Valve could reduce their cut honestly, perhaps some program for independent developers to help them get on their feet. I don’t think the top games or big publishers should be getting cut reductions.
Either way, Valve haven’t been buying out studios for exclusive games, so Epic and Sweeney can go fuck themselves, they are scum.
At the same time it’s not like Valve is not making use of the extra money to use it only for taking in profits. It might of been what made it possible to try entering the hardware market with VR and the Steam Deck and putting resources in trying to make Linux gaming for accessible for regular people. Might of been what allowed them to not be deterred after the failure of the Steam machine and Steam Controller.
Might have, brother. Might have.
Why do I see this online so often? Is it an educational thing? Is it an auto correct thing? Or something other? I am not a native speaker, so I have no clue how this happens.
My understanding is folks tend to gravitate towards that because it’s indeed very close to might’ve and whatnot phonetically. My anecdotal experience as a non-native speaker is we tend to be less affected since we usually tackle speaking and listening more seriously after we’ve already familiarized ourselves enough with writing/reading, grammar and vocab.
Bone apple tea
Pretty much the tl;dr here, yeah 🤣
It blows my mind as well. My native language is Spanish, but for me it’s way easier to follow language rules properly in English. May have something to do with the fact that my native language is my regular language for expression, so I don’t pay much mind to how I use it, but English being a second language, I actually try to make sure I’m understood. Anyway, that’s what I think could potentially be the reason.
Yes no maybe I don’t know 🎶
Can you repeat the question.
Lol. Good to see I’m not the only one that sees the impact in not using proper language rules 🤣
If I recall correctly valve did lower their cut in the wake of EGS having better terms for devs.
For the first $10m earned it’s 30%, then it’s 25% until $50m, then it’s 20% from then on.
Ok yeah that’s still pretty shitty
Why?
If steam has to do the work to host the game then the majority of effort is going to be getting to the published and available to buy step, which is recouped along with server costs early on. As it scales, the efficiencies kick in and the price gets lowered a bit.
A company keeping 70% of retail price is still a higher cut than they would get for a game on a shelf at a store, and most likely with a far higher number of sales through steam. Plus it is digital so they don’t have all the physical distribution costs. For smaller games those additional costs and advertising are going to keep them from being feasible.
Valheim and Palworld wouldn’t have been massive successes on store shelves. 30% for visibility and unlimited scaling if the game is more successful than expected is a pretty good deal for the benefits it provides. It actually does buy something, it isn’t the mob’s cut for pretending to protect your business.
It’s the other overheads too, publishing cuts, marketing cuts, QA etc before you get down to the money made for wages etc.
Valve are absolutely in a position to take less, but the service they provide is like no other.
I don’t give a fuck about EA/Ubisoft etc getting a smaller cut, but independent developers could absolutely benefit from some sort of program.Plus the income lets them take care of their employees, and to the best of my understanding it is a pretty good working environment.
Many studios are in a real pinch right now. I don’t know what valve’s overhead costs are but I’d imagine they could afford to kick back some more to devs.
It should be reversed so that small devs don’t get shafted for not being able to sell millions of dollars worth of copies of their game. The ones making tens of millions of dollars should be paying more.
Was about to ask what’s with all the shilling here but just realized which community this is. Have fun shilling for a mega Corp. Go tell yourselves that 30% cut isn’t ridiculous.
Okay, so you say a 30% cut is ridiculous.
But let’s move that away from the mega Corp [sic] everyone here is supposedly shilling for. Let’s talk about cuts lost to distribution and delivery for a second.
I cannot answer this for a lot of industries, but for example for board games ~7%-9% go to the actual designer. That’s 91%-93% that is lost along the way. Even if we take Sweeney’s 25% example that the devs get, that’s still 3x-3.5x as much as for physical products.
This would indicate that digital distribution is far better than physical for developers making games, as they get a vastly bigger percentage of the money. Within the digital space, we can compare things a little bit, at least for video games.
Digital storefronts seem to roughly all come out at 30%, for which Valve provides more value than say Google or Apple, as they also give you forums, mod integrations, and various dev tool to use to simplify development of your game’s modding and multiplayer features.
We also know that consoles are pricier, as you have to pay certification costs for updates on top of the original distribution, and in a way this is true of the mobile stores, too.Now, don’t get me wrong: 30% is a ton of money, and I cannot see where a rich company needs this much money. However, I would argue they’re one of the last companies to tackle in improving as far as them not taking excessive money goes, and everyone else (Google, Apple, MS, Sony, even Epic considering how they do fuck all for the 12% cut they take) should get impacted first, plus it’s still difficult to argue that digital cut is excessive to begin with comparing the vastly improved developer cut comparing the physical distribution space - as good as I can compare board games vs video games, granted. But I would estimate that the overhead costs of physical sales for video games aren’t that different, manufacture, shipping, it’s all comparable after all. Video games need less container space, but they also sell for less.
- YouTube takes 30% from fan-funded revenue
- Twitch takes 50%, which was an increase of their 30% cut, and people have called them out on it
- Apple take 30%, but recently reduced that to 15% for apps making under $1M/yearly
- Google Play has the exact same system
- GOG takes a 30% cut
- Epic Games takes a 12% cut, but they are purposely operating at a loss and this comes with a lot of strings attached (exclusive contracts, passing transaction costs to users, etc.). This is not sustainable, and developer should expect an increase as soon as they take over more of Steam’s userbase. (If they take it over…)
Overall, calling a 30% cut “ridiculous” is patently false. It is the industry standard.
Digital marketplaces use a near monopoly to extort developers into accepting these inflated cuts. I simply will never accept an inflated rate caused by a monopoly as a good thing. Without that near monopoly there is no way they could maintain a 30% cut.
Why?
I am not going to pretend to understand the economics involved but 30% is an absurd amount of money to charge someone to do nothing but provide a storefront to sell games. I’d wager Sweeney is correct that Valve makes more profits than the actual developers. You know, the people who do the actual work of creating and maintaining the game.
Valve is exploiting their market dominance to rake in absurd profits for what is in all likelihood, very little actual work.
Valve makes more money per employee than fucking Apple. If that’s not an indicator of giant profit margins, I don’t know what is.
And while they do use that money to improve the gaming industry, and they’re a relatively ethical company, that don’t make those profit margins any less ridiculous.
A company keeping 70% of retail price is still a higher cut than they would get for a game on a shelf at a store
And I’d argue that’s also exorbitant and that there are far more logistics and other costs involved.
Valheim and Palworld wouldn’t have been massive successes on store shelves.
They could have been significantly more successful if Valve charged 15%. And Valve would remain extremely profitable.
Also want to note that Sweeney would absolutely begin charging 30% if and when he could, but right now that’s literally all they have going for them.
To be fair, Steam provides a lot more than “just being a storefront”. There’s large feature set there in Steamworks which is ‘free’ for developers to use.
The game developers would probably spend more than 30% of revenue hosting their own game on their own store, so the value is there already.It would be strange if Valve’s cut went up the more money your game made, but it would be better for independent developers.
To be fair, Steam provides a lot more than “just being a storefront”.
Meh. I wouldn’t call it “a lot”. And most of the hardware they’ve made has been a huge flop, SD being the (amazing) exception.
The game developers would probably spend more than 30% of revenue hosting their own game
…what? How do you figure that?
Why should valve, or sony, or Apple, or Google get 30% of the revenue of entire industries for having a download and payment service.
It’s extortionate and undeserved. When I play a game I absolutely love, one third of the money for that game didn’t go to the people who made it, it went to valves endless bucket of money. It’s not right and we should not be defending these extremely high cuts.
Valve runs a profitable Launcher that allows them to try expanding into ventures like the Steam Deck and pushing Linux gaming adoption even if it ends in failures. That extra cash is what allows for businesses to expand beyond only one field.
Otherwise a company is just stuck being just a reseller, and I think gaming space currently is better for Steam Deck and how it’s pushed more people to try Linux. And even before the Steam Deck work on Proton helped. Having profits makes it easier to absorb failures and put resources towards stuff like Linux that is niche and may never gain a significant enough adoption.
Like epic even with fortnite can’t financially justify supporting Linux anticheat for fortnite, so I guess that’s what happens if a company is not taking in enough profits. And Epic store is only being kept afloat because of fortnite, and is losing money.
Also, it’s worth pointing out that Gabe seems like a decent guy, and Tim Sweeney is a fucking prick. So I think that’s a pretty big difference right there too. Valve has earned respect, Epic has not.
Not just the Steam Deck. It or the Index (or IMO even better the Link and the Controller) are certainly more noticable things they did, but big wins to me are stuff like the integrated modding in Steam, or the ease of user reviews.
And for a newer feature that has become somewhat standard across stores but only because Valve startedi t and they had to keep up, refunding without any questions asked.
When you buy something at the store, did you know that in most cases the company selling probably saw less than half of what you paid? What if they don’t have it in stock?
steam provides a ton of benefits at scale that would have probably eaten up more than 30% of the price for the game company, with the ability to instantly scale with no limitation if it picks up in popularity.
If I buy a single player game, more than likely, valve is making entirely profit on that 30%. The cost of the download is below a penny to valve. Yet they still get s third of that companies revenue.
Charge them for the services if you want. They aren’t doing thst, they are taking 30% of an industries revenue for doing nearly nothing.
Valve is at least helping out to grow a community ofbgamers that want to have nothing to do with Crapple, Google, Microshit, etc. Look at the cost of a Steam Deck. Now to see if you can buy or assemble a computer with similar specs. Why do you think Asus and Ayaneo have similar devices that are way more expensive? Valve sells the decks at a loss (which they make up for by that 30% on sapes, sure). How would they be able to pull something like that off if they weren’t swimming in money? Is 30% disproportionately hefty? Hell yes! But developers and gamers alike get much more out of that cut Valve gets, just Proton development alone is good enough. Can you say the same about Crapple, for example? Valve is a corporation, for profit, like every other corp out there, but at least they do bring innovation (not to be confused with the bullshit that Google and all Tue other crooks want to call that when all they are doing is knocking down walls between them and your money) and value across the board.
Getting paid half as much to be a middleman as the developers get paid to make the goddamn game is obscene. Especially for Steam, a pseudo-monopoly on a platform they did not make. Steam is a program for Windows PCs from a company that makes neither Windows nor PCs.
Well, I guess they kinda do both, now. Nevertheless. 30% to be the gatekeeper is quite a fucking cut.
Tell me you know nothing about retail without telling me you know nothing about retail.
Smug nothing. Try again.
I do think Valve could drop it to 25% and not lose much sleep over their coffers.
I mean I don’t know how much money steam is banking, but they provide quite a good service for their share.
Max download rates at all times (almost).
Amazing steam overlay. Online gaming. Online saves. Workshop. Linux support.
And many more. Some of that epic has too but in comparison epic launcher is shit.
It would effectively not do anything for game devs to reduce it by 5%.
On the dev side steam provides distribution and a bunch of tools while you develop your game. Tomorrow you can pay 100$, and steam will support you with keys, releasing and publishing your game, reviewing it for free etc.
I have a game I’ve been developing for 5 years part time. I have steam keys I share with testers, and can distribute version for free, with all the patch notes and update features from steam for 100$.
When I do release, they’ll have earned the 30%, and if I don’t release I’ll have saved a ton and steam will take the costs. This greatly reduces the barrier to self-publishing. Out of all the companies I deal with, this is by far the fairest and lest predatory model there is. Gaben could have just bled us of our money even more and it would have worked. They are very rich because they are very humble in a sense.
I think Steam’s cut should probably be something like
0.05 * (log(x) + 1)where x is number of copies sold.You mean that games need to have 100 000 copies sold to get to the 30% cut?
Yes. It would mean that small indie games with low sales wouldn’t be hit as hard by Steam taking a cut, and huge hits that sell millions of copies would help subsidize this.
Awesome article, see? Just like Apple and Google… No, wait, I was thinking of a parallel reality. Never mind.
The reason big studios get better rate is because they have leverage. Just as Amazon has leverage against apple in app store
Its based off revenue, obviously more revenue made overall gives Valve more money with less cut than small revenue at a larger cut.
If scale is no longer an issue, why can’t Epic create a store with similar functionality to steam? Because it’s not about that. It’s about Tim not being able to pocket as much.
Epic simply doesn’t want to be consumer friendly. Epic sees the money Valve is making, but not the effort Valve puts into their store. Just how consumer friendly Valve is the reason Valve basically a monopoly. Valve gives so many tools to the devs too such as SteamAPI to make their games better and accessible to a wide range of consumers with a wide range of devices.
Epic knows that the way it can fight Valve is by pointing out their 30% cut. Everything else, involves making their store better, which Epic doesn’t wanna do.
Human rights principles? Tim needs to quit sniffing his own farts. He’s trying to sell digital video games on iPhones, not end human trafficking.
Is epics cut still 12%?
And in the same court case - it was discovered it was not profitable despite their more limited offerings.
I’m not sure what you mean by ‘despite’ here.
Maybe he meant in the sense that they filtered out the shovelware and asset flips from Epic Games Store (at least until recently) so to make the store look good. That way they’re providing hosting only for the games that actually will be downloaded a decent amount of times, avoiding wasting storage on bad/forgotten games.
But hosting is basically a rounding error in the equation of selling games on an online store. The actually significant cost is going to be in developing and maintaining the software powering the online store, and that cost is fixed. This in turn means that having less games in the store is an obvious disadvantage, not an advantage.
…I don’t mean to be rude, but you shouldn’t speak to things you do not understand or know about. Cloud hosting costs for a large e-commerce site are rather large, definitely variable and not cheap.
Cost of developing software is also not fixed over any meaningful period.
It’s also an indefinite cost. It’s not like Valve decides to stop hosting a game they’ve sold after a while. Generally speaking, they store and host it forever even if they never get revenue from sales of it ever again. Of course, I’m sure if the revenue wanes that much that downloads will too, but there’s definitely a crossover point where maintenance will start being a permanent negative cashflow. Now multiply that across tens to hundreds of thousands of games and counting. Forever. You kind of have to consider that for the long term when setting your pricing for today since sales cuts are the only revenue you get.
I don’t mean to be rude either, but you shouldn’t assume that someone doesn’t know what they are talking about or understand.
From professional experience I can speak pretty confidently on the subject that staffing opex is almost universally going to supersede cloud opex.
EDIT: I noticed that I was being a bit unclear when saying fixed. What I mean by fixed in this context is that you need to develop the whole e-commerce infrastructure regardless of if you have 1 game or 1000 games - a simplification as you do need to take care to scale well when growing, but it is good enough for the purposes of demonstration. The more games sharing the same e-commerce infrastructure, the less the e-commerce infrastructure costs on a per-transaction basis.
I quite doubt that, infrastructure to provide Terabytes of bandwidth per second isn’t cheap, and employing people who are on watch 24/7 and maintain it all, aren’t cheap either.
You need to employ relatively fewer people to maintain and remain on-call for a service as you grow it - this is part of the point I’m trying to make. Having fewer games is a disadvantage for Epic, not an advantage.
Hosting is so easy that most companies who do it fail at some point…
If the percentage was the most important part, why isn’t every game on Epic?
discord i believe when they sold games only took like 10% cut. turns out, thats not all it takes to sell games, and its not like no one uses discord, so you couldn’t even say people were avoiding the software as it is a popular platform.
Did anyone get games on discord?
i personally don’t know anyone in my circle who did.
That’s probably a big part of why Tim is angry
Afaik it was a deciding factor for a lot of playstation exclusives that started porting to PC.
Yes
Love how this is “highly confidential”, yet, here we are 🤣🤣🤣 God, I love this community!
Sweeney is a third-rate Carmack
That’s insulting to Carmarck considering how intelligent and talented the man is. Sweeney is a mediocre programmer and a hack businessman at best.
Time Travelling Interdimensional Energy Being John Carmack!?
The “you mad bro” is found among internal Valve communication (Valve COO Scott Lynch to Erik Johnson and Newell, i.e. in the sense Johnson/Newell being “mad”, not Sweeney). It was particularly not sent out as a response to Sweeney. Another outlet already got tripped over this and had to make a correction: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2024/03/valve-coo-on-epics-tim-sweeney-you-mad-bro-when-launching-the-epic-store/
This is not quite as sensational as some people are framing it.
Less drama more context would be nice from headlines, but man does it feel like I’m asking too much
Lmao common steam W
Steam community or not, the glib defense of rent-seeking behavior on lemmy.ml is wild.
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I dont understand. Doesnt Epic give devs a better cut of the profits? Why is Sweeney mad?
Because his shitty company can’t provide any of the benefits Steam provides, so he has to keep creating bullshit distractions to be marginally relevant and not have all of his investors jump ship.
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Sweeney really comes off as an angry guy who sees only enemies. Apple (justified, even though I’m an Apple nerd), Valve… let’s find some more persecution-complex targets. Can we be mad at Steam? Let’s go!
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Epic offers jack shit in terms of features, has admitted to be losing money from the 12% cut, has a shitty storefront and is beholden to Tencent, the shittiest gaming company known to the world. Also, Steam is free advertisement, whereas the EGS is antiadvertisement.
There’s at least as much of a “massive discrepancy” between what Valve and Epic provide as value to people that chose their service.
The 30% cut is an obscene standard that needs to be reduced on PC, console, and mobile. Taking an entire third off-the-top as nothing but a middleman and file-server is indefensible. Valve doesn’t even control their platform - they shoved their way onto computers via HL2 and now perpetuate an overwhelming market share. Then as now, it is a problem that games require any online DRM launcher.
Tim can still get bent.
EGS by all accounts does fuck-all to attract users or sellers, beyond adjusting that cut, and it is still a project that exists primarily as rent-seeking for that cut.
Same deal for Fortnite on iOS: their excuses are pretense for taking 30% of everything spent on an app or IN an app, on every iPhone. They once strongarmed Facebook out of even mentioning that. Furthermore, people must have software freedom. It is intolerable that Apple ever restricted what you install on your own goddamn phone.
Fortnite should be unavailable because Fortnite should be illegal.
Nothing inside a video game should cost money. Real-money charges make games objectively less enjoyable. Maximum revenue comes from addiction to manufactured discontent. It is infecting every platform, genre, and price point. It is in single-player games. if we allow this to continue there will be nothing else.
Their criticism of Steam seems pretty valid
How so?
I mean it’s not like Epic does anything to help sales, they just give devs slightly more of the money. Or at least it cannot prove that. Their store is so badly organized that the reduction in discovery and the Sweeney-created (and in fact at this point seemingly deliberate) negative association of the epic store and in particular exclusivity on it, it’s impossible for a company to judge whether the 25.7% increased money (70%->88%) is not easily eaten up by the loss in sales compared to other stores.
Valve can also trivially point to all the stuff Steam provides like forums, mod integration and streaming to justify higher cost, and Sweeney suspiciously never talks about that. I bet if he had to, he’d have to admit that he actually provides less value with his baby store considering how little devs get for the 12% taken compared to what Valve provides for the 30% they take.
Is it cool that stores take 30%? No.
Can I, as a gamer, judge whether it’s a valid amount of even one worthy of critique in particular comparing brick&mortar supply chains (his 75%-loss-criticism is a false equivalence, as the extra costs he adds existed with physical stores, too)? No, I cannot.
Does it feel to me as a gamer that I get “more” buying a game on Steam than on Epic? For sure! Sometimes I can get it cheaper on Epic, which might be worth it compared to having stuff like workshop integration or prompt updates on Steam. Or it might not be, that’s something everyone has to judge.
For me personally, my takeaway from Sweeney’s baby trantrum antics and aggressive exclusivity has been this:
- I window-shop on all digital store fronts.
- I select where to buy based on isthereanydeal, with no particular weight given to any store except a little one towards GOG because I get actual installers for offline storage there.
- However, Epic is explicitly excluded. I browse there, I take the freebies, I don’t buy there. The only money Swine-y ever got from my was the 7€ when that bug around Death Stranding happened and I didn’t realize my free game actually cost me money instead of being free.
His criticism might be valid. Or not. I cannot judge that. Regardless, he’s an asshole and his shop is terrible for me as a customer comparing the alternatives.
How so
Well
Then Sweeney adjusts his flight goggles and gets ready for takeoff on one of his pet peeves: the 30% platform fee on Steam. “There was a good case for [such fees] in the early days,” writes Sweeney, “but the scale is now high and operating costs have been driven down, while the churn of new game releases is so fast that the brief marketing or UA value the storefront provides is far disproportionate to the fee.”
Sweeney opines that, if you were to strip away the top 25 selling games on Steam, “I bet Valve made more profit from most of the next 1000 than the developer themselves made.” The maths to get there is 30% to Valve, 30% on marketing, and 15% on servers / engine costs, so “the system takes 75% and that leaves 25% for actually creating the game, worse than the retail distribution economics of the 1990s.”
Sounds valid, it’s a really high cut
“Right now, you assholes are telling the world that the strong and powerful get special terms, while 30% is for the little people,” writes Sweeney. “We’re all in for a prolonged battle if Apple tries to keep their monopoly and 30% by cutting backroom deals with big publishers to keep them quiet. Why not give ALL developers a better deal? What better way is there to convince Apple quickly that their model is now totally untenable?”
Sounds valid, making deals with the big publishers for smaller cut and taking the big cut from smaller publishers. Sounds pretty shit
Yeah but OTOH I can easily see this be discussed away. Economy of scale is very much a thing in physical distribution (so smaller board games have to set aside significantly higher percentages to manufacturing, logistics and marketing), and I lack the business knowledge to know how this does or does not translates to digital distribution.
In other words I cannot judge that, but I have two indicators to suggest it might be a thing:
- Physical distribution mirrors it.
- Sweeney is an absolutely untrustworthy source, and him so vehemently poking at it suggests it’s a false narrative.
(Plus let’s not forget that Sweeney would take a 105% cut if he could get away with, he himself is a money-greedy bastard)
I think their claims seem credible. I think Steam lowering their take shows that 30% was indeed higher than necessary. And lowering it for those selling shitloads of copies and keeping it high for smaller sellers does sound a bit backwards and scummy.
But both Epic and Valve are businesses. Of course they’re going to be greedy and scummy. I wouldn’t really expect anything else. I just think in this case the specific arguments towards Steam seem valid.
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I’ll never understand why some people look at the fact that steam is popular because of their policies, and can’t help but make a comment like this equating that popularity to cock worship.
Like, we get it bro. You’re thinking about cocks and you’re mad about a half decent game store. What compelled you to combine those thoughts on a public forum?
The weird thing is that this isn’t even the first comment I’ve seen like this. Dudes that are mad about steam want everyone else to know about steam’s massive, throbbing cock for some reason. This guy alone has posted 3 of these.
You’ve posted this exact same message letter for letter in two threads, reported as a bot.
True, only bots can copy and paste
Do you even bother to read what you write or nah?
I mean, aside from the lack of a period at the end of the sentence, the post looks grammatically correct to me. Why do you think I didn’t proofread my own post? What a silly goose
They did a lot for pc gaming and I like them, but they really should lower the % cut imho.
Agreed, but as long as there is no real competitor they have simply no incentive to do that
Competitors are out there, it’s just that not enough people care about how much of their money goes to the developer/publisher.
real competitors, there are ofcourse the niche stores like GOG, but the ones with more money like Epic, EA whatever en Ubisoft Connect just suck
There is nothing wrong with gog or epic. Even xbox is fine.
It’s because of their backend tech. Steam has some of the most efficient CDN usage in the world. How do you think you’re able to download a 60Gb game in 10 min?
It surprises me too. I suppose gamers do really like their proprietary DRM with monopolistic practices.
DRM is up to the game developers, it’s not enforced by Steam.
