well be our current legal systems and societal incentive structures that prevent them from being more of a thing.
Amongst the top 100 most valuable companies, not a single one is ran as a worker collective. If we extend it to the top 1000 most valuable companies, we have mondragon, the IFFCO and CHS. Which is still only 3 of 1000. I don’t know how much more of a source you need.
current legal systems
The current legal system doesn’t do anything to prevent worker-ran companies.
societal incentive structures
Dunno what you mean by that tbh.
In the end, too many cooks spoil the broth. Worker collectives suffer exactly from that problem. On top of that, many people don’t WANT to be a part of their company. They want to work 4 - 8 hours, get their safe salary and move on. If the company goes bankrupt, they move on and don’t want to be personally liable. On top of that, having a company with a lot of employees that all have an equal say in matters makes such companies extremely inflexible.
I legit never met anyone IRL with a job that was claiming that worker collectives are the greatest thing ever, it’s only on lemmy or other lefty online communities where this statement is spread.
Amongst the top 100 most valuable companies, not a single one is ran as a worker collective. […] I don’t know how much more of a source you need.
I didn’t ask for sources that they’re not a thing, I asked for sources on the reasons for that.
The current legal system doesn’t do anything to prevent worker-ran companies.
I’m a startup owner (in Germany) who has looked at the possibility of making my company worker-owned. It is serious effort and comes with a lot of hurdles, tax headaches, etc., because the legal system is not generally made with that kind of company structure in mind, much less the transition into it. It is very easy to start a company with the default capitalist structure of one or a few owners/investors, it requires magnitudes more to do it the worker-owned way (and do it right). But sure tell me again how the legal system is impartial in that matter.
In the end, too many cooks spoil the broth.
That’s assuming that everyone wants to have a say in everything, and that there are no good internal structures for dividing and assigning responsibility. You can still have individual people who steer the ship, who make autonomous decisions in certain areas, etc. The difference being that they’re selected by their peers, rather than through a management hierarchy, and they answer to their peers, rather than their managers and/or investors.
free market mfs when consumers choose the option that doesn’t shit on them:
“Exactly! Simply do that for every product you need to live.”
Doesn’t shit on them… for now.
My extremely Baby’s First Monopoly take is that whatever your feelings about specific aspects of Steam’s service, or Valve in general, no individual company should exert this much power over the fortunes and overall culture of an artform. As such, I welcome efforts such as Wolfire’s to challenge Valve and Steam, even if I may not agree with the detail of the suit in question.
What a stupid take. Valve isn’t doing anything anti competitive, they just provide an objectively better service which is why everyone uses it. Anyone can put their game up on Steam, Gog, Epic, Uplay, and Origin at the same time. Valve doesn’t own the space, and tbh we’re probably getting the best deal we can get with them being the top dog, cuz you know Microsoft and the like would never treat us that well.
The closest thing I can think of wrt competitive rules is their price parity rule, where if you sell your steam keys (note that. not epic or uplay, just steam.) yourself, the price can’t be noticeably lower (or a sale can’t happen) without a comparable discount/sale on Steam within a reasonable timeframe.
The closest thing I can think of wrt competitive rules is their price parity rule, where if you sell your steam keys (note that. not epic or uplay, just steam.) yourself, the price can’t be noticeably lower (or a sale can’t happen) without a comparable discount/sale on Steam within a reasonable timeframe.
That’s pretty anti-competitive, unless I’m misunderstanding it.
If Epic takes a smaller cut, a developer might be willing to sell it at a lower price than on Steam. But if Steam says that the sale on Steam needs to be the same, then that means the developer can’t put out the same sale on Steam (since Steam takes a bigger cut).
So instead, they’d have to make the sale price equal to the price they’d be willing to accept after taking Steam’s cut into consideration…which would be higher than the price they’d be willing to sell for on Epic.
That’s bad for developers AND consumers.
it’s only applicable if you sell steam keys.
They say that for legal reasons, but their actions are different. If you look at the actual Wolfire complaint, they say they were pressured regardless of steam keys.
I would absolutely agree if it were limited to steam keys, but it’s not. Steam can deprioritize your game in more ways than one. Even just not putting your AAA quality $60 game in the featured games list is a big deal.
If you all just give them a pass, they’ll keep doing this. If they get criticism for it, they’ll likely sweep it under the rug and pretend it was just the Steam key thing the whole time. In the second case, you should expect to see games beginning to sell on Epic (or on their own site) at a lower price than on Steam. There’s a reason you don’t see this now, and it’s not because of steam keys.
I haven’t seen anybody else except the litigants included in the class action make these claims. Nobody seems to be able to substantiate them. I’m actively following this because I want to know if it’s true. I’d welcome any proof someone can provide that these claims have been elsewhere substantiated.
yeah it’s because the publishers have higher margins on epic sales that way.
like, yeah, we want this market to be fair, and if what the wolfire guys say is true then it’s a problem. but remember, they started this suit when they ran a competing store! wolfire started humble bundle! and humble’s main thing is keys! and i don’t know how many other devs are affected by this, but wolfire is driving it and nobody else seems to talk about it.
We should be seeing lower All-Time-Lows off of Steam than on Steam then, right?
Do we regularly see that?
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It’s no surprise that big-name publishers suck. Though over time, it does seem like digital prices fall lower than physical prices. Especially if we look at those who can’t mass produce physical copies. Look at indie devs, for example.
There are lots of indie devs and games released on multiple e-stores. But at least in NA currencies, I don’t think we see lower prices on Epic.
i mean, i guess? i know gog regularly host sales when steam doesn’t, but i’m not actively price matching. hell, gog even used to give away games for free if you already had them on steam.
Just because they’re not on sale at the same time doesn’t mean Steam doesn’t get the same sale price.
And if GOGs sales aren’t going lower than Steam’s sale prices, then that’d be evidence in favour of what I’m saying.
…but that’s what the clause is about? if you sell steam keys, you can’t have a sale if the game is not also cheaper than normal on steam at that time.
gog doesn’t sell keys, so it doesn’t affect them.
Then let’s look at Epic, who also doesn’t sell Steam keys, but takes a much lower cut.
Does Epic regularly have lower All-Time-Lows than Steam?
I track prices with isthereanydeal.com and yeah pretty often a new historical low is set by a Steam key reseller like Fanatical. It’s usually only by a few bucks (like maybe $5 max, though still not a bad discount if the previous price was like $25).
Of course if I buy the game, I stop caring about its price so maybe the same sale happens directly on Steam sometime after. I’m not sure on that so ymmv.
Interesting, thanks for sharing!
I’m curious if the same thing happens on the Epic store. I’d seen some people discussing Epic being a lot cheaper in certain currencies, but not in North America anywhere.
You are misunderstanding it, and it’s been explained to you so many times that I feel I have to imply that you are misunderstanding it on purpose
It’s specifically Steam keys, even says so in the quote. If they sell it on Epic for a lower price and it doesn’t come with a Steam key then there are no restrictions on the price.
So we should be seeing lower All-Time-Lows on Epic than on Steam, right?
Do we?
Why would we? Companies want to make money. Epic taking a smaller cut isn’t a consumer benefit.
Lower prices can “unlock” more customers/sales
If they did then surely folks would have had lower normal prices on Epic and we’d hear them talking it up, either then or now, but overwhelmingly they don’t, because publishers don’t actually view uplay, epic, steam, etc. as different beasts.
Its just one more spot to throw their game on and make money. Epic just lets them make a little more off the same sale.
It does (allegedly) happen in non-NA regions though. I wonder if there’s something there.
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They can use alternative stores if they want. Its not our fault the alternatves bar gog are shit and anti consumer. Valve is the only one supporting linux so I’m buying my games there to support that effort.
Also steam has a lot more than just the store. The chats, the media sharing, the forums, cloud saves and input profiles. Epic can’t even show you a list of games in your library when you log in. I claim the free games each week but ive never even bothered to play them as with steam I can just click play and get on with it. As a long time linux user I value the just works approach and the work that wine and valve have put in.
I won’t use GOG till they make Linux use easy.
Bought Skyrim and Doom II then proceeded to spend 45 minutes struggling to getting them to work. Decided that it wasnt worth the effort when Steam just works™️ and bought them there.Id prefer if valve took less from developers but I value being able to actually play my games more than I value a couple bucks. Also their cloud saves make multi device gaming so much better. If steam eventually enshittifies and takes my games away I’ll just pirate them and struggle with ‘Wine’ then.
Heroic Games Launcher and/or Lutris are what you’re looking for on Linux.
With HGL it’s simply login and install GOG, Epic Games and Amazon Games games like Steam games. No huge issues I’ve ever really run into.
for GOG Games you can use the process i described here; just download the offline installers and go from there.
(just a small remark: lutris sometimes chooses the wrong executable to run, especially with unity games (it tends to select the crashhandler instead of the game exe) - if you run the game and nothing happens, check the settings.
itch.io isn’t anti consumer! It’s a good store. (Not a lot of big brand games there though.)
Don’t take this as me supporting epic, but the game launcher has a full tab for your library. The idea it doesn’t is insane. I’ve never seen a version of epic that doesn’t have this.
Sorry I was talking about the site specifically. I should have clarified that.
lol, replace Valve with Apple and Steam with App Store and everyone would have a very different tone on here despite the fact that they both charge 30%.
That’d be false equivalence. Valve doesn’t own the platform in which they distribute games. Valve doesn’t own Windows, macOS, or Linux, and to my knowledge they don’t enforce any platform-specific restrictions like Apple does. Not sure why you’d swap the two with regards to this case.
Yeah, it’s also ignoring that the issue with Apple’s “30% cut” isn’t that they take 30% of game sales. It’s that they’re forcing you to use their payment processing service to put an app on the store, and then they take a 30% cut out of that, even though third-party payment processing providers take much smaller cuts than that.
Physical stores also took a 30% sales cut, because there’s value in getting people to see your product. It’s literally been the standard storefront cut for decades. Microsoft and Sony take the same cuts for their console sales/transactions.
Valve does a lot more for companies than just put eyes on their games, too. They’re pushing for Linux-compatibility with Proton, they provide you with networking libraries and infrastructure for multiplayer servers if you use SteamWorks, Steam will optionally update your game’s SDL libraries so you have up-to-date controller bindings, etc. It’s not like they’re sitting there twiddling their thumbs and taking 30% of your money for nothing.
I’d argue Microsoft and Sony do comparable work for devs on their platforms too.
The whole argument against the 30% cut is so fucking dumb.
Do you need to own a platform to have a de facto grip on game distribution? I like Steam as much as the next guy, but it’s totally douchey the way nerds fall all over themselves to shit on Apple, but not Valve for charging the same thing. But, I guess not “owning” a platform makes you immune from criticism. Glad to know where the arbitrary line has been drawn. Given that “owning” the platform is the problem, then I’m hoping to see an equal amount of rage at Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft for their online stores that charge 30% to distribute games.
Do you need to own a platform to have a de facto grip on game distribution?
It helps immensely to own the platform you’re also distributing software for if you’re planning to enforce platform-specific restrictions, such as restricting which storefronts can even operate on your platform. Yknow, like Apple
doesdid. But that aside, Valve does not have a de facto grip on game distribution because multiple platforms exist where Steam doesn’t even distribute games (Microsoft Store, PlayStation Store, Nintendo eShop, etc.), and the only gaming platform that Steam does occupy has multiple competitors (Epic, Uplay, EA Play, GoG, itch.io, etc.).I like Steam as much as the next guy, but it’s totally douchey the way nerds fall all over themselves to shit on Apple, but not Valve for charging the same thing
There’s reasons to shit on both of them, but Valve taking an initial 30% cut of games sold on their own platform makes sense. They offer way more services than the competition, and frankly developers don’t have to use Steam. They can use any of the other aforementioned platforms to distribute their games, or just roll their own platform if they’re daring and patient.
But, I guess not “owning” a platform makes you immune from criticism.
No idea how you came to this conclusion. Both companies have legit criticisms made against them that have pretty much nothing to do with the case discussed in the article. Apple does flat out anti-consumer, and sometimes anti-developer shit all the time, Valve’s work culture isn’t near as diverse as it should be in the 21st century, and they don’t seem to do any sort of audits of new games they distribute, they also don’t seem to care about abandoned titles people have already paid for, etc.
Given that “owning” the platform is the problem, then I’m hoping to see an equal amount of rage at Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft for their online stores that charge 30% to distribute games.
That’s… not the problem though. Did you read the article? This is in relation to a class action lawsuit made by some disgruntled developers being put off by Valve’s 30% cut on a platform where they have the option to use some other service lol. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo are the only official distributors of digital games on their respective platforms.
makes you immune from criticism
I definitely criticize valve, 8 YEARS of one of my favorite games being filled with bots isn’t just forgotten. I think their 500 employee model isnt fitting for a company their size. I think it’s insane that you need to get verification that you own a game before you can play it (use Internet and block valves servers, your games won’t work.)
I won’t criticize them in this situation compared to Apple as on IOS you can’t just download from itch.io or GOG like you can from PC. You’re stuck paying a 30% cut not because it’s helpful to use the platform like Steam, but because ITS THE ONLY OPTION.
I’m hoping to see an equal amount of rage at Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft for their online stores that charge 30% to distribute games.
I haven’t bought a game on there in AGES, I’m mad at them too.
This will always be funny to me. In no other aspect of my life do I even know the charge of distributors or shops is, and I dont give a fuck. I still don’t know why I as a consumer should give a fuck because that aint my problem.
I go where the best service and the best options for me are. In terms of digital games stores, Steam is easily that platform. In terms of phone platforms, for me it is easily not apple, I coule not care how much people charge to sell in their stores.
I do care about dumb monopolistic limitations though, things like apple forcing browsers to use webkit. That would be like steam forcing all games to use the source engine. Apple not allowing people to install their own store fronts, Google making that more difficult, Steam not allowing you to install Epic… oh wait.
Steam is a DRM system. It’s amazing to hear people profess their horniness for a DRM system.
It’s not just a drm system
It does a lot of things. Apparently developers mention that it even makes adding things like multiplayer support really easy
Also, cloud saves and such too
On Linux, they also emulate Windows for game compatibility
Steam can charge because they do what they do well and hide the fact they actually do a lot more. It’s easier to get an old school game running if it’s steam than a normal exe generally
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam
I will just leave this
one of those cares about its customers, another doesnt. But which is which?
Delusional to thing one cares. We live in a capitalist civilization. No one gives a flying fuck about us.
let me rephrase, one has undestood its more profitable to not shit on customers which is the best we are going to get
If Valve went public Newell could exit with a golden parachute equitable to the GDP of Germany.
He kept it private and kept >50%. He is responsible for the mostly decent business practices Steam has simply because he has the final say on all policy.
That’s not saying he can’t fall from grace, but the guy seems to care considerably more than the operators of every other digital storefront aside from maybe GOG.
Steam isn’t a publicly traded company. Which means they can focus on customers and not investors.
I didn’t learn things but I can count two sides which, since they are sides, that means they’re the same.
/s
it’s almost like these 2 companies have wildly different practices regarding how they treat their customers and business partners.
Didn’t the Epic lawsuits against Apple and Google end up showing Valves Steam cut ended up working out to something closer to 20% after all the key sales and whatever other factors. Plus EGS already does less than 20% cut and it’s been like 6+ years and that client is still bare bones and they don’t even do gift cards or price lower. Same for Microsofts store which I believe is lower on PC while still 30% on console.
Regardless at best this lawsuit would just mean an end to 3rd party steam key sales or Valve taking a 30% cut on those too. At best a victory against Valve would mean more expensive games with the loss of keysite stores pricing advantage
Also games used to MSRP $10 cheaper on Steam when there was an argument that going digital was a major cost savings compared to physical products/packaging, shipping, and retailler cut. Eventually publishers stopped caring and made physical and digital prices the same while adding an assortment of DLC and subscriptions
Does this mean cheaper games on the Steam store? Might be good for indie developers, but I bet most publishers will pocket the difference.
In the same way that applying tarrifs will reduce the price of goods.
Comment sections under these articles are always filled with two kinds of people:
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Ones who won’t miss the water until the well runs dry.
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Ones who understand what it means to have a well.
I am now confused, not sure if because I can’t recognize the well or I am too thirsty.
Just remember to stay moist.
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I’d love to see valve just blacklist devs who are on this lawsuit :D Go back to epic ig you care about your cut and not your customers.
Irrational steam fanboys are funny
it would be funny though. They shouldn’t do it, but it would be funny if they did.
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Watch out for valve pr team shilling online
The only actually decent big company I can think of with a decent product and a track record of investing in open source and consumer benefiting solutions is being defended online. Shock.
Private companies, for better or worse, are beholden only to the boss. No shareholder value to worry about.
That’s the only reason steam hasn’t been turning the thumbscrews on developers for stage 3 enshittification profit seeking.
And why I’m clenching it for the day Gaben leaves. It will probably be disastrous.
Idk the internal company culture is supposed to be pretty damn good and stable. Flat management structure with everyone getting to work on whatever they please…
Seems like a replacement council would probably do fine.
The only actually decent big company I can think of with a decent product
A company that promotes gambling to underage kids with a proprietary third party launcher.
What are you doing on dbzer0 btw?
What are you doing on dbzer0 btw?
Are you gatekeeping piracy to a dude simply because they don’t think Valve is the devil? Bruh, you need to go outside.
Defending a billionare and his proprietary products while having to resort to piracy to get them it’s ridiculous
Not everyone uses piracy the same way as you. Some people will use it to try games before deciding to buy them.
And some people will play games that you can try before buying and not shill online for the companies that have you resorting to piracy.
Shilling? Saying they’re not total shit is shilling now?
A company that increases mental health of all users through entertainment, pushes the boundary of corporate responsibility and basically solves depression through their carefully crafted launcher.
See, I can also make up bullshit by extrapolating to the extreme.
A company that increases mental health of all users through entertainment, pushes the boundary of corporate responsibility and basically solves depression through their carefully crafted launcher.
Excuse me, how does a third party proprietary launcher solve depression?
The rent seeking on platforms like Steam, the Apple App Store, and Google Play is absolutely gross considering how little value they actually provide. I’ll be very glad to see them forced to reduce it to somewhere similar to a card transaction fee.
Here we go again. Armchair economists bleating “why everything cost money, corporate bad” with no actual expertise to back it up. Steam is not a parasitic middle man, it is a collection of services that would have to be provisioned and operated by the developer otherwise.
- A massive infrastructure to store and deliver the game and its updates, worldwide, and at an acceptable bandwidth that Valve operates
- A storefront that enables monetizing the game
- The audience and discoverability that would not exist otherwise
- The Steam API, achievements, cloud saves
- The client itself, content management, validation, and Linux compatibility tools
- Network and operational security
- (edit) Also keep in mind that Steam and its services are operated by experts. A game developer would have to hire the experts or get training.
That’s where the cut goes.
People should really read the Steamworks documentation to get an idea of the absurd amount of services Steam offers https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/home
Yeah, I think the big difference between Steam and Google Play and the App Store is that Steam does not own Windows and has actual competition.
I think asking for a cut just because you own the OS is despicable, but Steam is actually providing a service.
Steam does own SteamOS but they also bundle a third party software repo (flathub).
Their Deck is still technically niche and yet somehow I can still pretty much install whatever I want in desktop mode, and can even make links in steam to them. (You can even put Epic on it, but that takes a bit of a work around).
You bring up a good point, why are consoles not being forced to allow other app stores like phones?
Idk, I use a Google Pixel. For the OS I use GraphineOS and for app stores I have obtainium plus Accrescent
The real question with these issues is not whether you can install other software with some effort, but whether you can start a competing app store that, if better than Google’s, can outcompete Google.
Right now you can’t get the same deal from the makers of Android and phone manufacturers as the Google Play owners, and that is why it’s said the market is monopolistic.
Well F-Droid is popular and you can just download apks, thats what epic games did (simply distributing their store as an apk)
And all the community features for the consumers.
The Community > Discussions page for a game is one of Steam’s most underrated features. The amount of times I’ve wanted to know something super specific about a game prior to buying and found exactly the info I was looking for in the Discussions page. Oftentimes with developer comments on said feature clearly labeled. So clutch.
It’s not the nicest place in the world, but it reminds me of Gamefaqs back in its hay day. I found advice there recently over yet another bad SE port crashing.
You forget to mention the cut that goes into the ceo billion dollar worth fleet of mega yachts
https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/gabe-newell-luxury-yachts.php
Success is not illegal. In Valve and Gaben’s case, it’s deserved, and probably as clean as you’ll ever see.
I firmly believe that Steam has allowed fair competition to exist. Epic had the greatest chance to become viable competition, but they fumbled the store’s launch, poached Metro Exodus and fucked over the people who preordered, did not have the foresight to implement some kind of preloading for Borderlands 3, and pissed people off when they refused to allow non-exclusive indie games to exist on the store while they made an exception for Cyberpunk 2077. In that time, the only thing that Valve did that might have hurt EGS is refuse to host store pages and ads for games that weren’t going to launch on their platform. Shortly after that, Valve released the Steam Deck (the most pro-consumer handheld I’ve seen to date), SteamOS (free), Proton (free), DXVK (free), Gamescope (free), and have contributed (for free) to upstream projects like Wine. Of all the billionaires, Gaben is the only one I can think of that I’m okay with being a billionaire.
You are one of the few who share my exact same feelings toward Epic as compared to Steam. I intentionally have never, and will never, have any of my money go to Epic for the shady “exclusivity deals” they made with shitty devs, to poach business from Steam. I only just now bought Metro: Exodus, in Steam, because of their lead dev’s comments to the backlash they faced when pulling it from Steam.
You missed something, however. If I recall Epic did all the things you mentioned, but also was caught stealing user data from Steam .dat files found on the machine.
Y’all wanna know what anti-competitive business practices look like? Turn your gaze toward EGS, cause that’s what it looks like. Steam is the beast it is thanks to Gabe and the work of talented devs over the last 20 years. Make better products, get more loyal consumers!
Sucks that so many misinformed consumers/devs conflate success from better products with success from monopolistic actions. But then again, we got another 4 years of tRump due to that illiteracy so…
Success is not illegal. In Valve and Gaben’s case, it’s deserved, and probably as clean as you’ll ever see.
Fuck off. Steam is a third party proprietary launcher that promotes gambling to kids. We are on the verge of a climate disaster and people are getting poorer every year that goes by. A fleet of mega yachts is a smack on everyone and the planet.
Making billions off a proprietary app targeted at kids and spending the money on yacht it’s not success, it’s greed and mental illness. You do not make billions in a clean way.
Steam promotes gambling to kids? Care to elaborate? Are you referring to the playing cards? Because certainly you don’t mean CS:GO shit. Because I’ve never seen that on Steam.
If you’re so passionate about the subject, why don’t you redirect that energy into making a real change? Join a protest, call a politician, get organized, instead of engaging in tired, empty, useless whataboutisms on the internet.
Same goes for you, we are on lemmy on a thread about a lawsuit against steam, go worship billionares in their proprietary platforms.
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Valve has about 100 employees, Steam is operated by about 40, but I would love to have a source on the “generational wealth” part. Most of the income is likely spent on operational costs, like the aforementioned massive CDN infrastructure. If you’ve never worked in corporate-level networking, it might elude you how ridiculously fucking expensive stuff gets, especially at a worldwide scale.
it might elude you how ridiculously fucking expensive stuff gets
I don’t know how that scales to worldwide CDN setup, but I work with a company who has presense on multiple countries and they drop casually 150-200k to few servers alone which provide services for at maximum for couple of thousand users. Networking, labor, power and things like that not included, just the hardware in a cardboard boxes.
Obviously there’s a ton of factors on this and I can’t elaborate our setup any further for obvious reasons, but just to give some scale how expensive things can get I can share my very real world experience. And that setup is pretty much the low end on the spectrum. 10k a month for a any as-a-service setup is almost a rounding error even with relatively low user count.
Serving anything to 100+ million people globally is a whole another beast. Wikipedia is a decent comparison, running a single website which looks like relatively simple to the end user (and oh boy it is not, but your Joe Average doesn’t know nor care about that) takes around 170 million dollars per year just on operating costs.
I don’t have any kind of opionion if that 30% is reasonable, but I do know that running that beast is not cheap and the money needs to come from somewhere. And as a customer, Steam just offers me what I want in a package which is the best one around, so they’ll keep getting my pennies until something better comes along. And I’m very aware that their service is not perfect and that I don’t really own anything on their platform, but for me in the current state in my life, they just provide the best bang for my buck and for the very limited time I have to spend with gaming.
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Valve is not publicly traded. We don’t know. (Unless it became public information through a lawsuit or was leaked. In which case: Source pls.)
That’s all nice, but you’re dreaming if you think any of that adds up to 30% of the value of a video game.
I don’t think that’s exactly how it works… It isn’t just the value of the game, it’s the exposure and distribution that it gets just for being on Steam. I imagine that’s well worth the 30% to most, which is why most devs seem OK with it.
It does seem slightly high to this non-expert, but I don’t really know enough to say for sure that it’s anti-competitive or anything.
It’s not slightly high when you realize that someone has to pay for bandwidth, advertising, licensing fees etc. IGN (please take that with a grain of salt) has an infographic about this from an article awhile back. I feel like it explains fairly well that the industry standard is 30% and that only a handful of stores actually provide anything below that. And Nintendo particularly is reported to take 30-40% depending. I can appreciate that people are naturally distrustful of any large company. I can appreciate that steam doesn’t get it right 100% of the time and there are valid criticisms of it’s business practices and decisions over time. But on the other hand, this has always seemed like a nothing burger to me.
When you buy a digital key at Walmart or Best Buy or Game Stop, they get a 30% cut too.
It’s not even 30% of all sales: “Valve even adjusted Steam’s rates late last year in what seemed to be a response to the pressure from Epic, but this change is likely only impactful to major developers. After $10 million in sales through Steam, Valve’s cut drops to 25% on all new sales, and drops again to 20% on sales after $50 million. For reference, earning $10 million would mean selling just under 170k copies of a $60 game, and far more for independent games that are rarely that expensive.”
That explanation makes a lot more sense for AAA who are very likely using significantly more bandwidth (due to data bloat in their games, day-1 updates), and are much more likely to be making millions.
For indie not so much, and it seems odd that there isn’t even some general incentive for games with lower requirements. Then again, using a platform like itch instead (possibly geared more towards bundles) or even going with some other payment method (donations) might just make more sense in that case.
On one hand, Itch.io is supposed to be for indie games and while I personally have not got any experience with their platform their model does seem to be pretty incentivised towards developers if the only thing those developers care about is getting more profit from the games they are able to sell.
However, on balance, indie game developers don’t often have the budget to create the kind of hype around a game that would push most consumers to buy it from just itch.io. So it’s in the best interest of lots of indie developers to make their game as accessible as possible and go where the users are.
In that respect steam (and Microsoft and Sony) are the places to go. Of those three steam has less active competition from their company for games than either of the other platforms. Indies aren’t competing against Valve games the way they are against Sony or Microsoft produced games on the relevant platforms.
At this point I’ve backed 4 games on Kickstarter or in one case the developer site, and I am very happy with each of them. They have (all except one) offered keys on steam, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony. Even when they didn’t release on all those platforms at the same time. Two of them I have purchased on a separate platform after receiving a key on my chosen platform so I can play those games in multiple places.
On the other hand, I don’t necessarily like that Indies probably won’t see the same benefit of paying less per unit served after selling $10 million and again after an additional $5 million (Valve drops their percentage from 30% to 25% after a developer sells $10million worth of units and again to 20% for every copy sold after selling an addition $5 million sold on steam).
This I feel is a boon to big development firms that not a whole lot of Indies can take advantage of. So there is definitely room for improvement there.
It’s a monopoly on exposure.
The infrastructure and services they provide (outside of an advertising monopoly), do not cost, and are not worth anywhere near 30%.
Think about how much effort and time goes into developing a game, and then think about how much time and effort go into hosting the download files for that game and providing a forum. It’s not 30%.
They should get more than credit card transaction fees, but nowhere near 30%. I expect Epic would be quite profitable at 12% if they hadn’t invested in a terrible exclusive strategy that people hated.
You think all Steam does is distribute files?
They distribute files, automate one click installs on Windows/Linux/Mac, they automate compatibly for non-Windows installs, they offer cloud saves, and they offer unlimited downloads and installs of games.
That’s a massive amount of infrastructure that makes sure games sold through Steam are playable for decades.
If you remember before distribution platforms you would see a game for sale at full price on disk for 6mo to a year, then IF there were any disks left they would slowly decrease in price until they eventually hit the $5 bin. After that the game was just unavailable to you and not generating any revenue for the developer.
On top of all of that, 30% is the cut that Physical stores take while offering NOTHING to the devs.
On top of that, the 30% the physical stores take doesn’t cover the extra overhead of stamping, shipping, and storing physical media, so the devs are ahead there even if they get nothing else out of it
You clearly have no clue what running a robust, globally distributed file delivery system takes, even if that’s all they did (and it’s nowhere near all they do)… It’s hardly “[no] cost”.
do not cost anywhere near 30%
You missed some context. Maybe you had issues with the sentence structure. My bad.
I was about to reply with something nasty but read it again, and I see what threw me off
To be fair to myself, it is a bit of a tortured sentence structure and not that clear, but to be fair to you, I’ve written plenty that make perfect sense to me at the moment that’s hard for others who don’t already know what I’m saying to follow
Anyway, I still assert that it’s a lot more than maybe you realize, but I see you weren’t trying to claim it cost nothing, so sorry for responding that way
I am one to always call out rent seeking where I see it… But I don’t really see how Steam fits in there. Some of us are old enough to remember when HL2 came out, and things began transitioning from physical media to Steam. No dev was forced to do anything, and for years most people still bought physical games for everything other than Valve games.
The reason other devs started switching over, and it became dominant, is because it’s just a damn good service (and also because broadband just started getting more affordable).
We can always go back to the old ways of having a download from the company website and downloading directly from them. What? Nobody wants to pay for bandwidth? Nobody wants to have to pay for secure management of credentials and billing? :O
Those days didn’t even exist (or if they did, they were very short). I feel like Steam came out just before the broadband boom (when they released HL2, it was still on five CDs). And by the time other devs started switching, most of them just went to Steam.
However, re: the broadband thing, they could distribute with bittorrent, kind of like how linux distros do it.
Uh, all games had patches and mappacks downloaded directly from the game’s distributor. It was extremely slow, hence the invention of CDNs like filehippo, hwfiles, 2cows etc and some gaming companies (at the time you could rent your own server and host the games. Incredible, huh? You could also have LAN parties and play with your clan against other clans all using LAN, no internet required) were also doing mirroring of those files (in Italy it was gamearena and ngi, for example). Steam wasn’t even a thing.
Lol patches… Unless you were having LAN parties, or attempting to play a game of AOE2 over dialup (hoping your mom doesn’t try to use the phone), you just ran whatever version of the game came on the disc. By “you”, I guess I meant me.
For bandwidth, it’d absolutely make sense if a game that’s 10GiB+ because uncompressed audio and pre-rendered cutscenes (and likely huge day-1 updates) had to pay more of a cut to its platform than a 200MiB (or less) game. Particularly if the smaller game doesn’t even have multi-player.
Nobody wants to pay for bandwidth? Nobody wants to have to pay for secure management of credentials and billing? :O
They absolutely would if it didn’t mean getting deprioritized on Steam. Those things aren’t that difficult or expensive these days. I could have secure management of credentials and billing up in a weekend if I needed it (correctly), and I’m a single developer.
Steam is better than Microsoft, Apple, Google and Tencent. Using monopoly power to maintain the 30% standard is still a problem.
Do you wish to collect games on dvd again?
Eh, there’s more involved with a full storefront and content delivery compared to just a card transaction. But it’s definitely not 30% worth of additional value.
But it’s definitely not 30% worth of additional value.
They’re actually claiming to be adding almost 50% (43%, to be precise) in value, since that’s how much more you have to add to end up at 30% of the final value. (By analogy, imagine they took a 50% cut. That would be claiming to double the value. Something that used to be worth $10 is now going to cost $20 if the original wants to maintain the same cut.)
