Steam feeling the financial heat of their unfair revenue split

The fact is that we have proof that devs will just abandon something if the userbase is too small (regardless of the size of said developer), Games For Windows Live being the main culprit, a few games are practically unplayable now as a result.

So the reality is if you don't want to lose access to your library in an increasingly digital life, you have to put up with a monopoly, i won't be trusting EA, Bethesda or Ubisoft to run their systems for as long as Steam can. It's fundamentally awkward to admit it, but frankly Valve has done little to annoy me over the decade i've been on the system and they seem to have a liberal (the actual term) idealogy when it comes to their store.

Clearly Microsoft want's to close down it's system at some point and it'll be hugely damaging, I can only assume Gabe knew that ages ago.
 
Gimpymoo said:
This.

And has been the case for some time to be honest so not sure why it is "news" now.

You are paying for "access to market" which in "business to business" transactions is far from uncommon.

People think "30%, what a rip off". In what other business do businesses pay a one off fee to a service provider and have access to that service indefinitely? it sounds mad but that is what Valve do with Steam.

Release your game, no extra charge for downloading, EVER.
You release an update for your game, no charge.
Give away Steam keys yourself, NO CHARGE for activation.

Who pays for payment processing, Valve.
Who pays staff to handle billing problems, Valve.
Who deals with chargebacks, Valve.

All these man hours could mean if a single transaction has a single problem, the 30% could be wiped out.

ALSO, if a 4 man dev team ever has to deal with such issues at some point, they would gladly give 30% to know it is all sorted as it would cost them as a business more than 30%.

With smaller titles, the risk is higher as man hours are a fixed rate, so a £4 game with a single transaction problem would yield NEGATIVE income.

Also, the 30% applies to Steam store purchases only.

While here, can we talk about the other "ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM".

CD key sites?

They give ZERO to Valve yet profit from their service, these scumbags do not even have to handle downloads and the costs of maintaining file servers in multiple countries or paying for bandwidth.

People would change their tune if the option was:
"15% commission across the board and redeemed keys are charged at 15% of current selling price".

Again, VALVE do not charge developers/publishers for Steam activations if they themselves distribute the keys.

It is all not as "black and white" as many believe it is.

When you consider each "sale" means possible "lifetime support" in terms of keeping download available, dev pushing out update to your (Valves) clients, 30% is not a great deal.

The 25-30% has been "the" figure since the digital delivery games market began and lets be honest, I do not want to go back to MANUAL PATCH DOWNLOADS.. and "Mismatch version" errors when joining servers just to save a few quid. **** that.

Valve have remained an independent company AND laid the groundwork for a solid system over many many years and did that with one eye on the "prize" and they deserve that. HOWEVER, they also had one eye on how devs were treated being devs themselves, ESPECIALLY AFTER THE HELL THEY WENT THROUGH WITH SIERRA/VIVENDI Universal who oddly were acquired by ACTIVISION who would relish having a monopoly.

They were investing in digital delivery when the "shareholders and suits" were laughing at them.

People say Valve are a monopoly. Who have they purchased to become a monopoly?

If Valve/Steam is a monopoly, who let it happen?

Consumers and Developers chose them and the popularity of PC gaming over the last 15 years is in part contributed to Valve as they are the ones who made it "simple" when everyone else was sat around scratching their ***.

Some people need to be careful what they wish for as the PC would be a dark place devoid of life if we had to rely on "Windows 10 Store" for our gaming fix.

Also, Valve do not care about "Exclusivity" which is a disease on the industry and if they were a "true" monopoly, they would insist on.
Also, I doubt Valve are "Feeling the heat" as per the op, am sure they are doing fine :D

Fake news is fake news though I guess.
Wow, that was a long rant. Am sure there is some truths in there somewhere :D
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Great post, 100% agreed.

I hate people complaining about steam being a monopoly. First, it is complete nonsense, because there is ton of competition that steam has - not just GOG, Origins and others, but also consoles (yes they also compete with PC games for people's time and money) and cd key resellers. The only way Steam could be a monopoly is if government outlawed every other service besides Steam through threat of violence by law.

Second, it has DOMINANT POSITION (not a monopoly) on PC gaming market because PEOPLE CHOSE IT VOLUNTARILY due to its superior service. And there is nothing whatsoever wrong with that.

And Steam still offers million features that no other store/service provides, both to gamers and developers.
 
I'm sort of slightly bemused at the idea that the retailer/distributor/server provider getting 30% is bad.

In the retail distribution world the split would likely have been closer to 30% to the publisher and 70% (of the RRP at least) to the other parts in the chain, you can be fairly sure that the publishers are getting far more of the end return from their Steam deals than they did back when you bought physical discs, or even "retail" copies today were you might only get a box with a CD key in it.
And as has been said for smaller publishers that 30% buys them an awful lot that would cost them far more as a percentage of their income* than a fixed fee to steam.

Steam for their 30% are basically getting the traditional "retailers cut" (or less) then throwing in everything else that in physical distribution also had to be done, as well as support and patch servers the publishers used to have to pay for and even a degree of advertising on a platform where the people you are trying to sell to, actually see the adverts.


*Payment processing (IIRC something like 2% if you're big enough to get the best deals due to the volume of payments), some level of customer support, certain parts of the accounting process, download server costs, and DRM/log in system costs etc.
 
MrMarvelous said:
I'll only use Steam and Origin at a push. If a game comes out with a separate launcher that isn't one of the above then I simply won't play it.
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I'm quite happy using Steam. Can't really complain about Battle.net. I'll even use UPlay at a push. But games on Origin or the Epic Launcher have to be really good if I'm to suffer those bits of software in order to play them.
 
Werewolf said:
I'm sort of slightly bemused at the idea that the retailer/distributor/server provider getting 30% is bad.

In the retail distribution world the split would likely have been closer to 30% to the publisher and 70% (of the RRP at least) to the other parts in the chain, you can be fairly sure that the publishers are getting far more of the end return from their Steam deals than they did back when you bought physical discs, or even "retail" copies today were you might only get a box with a CD key in it.
And as has been said for smaller publishers that 30% buys them an awful lot that would cost them far more as a percentage of their income* than a fixed fee to steam.

Steam for their 30% are basically getting the traditional "retailers cut" (or less) then throwing in everything else that in physical distribution also had to be done, as well as support and patch servers the publishers used to have to pay for and even a degree of advertising on a platform where the people you are trying to sell to, actually see the adverts.


*Payment processing (IIRC something like 2% if you're big enough to get the best deals due to the volume of payments), some level of customer support, certain parts of the accounting process, download server costs, and DRM/log in system costs etc.
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I agree mate. But times change I suppose and companies want to keep as much profit as possible I suppose.
 
30% seems to be the default (started by Apple, I presume) and considering the reach and reliability of software platforms these days I don't think that's particularly unreasonable. Of course, whether anyone can find you on those platforms is a different matter. However it's the same for all creatives, surely?

Unless you're a Big Name, if you write a book you'll be lucky to keep 15% of book sales and maybe more on e-book sales. Most books are written by folk with 'proper' jobs; I imagine it's not much different to most other creative types.
 
Andrew_McP said:
30% seems to be the default (started by Apple, I presume) and considering the reach and reliability of software platforms these days I don't think that's particularly unreasonable. Of course, whether anyone can find you on those platforms is a different matter. However it's the same for all creatives, surely?

Unless you're a Big Name, if you write a book you'll be lucky to keep 15% of book sales and maybe more on e-book sales. Most books are written by folk with 'proper' jobs; I imagine it's not much different to most other creative types.
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Steam predates the app store.
 
GoogalyMoogaly said:
I'm quite happy using Steam. Can't really complain about Battle.net. I'll even use UPlay at a push. But games on Origin or the Epic Launcher have to be really good if I'm to suffer those bits of software in order to play them.
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Yeah battle.net is decent, I also like Galaxy. Not used UPlay in ages, I would have hoped it would have improved by now but I guess not... I've used the Epic launcher once and found that dreadful. Haven't used Origin for years, not actively avoided it just haven't wanted to buy anything that I'd need it for.

Well I like this thread anyway, its one of those rare occasions where I've started with one opinion and completely changed my mind.
 
Now Epic games are also launching their own PC store returning 88% to the developers or publishers. They are also giving away major PC games for free when the service starts!
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/epic-games-is-starting-a-store-to-rival-steam/

More details from Tim Sweeney here where he also mentions Epic will be funding these giveaways games themselves so the developer will get something back as well! He also calls out Valve for taking so much money from Steam (300-400% more!!).
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...-with-88-percent-revenue-share-for-developers

"Q: Why is the 30/70 revenue split that seems to have been the industry standard not appropriate here?

Tim Sweeney: While running Fortnite we learned a lot about the cost of running a digital store on PC. The math is quite simple: we pay around 2.5% for payment processing for major payment methods, less than 1.5% for CDN costs (assuming all games are updated as often as Fortnite), and between 1% and 2% for variable operating and customer support costs. Fixed costs of developing and supporting the platform become negligible at a large scale. In our analysis, stores charging 30% are marking up their costs by 300% to 400%. But with developers receiving 88% of revenue and Epic receiving 12%, this store will be a profitable business for us."
 
AWPC said:
Now Epic games are also launching their own PC store returning 88% to the developers or publishers. They are also giving away major PC games for free when the service starts!
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/epic-games-is-starting-a-store-to-rival-steam/

More details from Tim Sweeney here where he also mentions Epic will be funding these giveaways games themselves so the developer will get something back as well! He also calls out Valve for taking so much money from Steam (300-400% more!!).
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...-with-88-percent-revenue-share-for-developers

"Q: Why is the 30/70 revenue split that seems to have been the industry standard not appropriate here?

Tim Sweeney: While running Fortnite we learned a lot about the cost of running a digital store on PC. The math is quite simple: we pay around 2.5% for payment processing for major payment methods, less than 1.5% for CDN costs (assuming all games are updated as often as Fortnite), and between 1% and 2% for variable operating and customer support costs. Fixed costs of developing and supporting the platform become negligible at a large scale. In our analysis, stores charging 30% are marking up their costs by 300% to 400%. But with developers receiving 88% of revenue and Epic receiving 12%, this store will be a profitable business for us."
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Interesting. Maybe steam will eventually have to lower theirs in the future. But I doubt it will be any time soon as they just essentially lowered it to 20% for sales over 10 million dollars. For 8% you would be getting a much bigger audience.
 
AWPC said:
70/30% before now its going to be 75/25% only AFTER the first $10M though! No wonder all the big new games are using their own launchers & services. Valve were making a LOT of money for doing very little except distributing the content & managing patches.

I think as time goes on less & less of the bigger games will use Steam clearly its way too expensive & cheaper to just build your own platform!
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I thought steam cut has always been 30% …:confused:
 
Oh yes, Epic...

That wonderful charitable company.

Oh, and their parent company has a net income of OVER 8 BILLION pounds, yes, they are clearly driven to save people money.

They are taking less in an effort to get a foothold so when the time comes, they can charge more.

Valve are the ones who are independent with no shareholders to feed.
 
StriderX said:
"not doing very much" ? Are you serious? A storefront like Steam that works almost flawlessly for nearly a decade (in it's more recent form, obv older) isn't "doing much"...
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there was a period of time couple of years ago where steam would regularly play up for many users. and the only thing i mostly noticed is their bandwith used to be poop.
 
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