We researched ourselves and found out that we are the best
I’d trust a group of employees doing this out of curiosity over, say, HR doing it.
I imagine each employee crunched their own numbers using their own salaries and compared notes.
What’s the efficiency in taking 30% of almost all game sales on a platform? I know we all love valve, but the efficiency here is having a store that everyone has to use if they want to make sales at all.
Valve’s 30% is high, sure. But you’re not seeing the total cost of selling a game.
And yes, I’ve done this before.
Besides the user count, besides all other factors. Digital sales are kinda hard.
You need to offer the actual game. If you’re selling an indie game that’s a few hundred megs, well you get to go sign up for a service to deliver it. Could be as simple as a google drive link, but because this is business use you get to pay business prices.
Are they charging a flat rate per month, per gig? Per download? Some combinations?
Now there’s updates and patches that need to be delivered. Same deal as before, but also now you need to handle the actual patching. Do you ship one big patch that checks for previous patches? Small individual patches that your users have to figure out what one they need?
Does your game have multiplayer? Well damn have fun with that.
What about support and refunds and GDPR stuff? Gotta factor all of that in too.
Now we get to do payment processing. You get to pay a company to accept payments on your behalf because you are NOT doing that yourself you WILL get stuck on inane and silly laws.
That’s part of it. Paying steam 3 bucks on my 10 dollar game to handle ALL of that? Yeah that’s fair. Could it be cheaper? Sure. a lot of things could. I don’t spend months on a game and then cheap out on the most important part: sales.
My time is valuable and worth 30%
Not to mention Valve’s effort with Proton, allowing non-Windows gamers enjoy what they pay for on multiple platforms with great ease; their efforts have been massive for gaming on Linux, and without it, I wouldn’t have paid for a lot of games, earning their developers a whole lot of absolutely nothing.
Also the community hub, the workshop, the review system, the cloud saving, the functional wishlist, the gifting system, the shopping cart, the anti-cheat (you’re better of with it than without it), the discovery queue, the sales dedicated to specific types of games that actually help people discover games and drive the revenue up for the developers, the (I think) complete transaction history, the refunds system, the friends and the chat and profiles - and probably many more things that I’m either not aware of or couldn’t list off the tip of my tongue, combined with internal works that, again, do help the devs in the end.
Steam is much more than a place where one pays for a game to then simply download and play it. It’s much greater and more functional than that. None of the developers have to put their games on Steam - nobody forces Epic Games Store or GOG to be this subpar in comparison. Same way nobody forces gamers to use Steam. People use Steam because they love it - or because there’s no good-enough alternative, but that’s hardly Valve’s fault.
Steam charging 30% is not just worth it, but also surprising, given what putting your game on Steam gets you as the developer, and what it gets us, the players.
Not to mention Valve’s effort with Proton
And their VR efforts. VR seems to have lost popularity lately, but I was really glad that someone out there was competing with Palmer Luckey, especially once he sold out to Facebook.
And… holy shit, I just found out he’s Matt Gaetz’ brother in law. That explains a lot.
Nobody is arguing that valve shouldn’t be compensated for the value they provide. Many of us do, however, argue they are taking too much. Their revenue per employee being so much higher than anyone else in the market supports that argument.
Uh huh, and I’m sure you’re privy to the exact financial breakdowns?
If someone could actually provide a better service than steam at a better price point, they would. The epic games store is shit, uplay is shit, origin is shit.
Let’s not describe this as “paying valve three bucks” because that’s not accurate and is misleading.
It’s paying valve 30% of your revenue.
They didn’t frame it as “paying valve three bucks”. They said “paying valve 3 bucks on my 10 dollar game”. The phrase “paying pennies on the dollar” comes to mind as a common idiom for saying you’re paying a small fraction of the total, and neither literally means nor implies paying actual pennies.
It is misleading. It is 30% of the entire revenue of the game. And it is objective whether Valve deserves 30% of that revenue. It’s also true that games aren’t locked to the Steam platform and can absolutely make money outside of Valve’s influence. History has shown though that it is less profitable then being inside the Steam ecosystem.
You’re better off never learning how little of what you pay your food actually goes to the producer, then…
Man, Epic must be patting themselves on the back for all the money they paid getting people to believe 30% was outrageous, because it’s paying massive dividends.
It may shock you to know that before Steam, your options were to fuck off or offer your product in a store where you would only get 30% of the profit, with the rest going to the publisher, the retailer, licensing, etc. These days it’s closer to 50% for physical copies, and Apple/Nintendo/Sony/etc all standardized with Steam on you getting 70% for digital.
Don’t like it? Pull a Valve and make your own alternative that’s better. If you build it, they will come… which is why nobody uses EGS.
EGS is like walking around a grocery store offering free samples and leaving without buying anything.
I don’t believe if you build it they will come anymore. People are fucking lazy and will put up with whatever the fuck is happening with Twitter for convenience.
30% is more or less the standard. Not just in the games industry, but everywhere.
It’s actually not the standard, the standard was iirc 70% for in-store at the time. These days I think it’s closer to 50%, assuming no 3rd party losses/licensing.
Nintendo/Sony/Apple/etc are all 30% too, by the way.
Epic is 12%. Yeah, Epic store sucks and all that. Whatever. There’s two marketplaces that aren’t first party. One takes 30% and one takes 12%. How is there a standard? You can’t look to other markets or other distribution methods to compare it to, because they’re all different with their own things.
Edit: GOG is 30% for indie developers (there’s a little more to it than that, but basically that). It sounds like with other publishers/developers they negotiate contracts on a case-by-case basis and don’t say what they get.
Steam does more to promote and support games than many other platforms out there. Epic does not have workshop and forum, Google Play does not promote games as good as Steam.
The efficiency is doing it so effectively that on an open platform competitors can create there own store, pay for AAA games to appear on their store, take the smallest of pay cuts, pass it on to the consumer, and still have customers prefer to pay more to be in the Steam ecosystem. I’m against monopolies but Valve’s is absolutely efficient.
That’s not how monopolistic marketplaces like Steam (and Amazon) operate, though. They have “Platform Most Favored Nation” (PMFN) clauses in their terms that mean products sold on the platform can’t be sold cheaper elsewhere…
Which means the whole “pass it on to the consumer” can’t happen, unless a product risks being de-listed from Steam. It literally removes the ability to compete on price.
You can find games sold cheaper than in Steam in many places. You can even buy games outside of Steam and they see 0 revenue from it.
Find me a game that has been de listed from Steam because it was sold cheaper elsewhere. You can’t, so don’t bother.
Did you know that almost every other marketplace out there (except that fucked up one) has the same 30% revenue split?
The whole debacle over it is artificial. It won’t change much if it looked better to people who complain now. It won’t remove Valve’s ability to provide the best service.
There is a difference though in that you do not have to publish on Steam for your game to be available on Windows or Linux or MacOS, but you do need to use the App Store to publish on iOS, so the 30% is mandatory there.
You can host your own site, you can publish on another app store, it just makes marketing harder.
There are other game marketplaces out there, but they’re bad.
This isn’t like the Apple App store where it’s the only option on the platform. In fact, they’ve competed with Microsoft’s store on some things. It’s not even like Amazon where they strong-arm people selling things on the platform. Amazon does things like forbid anybody who sells on Amazon from selling the item at a lower price anywhere, including on their own site. I don’t think Steam has any requirements like that. Steam’s store has a huge market share because people like using Steam. AFAIK, Steam doesn’t even do exclusivity deals, which suck for the consumer but are pretty standard for games, except with their own (Valve) games, and those are rare.
Not only does Steam have a user-friendly library and a user-friendly store, if you launch a game you bought on steam but that is published by a company with a shitty launcher / store / library (EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar), Steam goes a long way to neuter the shittiness of that launcher / store / library.
Maybe a 30% cut is too big. I don’t know. It would be great if someone tried to compete with Steam while keeping the consumer-friendly approach Steam has. Maybe competition would reduce that 30% to something lower. But, most of the other game stores I know of have much less consumer-friendly approaches. The only one that’s at all similar that I know of is GOG, and I do occasionally use them, especially for old games.
except with their own (Valve) games, and those are rare.
Personally I don’t have any issue with 1st parties keeping their stuff 1st party.
It’s just that I won’t participate if I deem it useless (see Ubisoft launcher) :)
EG can keep Fortnite etc. exclusive on EGS that is their damn right.
Also developers can generate a unlimited number of Steam keys for their games that they can sell on other platforms and steam doesn’t take any money for. So you can make MyCoolGame throw it on Steam then sell copies of your game on MyCoolGame.com give your customers Steam keys and keep the whole price while still benefiting from Valve’s infrastructure to support downloads, friend lists, updates ect.
Not to mention Valve has a history of offering interest-free loans to developers to help them get their games out- and there’s not even a requirement that you have the game on steam after.
Not to mention you can generate steam keys to sell on other game stores, in which case steam gives themselves a 0% cut, despite you still using and benefiting from all their services.
I believe that valve does require that you don’t sell the game for less on other platforms. It’s one of the complaints in the lawsuit currently against them by wolfire.
Plenty of games that make good sales numbers that aren’t on steam. Obviously it makes sense to go where the users are though
Not exactly, apple forces their users to use their stores, whereas Valve just offers a better experience than the other stores out there.
There is nothing stopping you from using other stores to buy your games on, unlike the appstore.
Yes, it’s all massive profiting, driving the cost of everything up, or putting less money into the hands of the people who make the thing you like.
When I really love a game, it bothers me that valve, or apple, or Google, or Sony, take 1/3rd of the money. They don’t deserve it.
What if you could buy direct from the publisher or developer, but you could only download the game once? Let’s say you could still install it any number of times on any device so long as you had the source file in this scenario. Would you still be willing to pay $60 for a major title?
Would your willingness to buy a game change if you couldn’t get a refund in the above scenario, regardless of time played?
I used to feel a bit sad about the 30% but then I learned you get stream keys for your games for free, which makes it seem a lot more reasonable.
You have to ask steam for the keys and they can deny them. I’m sure they only refuse to give the keys if they find out you are reselling them or giving out way too many, but I still don’t like that they get to decide what “way too many” is here
they explicitly do give out keys for resale. Steam Keys are a free service we provide to developers as a convenient tool to help you sell your game on other stores and at retail
Revenue per head is no doubt a sexy metric, especially for private companies. If it was a public company then investors would call for the company to try and grow its overall profits by spending more on growth related initiatives… Perhaps by releasing half-life 3 for example, lol.
The great thing about keeping your company private is that you can get it just where you like and keep it there no matter what outside parties want. I could totally see Gaben is perfectly satisfied making bank at this level while also having a chill lifestyle.
Why is money per employer a better metric than customer satisfaction?
Should an owner be more proud of their yatch size or of being a role model for customers not other millionaires? What’s their passion really, money or what they do for a living?
We clearly know where valve wants to be. I’m just surprised it’s a company that stands out.
Fuck shareholders.
When your employees are so efficient they start using their spare time to audit each other’s efficiency on an industry-wide metric.
I have heard that its not too hard to start your own project when working at valve.
Maybe it will turn into their next game, or a new steam feature or it will get canned.
Is that still accurate? Their employees handbook was legendary a decade ago, but since then there have been rumours that this isn’t the case any longer, and that there were significant problems behind the scenes.
I think you can still work on whatever you want as long as GabeN wants it too.
I mean they have a finance team for sure, so I guess this is their job… However Steam does a really good job to stay in its borders of where they can provide a good service and do not milk the cow until half live 09 where they just repeat the story of half live 1-3 in a poor way
“So we’re getting pay rises, right?” Annakin.gif “Right?”
You should dive down the rabbit hole. Valve does not have a workplace like anything you’ve seen before, and the pay is just as fucked.
How much did they compensate that bald man who they installed a valve in the back of his head for the loading screen photo?
My favourite factoid about that is that the minister of finance in Greece who was in charge during the Greek Debt Crisis was Yanis Varoufakis, the former economist-in-residence at Valve.
Afaik he still praises their anarchist corporate management structure. Haven’t really looked into it, but if true kind of an L from a guy i really like otherwise
Woah woah woah, really?
I stumbled across a bunch of economic videos featuring him in the past. Yanis and Steam in the same sentence was never something I was expecting to see lol
