So I really hate epic. And the Ai BS. And this moron. But I have an unpopular opinion on steam/valve.
I will say, a couple friends are game devs and they have a very negative outlook on the 30% cut. One told me that there’s something like 80 games a month added to steam and that most have a 1-5% success rate. In other words, most of these game developers are being milked by steam(punny coffee joke). So rough math aside, between the steam cut, taxes–I don’t know if the steam cut is taxed, overhead; then splitting up pay and likely getting taxed on that, you’re basically making pennies. Bantering for Valve is like bantering for Google. Think of it this way, you go to work get paid but 30% of your paycheck is taken but you get nothing out of it. And you’re told worship your employer, just like you should worship amazon and walmart.
Your friends can just request Steam keys and sell them outside of the Steam Store. Then there’s no 30% cut. That cut only applies to games and software sold on the Steam store.
Valve does offer the best features on their storefront by far, thus the 30% cut. And honestly comparable storefronts (Sony also 30%, Microsoft also 30% up until August 2021, and Nintendo also 30%) all take comparable cuts. This isn’t anything new or unique to Valve.
The real crime is that Valve requires price parity when you independently (no Steam keys) sell your game on a different store, as well as the Steam store. (“Most Favored Nation” clause.) It means that developers are allowed to pocket the profits if a game is sold on a store that has a lower percentage cut, but they aren’t allowed to share the lower cost with the customer, because that could encourage people to not use the Steam Store when buying games.
I’ve looked through court documents for this. They’re sneaky about it, but they implicitly threaten you with your game’s sales being crippled by being taken out of their recommendation algorithm. With Steam being the biggest store, that’s a death sentence for most indie developers.
The real crime is that Valve requires price parity when you independently (no Steam keys) sell your game on a different store, as well as the Steam store.
They don’t. Only if you are selling steam keys do they require price parity and only for steam key sales. You cannot sell a Steam key for less than you sell your game on Steam for. You can sell a non-Steam game key on other store fronts for any price you want.
This is what is being alleged in court by only a handful of developers but there are countless examples of the exact opposite thing being true.
They must’ve changed their tone recently, because I’ve read an actual leaked court document, and the Valve representative / employee states (very defensively) that this is what they did. There’s accounts of developers confirming this as well, including apparently in the (secret?) contract you sign when you sign up as a developer with Steam.
Link the leaked court document.
Here. And the reddit thread where I found it.
edit: Wait, lemme go ahead and quote the quotes from a previous post of mine:
If we get to a situation – again, this is rare. If we get to a situation where a partner is telling us that the price needs to be lower on other platforms than it is on Steam, then we will typically choose not to run curated marketing during times where that game is being discounted, if that is where the price is lower, or around a launch if it’s a around – if it’s a price at launch time.
and
Q. Okay. And part of these conversations is saying, hey, we’re not going to offer you curated promotions if you keep doing that, right?
A. Part of our approach, if we get to a situation where we can’t have pricing that is fair for Steam customers is not to amplify marketing with curated markets.
Q. But these conversations, as you know, also involve the threat not to keep the game on the Steam store at all; is that right?
A. That is not our typical process.
Steam/Valve are not the good guys, they seem more normal because they are not complete shit like all other large gaming companies.
The 30% cut is clearly not market driven. Network effects are not an inherent property of Steam itself.
They also pioneered lootboxes and tried to do their best to scam on refunds (typical American bullshit).
The 30% cut is clearly not market driven
How is it not? The market is gaming platforms for developers (i.e you’re not in the market as a gamer), and every other platforms are either 30% with good features, or 12% but no features.
I meant market in the real sense not the American polemical form.
A real market-driven price/cut is determined by supply and demand, the 30% figure was chosen by some American oligarchs that Valve decided to copy.
Have you ever wondered why it’s not 29.1% or 34.5% and the 30% figure never changes (other than than for well connected insiders?). How can market driven price never change, especially in a highly dynamic globalized market like gaming?
have you ever wondered why no one can provide the services Valve does for cheaper than Valve does? Is it because of their famously anticompetitive practices, their notorious lobbying and threats to politicians, their strong-arm manipulation of vendors against each other? Perhaps they have some other method of defeating market forces?
“Get nothing out of it?” Go ahead and spin up a store front that processes payments with every major channel, then come back to me in a decade when you’ve got that up and I’ll give you your next task.
Could just as easily argue it’s Valve who isn’t getting anything for your ten shovelware asset flip titles getting no sales, but they still have to pay for your overhead.
If you want to kiss valves’ ass, be my guest. A company with 300 or so employees making a 3-4 billion profit last year is the same as Uber. Everyone’s just a contractor and should be happy they use the platform. I’m not arguing if walmart or amazon is better. They both suck and they’re stores. Valve has a nice history of suck as well as all the rest, everyone turns a blind eye to this. So I’m not going to pretend they’re the good guys.
