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 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.
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!?
Which Carmack is the chud hack and which Carmack is the one that had his hands in Unreal Tournament
deleted by creator
Fuck does that mean there’s a third Carmack I’m forgetting about? 'Cause I’d swear there’s a Carmack in the credits for UT2k4.
deleted by creator
Y’know after wracking my brain for the past 15 minutes you might be right; I might’ve somehow mentally mondegreen’d the credits screen of Quake 3 Arena over that of Unreal 2k4
deleted by creator
What?
There’s two Carmacks in gaming and I can never keep them apart, which is a point of cognitive dissonance for me because one just held a right-winger convention and the other was one of the minds behind the now-defunct Unreal franchise that I still miss to this day.
Bro what are you smoking
This past fall’s harvest, actually; that is a perfectly cromulent question to ask for once. As it is, pretty sure my brain mixed up the credit screen for Quake 3 with UT2k4.
Not a lot of people know the troll face is used by pedo rings to identify each other. It was true back then but its common use muddied the water and gave them a lot of plausible deniability, but nowadays that it’s fallen off from common use it’s almost exclusively used as a symbol.
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.
If “Newell remained magisterially above the fray.” wasn’t hint enough this is garbage fucking journalism, this fact would tip you over the edge.
Less drama more context would be nice from headlines, but man does it feel like I’m asking too much
I do wish Steam changed their pricing policy tbh. Make it so you pay smaller % for X amount of purchases, then a higher % on purchases after that and then a yet higher % on purchases after that amount with amounts set to give better terms to small indie game makers, then be less harsh on mid size devs and then get the most operational money out of big games.
deleted by creator
A pricing structure which helps indie games doesn’t mean losing all that
Lmao common steam W
Steam community or not, the glib defense of rent-seeking behavior on lemmy.ml is wild.
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
👑
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.
people use ‘u mad bro’ like it’s some great insult. people get mad. it’s a human emotion. it exists for a reason. it’s not a glitch. anger is a motivator, and a damn good one. get mad, folks. use that energy. most people aren’t mad enough these days.
u mad bro?
maybe. whacha gonna do about?
Cry :(
With that handler? Highly unlikely (see what I did there? 😜)
See https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/u-mad, in particular the “Due to the agitating nature of the phrase, it is often considered a form of trolling.”
Removed by mod
u sound mad
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
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.
