Here we go again. Armchair economists bleating “why everything cost money, corporate bad” with no actual expertise to back it up. Steam is not a parasitic middle man, it is a collection of services that would have to be provisioned and operated by the developer otherwise.
A massive infrastructure to store and deliver the game and its updates, worldwide, and at an acceptable bandwidth that Valve operates
A storefront that enables monetizing the game
The audience and discoverability that would not exist otherwise
The Steam API, achievements, cloud saves
The client itself, content management, validation, and Linux compatibility tools
Network and operational security
(edit) Also keep in mind that Steam and its services are operated by experts. A game developer would have to hire the experts or get training.
The real question with these issues is not whether you can install other software with some effort, but whether you can start a competing app store that, if better than Google’s, can outcompete Google.
Right now you can’t get the same deal from the makers of Android and phone manufacturers as the Google Play owners, and that is why it’s said the market is monopolistic.
Their Deck is still technically niche and yet somehow I can still pretty much install whatever I want in desktop mode, and can even make links in steam to them. (You can even put Epic on it, but that takes a bit of a work around).
The Community > Discussions page for a game is one of Steam’s most underrated features. The amount of times I’ve wanted to know something super specific about a game prior to buying and found exactly the info I was looking for in the Discussions page. Oftentimes with developer comments on said feature clearly labeled. So clutch.
It’s not the nicest place in the world, but it reminds me of Gamefaqs back in its hay day. I found advice there recently over yet another bad SE port crashing.
I don’t think that’s exactly how it works… It isn’t just the value of the game, it’s the exposure and distribution that it gets just for being on Steam. I imagine that’s well worth the 30% to most, which is why most devs seem OK with it.
It does seem slightly high to this non-expert, but I don’t really know enough to say for sure that it’s anti-competitive or anything.
It’s not slightly high when you realize that someone has to pay for bandwidth, advertising, licensing fees etc. IGN (please take that with a grain of salt) has an infographic about this from an article awhile back. I feel like it explains fairly well that the industry standard is 30% and that only a handful of stores actually provide anything below that. And Nintendo particularly is reported to take 30-40% depending. I can appreciate that people are naturally distrustful of any large company. I can appreciate that steam doesn’t get it right 100% of the time and there are valid criticisms of it’s business practices and decisions over time. But on the other hand, this has always seemed like a nothing burger to me.
When you buy a digital key at Walmart or Best Buy or Game Stop, they get a 30% cut too.
It’s not even 30% of all sales: “Valve even adjusted Steam’s rates late last year in what seemed to be a response to the pressure from Epic, but this change is likely only impactful to major developers. After $10 million in sales through Steam, Valve’s cut drops to 25% on all new sales, and drops again to 20% on sales after $50 million. For reference, earning $10 million would mean selling just under 170k copies of a $60 game, and far more for independent games that are rarely that expensive.”
That explanation makes a lot more sense for AAA who are very likely using significantly more bandwidth (due to data bloat in their games, day-1 updates), and are much more likely to be making millions.
For indie not so much, and it seems odd that there isn’t even some general incentive for games with lower requirements. Then again, using a platform like itch instead (possibly geared more towards bundles) or even going with some other payment method (donations) might just make more sense in that case.
On one hand, Itch.io is supposed to be for indie games and while I personally have not got any experience with their platform their model does seem to be pretty incentivised towards developers if the only thing those developers care about is getting more profit from the games they are able to sell.
However, on balance, indie game developers don’t often have the budget to create the kind of hype around a game that would push most consumers to buy it from just itch.io. So it’s in the best interest of lots of indie developers to make their game as accessible as possible and go where the users are.
In that respect steam (and Microsoft and Sony) are the places to go. Of those three steam has less active competition from their company for games than either of the other platforms. Indies aren’t competing against Valve games the way they are against Sony or Microsoft produced games on the relevant platforms.
At this point I’ve backed 4 games on Kickstarter or in one case the developer site, and I am very happy with each of them. They have (all except one) offered keys on steam, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony. Even when they didn’t release on all those platforms at the same time. Two of them I have purchased on a separate platform after receiving a key on my chosen platform so I can play those games in multiple places.
On the other hand, I don’t necessarily like that Indies probably won’t see the same benefit of paying less per unit served after selling $10 million and again after an additional $5 million (Valve drops their percentage from 30% to 25% after a developer sells $10million worth of units and again to 20% for every copy sold after selling an addition $5 million sold on steam).
This I feel is a boon to big development firms that not a whole lot of Indies can take advantage of. So there is definitely room for improvement there.
The infrastructure and services they provide (outside of an advertising monopoly), do not cost, and are not worth anywhere near 30%.
Think about how much effort and time goes into developing a game, and then think about how much time and effort go into hosting the download files for that game and providing a forum. It’s not 30%.
They should get more than credit card transaction fees, but nowhere near 30%. I expect Epic would be quite profitable at 12% if they hadn’t invested in a terrible exclusive strategy that people hated.
They distribute files, automate one click installs on Windows/Linux/Mac, they automate compatibly for non-Windows installs, they offer cloud saves, and they offer unlimited downloads and installs of games.
That’s a massive amount of infrastructure that makes sure games sold through Steam are playable for decades.
If you remember before distribution platforms you would see a game for sale at full price on disk for 6mo to a year, then IF there were any disks left they would slowly decrease in price until they eventually hit the $5 bin. After that the game was just unavailable to you and not generating any revenue for the developer.
On top of all of that, 30% is the cut that Physical stores take while offering NOTHING to the devs.
Success is not illegal. In Valve and Gaben’s case, it’s deserved, and probably as clean as you’ll ever see.
I firmly believe that Steam has allowed fair competition to exist. Epic had the greatest chance to become viable competition, but they fumbled the store’s launch, poached Metro Exodus and fucked over the people who preordered, did not have the foresight to implement some kind of preloading for Borderlands 3, and pissed people off when they refused to allow non-exclusive indie games to exist on the store while they made an exception for Cyberpunk 2077. In that time, the only thing that Valve did that might have hurt EGS is refuse to host store pages and ads for games that weren’t going to launch on their platform. Shortly after that, Valve released the Steam Deck (the most pro-consumer handheld I’ve seen to date), SteamOS (free), Proton (free), DXVK (free), Gamescope (free), and have contributed (for free) to upstream projects like Wine. Of all the billionaires, Gaben is the only one I can think of that I’m okay with being a billionaire.
You are one of the few who share my exact same feelings toward Epic as compared to Steam. I intentionally have never, and will never, have any of my money go to Epic for the shady “exclusivity deals” they made with shitty devs, to poach business from Steam. I only just now bought Metro: Exodus, in Steam, because of their lead dev’s comments to the backlash they faced when pulling it from Steam.
You missed something, however. If I recall Epic did all the things you mentioned, but also was caught stealing user data from Steam .dat files found on the machine.
Y’all wanna know what anti-competitive business practices look like? Turn your gaze toward EGS, cause that’s what it looks like. Steam is the beast it is thanks to Gabe and the work of talented devs over the last 20 years. Make better products, get more loyal consumers!
Sucks that so many misinformed consumers/devs conflate success from better products with success from monopolistic actions. But then again, we got another 4 years of tRump due to that illiteracy so…
Success is not illegal. In Valve and Gaben’s case, it’s deserved, and probably as clean as you’ll ever see.
Fuck off. Steam is a third party proprietary launcher that promotes gambling to kids. We are on the verge of a climate disaster and people are getting poorer every year that goes by. A fleet of mega yachts is a smack on everyone and the planet.
Making billions off a proprietary app targeted at kids and spending the money on yacht it’s not success, it’s greed and mental illness. You do not make billions in a clean way.
Steam promotes gambling to kids? Care to elaborate? Are you referring to the playing cards? Because certainly you don’t mean CS:GO shit. Because I’ve never seen that on Steam.
If you’re so passionate about the subject, why don’t you redirect that energy into making a real change? Join a protest, call a politician, get organized, instead of engaging in tired, empty, useless whataboutisms on the internet.
Valve has about 100 employees, Steam is operated by about 40, but I would love to have a source on the “generational wealth” part. Most of the income is likely spent on operational costs, like the aforementioned massive CDN infrastructure. If you’ve never worked in corporate-level networking, it might elude you how ridiculously fucking expensive stuff gets, especially at a worldwide scale.
it might elude you how ridiculously fucking expensive stuff gets
I don’t know how that scales to worldwide CDN setup, but I work with a company who has presense on multiple countries and they drop casually 150-200k to few servers alone which provide services for at maximum for couple of thousand users. Networking, labor, power and things like that not included, just the hardware in a cardboard boxes.
Obviously there’s a ton of factors on this and I can’t elaborate our setup any further for obvious reasons, but just to give some scale how expensive things can get I can share my very real world experience. And that setup is pretty much the low end on the spectrum. 10k a month for a any as-a-service setup is almost a rounding error even with relatively low user count.
Serving anything to 100+ million people globally is a whole another beast. Wikipedia is a decent comparison, running a single website which looks like relatively simple to the end user (and oh boy it is not, but your Joe Average doesn’t know nor care about that) takes around 170 million dollars per year just on operating costs.
I don’t have any kind of opionion if that 30% is reasonable, but I do know that running that beast is not cheap and the money needs to come from somewhere. And as a customer, Steam just offers me what I want in a package which is the best one around, so they’ll keep getting my pennies until something better comes along. And I’m very aware that their service is not perfect and that I don’t really own anything on their platform, but for me in the current state in my life, they just provide the best bang for my buck and for the very limited time I have to spend with gaming.
Here we go again. Armchair economists bleating “why everything cost money, corporate bad” with no actual expertise to back it up. Steam is not a parasitic middle man, it is a collection of services that would have to be provisioned and operated by the developer otherwise.
That’s where the cut goes.
People should really read the Steamworks documentation to get an idea of the absurd amount of services Steam offers https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/home
Yeah, I think the big difference between Steam and Google Play and the App Store is that Steam does not own Windows and has actual competition.
I think asking for a cut just because you own the OS is despicable, but Steam is actually providing a service.
Steam does own SteamOS but they also bundle a third party software repo (flathub).
You bring up a good point, why are consoles not being forced to allow other app stores like phones?
Idk, I use a Google Pixel. For the OS I use GraphineOS and for app stores I have obtainium plus Accrescent
The real question with these issues is not whether you can install other software with some effort, but whether you can start a competing app store that, if better than Google’s, can outcompete Google.
Right now you can’t get the same deal from the makers of Android and phone manufacturers as the Google Play owners, and that is why it’s said the market is monopolistic.
Well F-Droid is popular and you can just download apks, thats what epic games did (simply distributing their store as an apk)
Their Deck is still technically niche and yet somehow I can still pretty much install whatever I want in desktop mode, and can even make links in steam to them. (You can even put Epic on it, but that takes a bit of a work around).
And all the community features for the consumers.
The Community > Discussions page for a game is one of Steam’s most underrated features. The amount of times I’ve wanted to know something super specific about a game prior to buying and found exactly the info I was looking for in the Discussions page. Oftentimes with developer comments on said feature clearly labeled. So clutch.
It’s not the nicest place in the world, but it reminds me of Gamefaqs back in its hay day. I found advice there recently over yet another bad SE port crashing.
That’s all nice, but you’re dreaming if you think any of that adds up to 30% of the value of a video game.
I don’t think that’s exactly how it works… It isn’t just the value of the game, it’s the exposure and distribution that it gets just for being on Steam. I imagine that’s well worth the 30% to most, which is why most devs seem OK with it.
It does seem slightly high to this non-expert, but I don’t really know enough to say for sure that it’s anti-competitive or anything.
It’s not slightly high when you realize that someone has to pay for bandwidth, advertising, licensing fees etc. IGN (please take that with a grain of salt) has an infographic about this from an article awhile back. I feel like it explains fairly well that the industry standard is 30% and that only a handful of stores actually provide anything below that. And Nintendo particularly is reported to take 30-40% depending. I can appreciate that people are naturally distrustful of any large company. I can appreciate that steam doesn’t get it right 100% of the time and there are valid criticisms of it’s business practices and decisions over time. But on the other hand, this has always seemed like a nothing burger to me.
When you buy a digital key at Walmart or Best Buy or Game Stop, they get a 30% cut too.
It’s not even 30% of all sales: “Valve even adjusted Steam’s rates late last year in what seemed to be a response to the pressure from Epic, but this change is likely only impactful to major developers. After $10 million in sales through Steam, Valve’s cut drops to 25% on all new sales, and drops again to 20% on sales after $50 million. For reference, earning $10 million would mean selling just under 170k copies of a $60 game, and far more for independent games that are rarely that expensive.”
That explanation makes a lot more sense for AAA who are very likely using significantly more bandwidth (due to data bloat in their games, day-1 updates), and are much more likely to be making millions.
For indie not so much, and it seems odd that there isn’t even some general incentive for games with lower requirements. Then again, using a platform like itch instead (possibly geared more towards bundles) or even going with some other payment method (donations) might just make more sense in that case.
On one hand, Itch.io is supposed to be for indie games and while I personally have not got any experience with their platform their model does seem to be pretty incentivised towards developers if the only thing those developers care about is getting more profit from the games they are able to sell.
However, on balance, indie game developers don’t often have the budget to create the kind of hype around a game that would push most consumers to buy it from just itch.io. So it’s in the best interest of lots of indie developers to make their game as accessible as possible and go where the users are.
In that respect steam (and Microsoft and Sony) are the places to go. Of those three steam has less active competition from their company for games than either of the other platforms. Indies aren’t competing against Valve games the way they are against Sony or Microsoft produced games on the relevant platforms.
At this point I’ve backed 4 games on Kickstarter or in one case the developer site, and I am very happy with each of them. They have (all except one) offered keys on steam, Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony. Even when they didn’t release on all those platforms at the same time. Two of them I have purchased on a separate platform after receiving a key on my chosen platform so I can play those games in multiple places.
On the other hand, I don’t necessarily like that Indies probably won’t see the same benefit of paying less per unit served after selling $10 million and again after an additional $5 million (Valve drops their percentage from 30% to 25% after a developer sells $10million worth of units and again to 20% for every copy sold after selling an addition $5 million sold on steam).
This I feel is a boon to big development firms that not a whole lot of Indies can take advantage of. So there is definitely room for improvement there.
It’s a monopoly on exposure.
The infrastructure and services they provide (outside of an advertising monopoly), do not cost, and are not worth anywhere near 30%.
Think about how much effort and time goes into developing a game, and then think about how much time and effort go into hosting the download files for that game and providing a forum. It’s not 30%.
They should get more than credit card transaction fees, but nowhere near 30%. I expect Epic would be quite profitable at 12% if they hadn’t invested in a terrible exclusive strategy that people hated.
You think all Steam does is distribute files?
They distribute files, automate one click installs on Windows/Linux/Mac, they automate compatibly for non-Windows installs, they offer cloud saves, and they offer unlimited downloads and installs of games.
That’s a massive amount of infrastructure that makes sure games sold through Steam are playable for decades.
If you remember before distribution platforms you would see a game for sale at full price on disk for 6mo to a year, then IF there were any disks left they would slowly decrease in price until they eventually hit the $5 bin. After that the game was just unavailable to you and not generating any revenue for the developer.
On top of all of that, 30% is the cut that Physical stores take while offering NOTHING to the devs.
You forget to mention the cut that goes into the ceo billion dollar worth fleet of mega yachts
https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/gabe-newell-luxury-yachts.php
Success is not illegal. In Valve and Gaben’s case, it’s deserved, and probably as clean as you’ll ever see.
I firmly believe that Steam has allowed fair competition to exist. Epic had the greatest chance to become viable competition, but they fumbled the store’s launch, poached Metro Exodus and fucked over the people who preordered, did not have the foresight to implement some kind of preloading for Borderlands 3, and pissed people off when they refused to allow non-exclusive indie games to exist on the store while they made an exception for Cyberpunk 2077. In that time, the only thing that Valve did that might have hurt EGS is refuse to host store pages and ads for games that weren’t going to launch on their platform. Shortly after that, Valve released the Steam Deck (the most pro-consumer handheld I’ve seen to date), SteamOS (free), Proton (free), DXVK (free), Gamescope (free), and have contributed (for free) to upstream projects like Wine. Of all the billionaires, Gaben is the only one I can think of that I’m okay with being a billionaire.
You are one of the few who share my exact same feelings toward Epic as compared to Steam. I intentionally have never, and will never, have any of my money go to Epic for the shady “exclusivity deals” they made with shitty devs, to poach business from Steam. I only just now bought Metro: Exodus, in Steam, because of their lead dev’s comments to the backlash they faced when pulling it from Steam.
You missed something, however. If I recall Epic did all the things you mentioned, but also was caught stealing user data from Steam .dat files found on the machine.
Y’all wanna know what anti-competitive business practices look like? Turn your gaze toward EGS, cause that’s what it looks like. Steam is the beast it is thanks to Gabe and the work of talented devs over the last 20 years. Make better products, get more loyal consumers!
Sucks that so many misinformed consumers/devs conflate success from better products with success from monopolistic actions. But then again, we got another 4 years of tRump due to that illiteracy so…
Fuck off. Steam is a third party proprietary launcher that promotes gambling to kids. We are on the verge of a climate disaster and people are getting poorer every year that goes by. A fleet of mega yachts is a smack on everyone and the planet.
Making billions off a proprietary app targeted at kids and spending the money on yacht it’s not success, it’s greed and mental illness. You do not make billions in a clean way.
Steam promotes gambling to kids? Care to elaborate? Are you referring to the playing cards? Because certainly you don’t mean CS:GO shit. Because I’ve never seen that on Steam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_box
If you’re so passionate about the subject, why don’t you redirect that energy into making a real change? Join a protest, call a politician, get organized, instead of engaging in tired, empty, useless whataboutisms on the internet.
Same goes for you, we are on lemmy on a thread about a lawsuit against steam, go worship billionares in their proprietary platforms.
Steam employs like 100 people, they could take 5% and still make generational wealth year on year
Valve has about 100 employees, Steam is operated by about 40, but I would love to have a source on the “generational wealth” part. Most of the income is likely spent on operational costs, like the aforementioned massive CDN infrastructure. If you’ve never worked in corporate-level networking, it might elude you how ridiculously fucking expensive stuff gets, especially at a worldwide scale.
I don’t know how that scales to worldwide CDN setup, but I work with a company who has presense on multiple countries and they drop casually 150-200k to few servers alone which provide services for at maximum for couple of thousand users. Networking, labor, power and things like that not included, just the hardware in a cardboard boxes.
Obviously there’s a ton of factors on this and I can’t elaborate our setup any further for obvious reasons, but just to give some scale how expensive things can get I can share my very real world experience. And that setup is pretty much the low end on the spectrum. 10k a month for a any as-a-service setup is almost a rounding error even with relatively low user count.
Serving anything to 100+ million people globally is a whole another beast. Wikipedia is a decent comparison, running a single website which looks like relatively simple to the end user (and oh boy it is not, but your Joe Average doesn’t know nor care about that) takes around 170 million dollars per year just on operating costs.
I don’t have any kind of opionion if that 30% is reasonable, but I do know that running that beast is not cheap and the money needs to come from somewhere. And as a customer, Steam just offers me what I want in a package which is the best one around, so they’ll keep getting my pennies until something better comes along. And I’m very aware that their service is not perfect and that I don’t really own anything on their platform, but for me in the current state in my life, they just provide the best bang for my buck and for the very limited time I have to spend with gaming.
They clear like 2 billion in profit a year
Valve is not publicly traded. We don’t know. (Unless it became public information through a lawsuit or was leaked. In which case: Source pls.)