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
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
