Sweeney's point has been missed. Like visa and MasterCard, Valve adds very little into the chain: all three are parasitic rent seekers, and valve is worse because they take 30%. It is a slam highlighting how little valve does for gaming in general given how much they take from it.
I'll just quote this, since there's not really any way I can do better:
They handle:
- Credit card processing, including payment processing for every payment processor in every country
- Historically, giving you literally hundreds of thousands of front page impressions -- not sure if they still guarantee this but historically they did; I know they currently guarantee tons of patch update impressions on the front page
- Unlimited keys for external sales which they take 0% on
- All handling of refunds and chargebacks
- A marketplace for item content, which they only take 10% on
- A marketplace for trading cards, which are free for developers, where each sale they take 10% on
- Custom art and promotion in major sale events
- Hosting every download and redownload, all patches and patch downloads, all costs associated with patch certification
- Hosting preloads
- Closed beta tests and interactive branching for deployment
- Cloud saves and storage for all your users in perpetuity
- Coupons and targeted user contacts
- A pretty effective anti-cheat system, yours for free
- A community discussion forum and an unlimited supply of free labour to moderate it if you need it
- Purchase support in every major language
- Steam Days
- Matchmaking
- Leaderboards
- Several engine tech stacks, including the major tech stack for VR, completely free
- An audience of 100 million users
Of course you might say you can do without some of these and roll your own for some of these (also, when you discontinue your roll-your-own service 3 years from now because you can't afford it, I hope you enjoy an unending torrent of complaints for your customers because you demanded not to have to pay 30%). But the idea that "lol if u add up mastercard and my cdn costs steam ain't worth 30%" is stupid as hell.
The monopoly / monopsony arguments seem totally incoherent; maybe 6 or 7 of the the 10 biggest games on PC aren't on Steam at all.
(Except to note that the "Several engine tech stacks, including the major tech stack for VR, completely free" really is very significant, even outside the obvious stuff which most enthusiasts know about like VR)
You are completely and utterly wrong. Steam does more than any of them for its users, without asking them for a monthly fee. And, as outlined above, it does at least as much for developers too.Could the same charges be levelled at Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft? IDK to be honest. Steam just seems to be a kinda crappy digital storefront, could be wrong tho.
Consumers clueless about Steam's offerings to devs, quelle surprise.In conclusion, you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
Sweeney's point has been missed. Like visa and MasterCard, Valve adds very little into the chain: all three are parasitic rent seekers, and valve is worse because they take 30%. It is a slam highlighting how little valve does for gaming in general given how much they take from it.
Could the same charges be levelled at Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft? IDK to be honest. Steam just seems to be a kinda crappy digital storefront, could be wrong tho.
The image is worldwide but League, World of Tanks, Overwatch, and World of Warcraft are all huge in the west. Battle.net will probably give Steam a run for it's money if they keep adding Activision's biggest games on to it.I am guessing that Western markets is the topic on Sweeney's mind, unless that is exclusively what the image refers to? Blizz doesn't even handle their own distribution in China, which makes things a bit fuzzy.
Well it shouldn't be 30% but it also should be more than credit cards. Credit cards don't have to send TBs of data to their clients indefinitely.
How are people in this thread surprised by an industry standard cut?
XBL and PSN take the same cut AND have a monthly fee.
lol
Haven't seen anyone mention it or maybe I missed it but Sweeney's Keynote at Devcom at Gamescom focused on this topic.
gamesindustry.biz paraphrases parts of his speech.
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl...a-huge-amount-of-profit-at-developers-expense
He clearly seems to think that all online merchants (not just Steam) are taking advantage of developers. He also seems to think that these storefronts are doing less than they used to but still charging the same cuts.
Every Steam thread is.
I guess in a way that tells you just how successful it is -- and, just maybe -- how much it irks some people when they defend a company for e.g. requiring an (increasing) monthly fee for online gameplay or cloud saves and others can point to Steam to show that this is, in spite of all the arguments, in fact not at all a necessity.
Going to quote myself from the top of this page:
Steam charges the same rate as Sony's, Microsoft's, Apple's, Google's, Amazon's, and even Epic's (read: Tim Sweeney's ) digital app/games stores.
Digital purchases on my PC should be less than a console which subsidizes hardware cost and marketing from publishing fees.
I feel like 15-20% should be the ballpark, especially as the compute, networking, and storage costs has dropped significantly since Steam started.
The reason Steam hasn't is because it doesn't have significant, direct competition. There's no reason to pass on the operational savings to the consumer.
Digital purchases on my PC should be less than a console which subsidizes hardware cost and marketing from publishing fees.
I feel like 15-20% should be the ballpark, especially as the compute, networking, and storage costs has dropped significantly since Steam started.
The reason Steam hasn't is because it doesn't have significant, direct competition. There's no reason to pass on the operational savings to the consumer.
I'm not saying Steam shouldn't make a profit. They should make a lot of money, instead of obscene amounts of money.
After the earlier discussion in the thread, I thought an interesting thought experiment would be to find out what Valve's effective cut would be for a variety of AAA games. By "effective cut", what I mean is assuming they take 30% for on-Steam sales and 0% for off-Steam sales. This, note, does not include the fact that they lose money on off-Steam sales because of e.g. costs of running Steam and people being able to download the game, just the assumption that they get 0% on the copies sold elsewhere.
Here's how I proxy this; Steam reviews indicate if a game was sold on Steam or not sold on Steam. Although it may be the case that off-Steam purchasers are more or less likely to leave a review than on-Steam purchasers, for the purposes of this thought experiment, let's assume they are equally likely. As a result, I can extract the percentage of sales that are on-Steam versus off-Steam and use that to calculate Valve's effective take. There are a few methodological reasons why this isn't quite accurate, but the errors seem like they are conservative in some cases and permissive in others so I'd say this is ballpark true.
All games aren non-F2P, released for at least 1 year, by different publishers, at different pricepoints, different genres, and sold on at least one external store:
Final Fantasy VII: 25.7%
Lego Star Wars The Complete Saga: 25.6%
Grand Theft Auto V: 25.5%
Five Nights at Freddy's: 24.9%
Dead Space 2: 24.1%
Max Payne 3: 23.9%
The Witness: 23.3%
RimWorld: 22.1%
The Walking Dead Season 1: 22.0%
Enslaved: 22.0%
Fallout: New Vegas: 21.3%
Football Manager 2017: 21.3%
Resident Evil 5: 20.9%
Cook, Serve, Delicious: 19.5%
Hitman: Absolution: 19.3%
Just Cause 3: 18.9%
Dead Rising 3: 18.9%
Dark Souls II: 18.5%
Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor: 18.4%
Burnout Paradise: 18.2%
The Evil Within: 17.1%
Napoleon: Total War: 14.8%
The median of that list is around 21%. So perhaps the people arguing "Why doesn't Valve take 20%" might observe that Valve does, in fact, take 20% under real world conditions.
They handle:
- Credit card processing, including payment processing for every payment processor in every country
- Historically, giving you literally hundreds of thousands of front page impressions -- not sure if they still guarantee this but historically they did; I know they currently guarantee tons of patch update impressions on the front page
- Unlimited keys for external sales which they take 0% on
- All handling of refunds and chargebacks
- A marketplace for item content, which they only take 10% on
- A marketplace for trading cards, which are free for developers, where each sale they take 10% on
- Custom art and promotion in major sale events
- Hosting every download and redownload, all patches and patch downloads, all costs associated with patch certification
- Hosting preloads
- Closed beta tests and interactive branching for deployment
- Cloud saves and storage for all your users in perpetuity
- Coupons and targeted user contacts
- A pretty effective anti-cheat system, yours for free
- A community discussion forum and an unlimited supply of free labour to moderate it if you need it
- Purchase support in every major language
- Steam Days
- Matchmaking
- Leaderboards
- Several engine tech stacks, including the major tech stack for VR, completely free
- An audience of 100 million users
Of course you might say you can do without some of these and roll your own for some of these (also, when you discontinue your roll-your-own service 3 years from now because you can't afford it, I hope you enjoy an unending torrent of complaints for your customers because you demanded not to have to pay 30%). But the idea that "lol if u add up mastercard and my cdn costs steam ain't worth 30%" is stupid as hell.
The monopoly / monopsony arguments seem totally incoherent; maybe 6 or 7 of the the 10 biggest games on PC aren't on Steam at all.
They are less, devs and publishes don't pay royalty fees to Steam like with console manufacturers.
Just like the consoles pay for online because you can't compete against them with multiplayer access because they control it all.
But apparently that is fine because hardware. Which is the new 'console manufactures can do anti-consumer shit' excuse.
There are royalty fees in addition to the 30% cut on consoles for digital content? That's straight up highway robbery.
See:
Lol, yeah, I'm done...too many know-it-all angry fans for this know-little tired non-fan.
After the earlier discussion in the thread, I thought an interesting thought experiment would be to find out what Valve's effective cut would be for a variety of AAA games. By "effective cut", what I mean is assuming they take 30% for on-Steam sales and 0% for off-Steam sales. This, note, does not include the fact that they lose money on off-Steam sales because of e.g. costs of running Steam and people being able to download the game, just the assumption that they get 0% on the copies sold elsewhere.
Here's how I proxy this; Steam reviews indicate if a game was sold on Steam or not sold on Steam. Although it may be the case that off-Steam purchasers are more or less likely to leave a review than on-Steam purchasers, for the purposes of this thought experiment, let's assume they are equally likely. As a result, I can extract the percentage of sales that are on-Steam versus off-Steam and use that to calculate Valve's effective take. There are a few methodological reasons why this isn't quite accurate, but the errors seem like they are conservative in some cases and permissive in others so I'd say this is ballpark true.
All games aren non-F2P, released for at least 1 year, by different publishers, at different pricepoints, different genres, and sold on at least one external store:
Final Fantasy VII: 25.7%
Lego Star Wars The Complete Saga: 25.6%
Grand Theft Auto V: 25.5%
Five Nights at Freddy's: 24.9%
Dead Space 2: 24.1%
Max Payne 3: 23.9%
The Witness: 23.3%
RimWorld: 22.1%
The Walking Dead Season 1: 22.0%
Enslaved: 22.0%
Fallout: New Vegas: 21.3%
Football Manager 2017: 21.3%
Resident Evil 5: 20.9%
Cook, Serve, Delicious: 19.5%
Hitman: Absolution: 19.3%
Just Cause 3: 18.9%
Dead Rising 3: 18.9%
Dark Souls II: 18.5%
Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor: 18.4%
Burnout Paradise: 18.2%
The Evil Within: 17.1%
Napoleon: Total War: 14.8%
The median of that list is around 21%. So perhaps the people arguing "Why doesn't Valve take 20%" might observe that Valve does, in fact, take 20% under real world conditions.
I'll parrot for the millionth time, the 30% is the same across all platforms. The App store, Amazon store, Google Play, PSN, XBL, and every other store take the same cut.
Steam is not a monopoly. I'll prove it. Let's play a game. Which of these games were sold on Steam?
Let's be completely clear: those savings will never be passed onto the consumer, regardless of where said savings are made. Tim Sweeney isn't complaining about a 30% cut because he wants to reduce the price of purchase for Epic's content, he's complaining because a 30% cut eats into his bottom line. Just like with Blizzard, EA, and Ubisoft, any savings made from selling games directly to the consumer without that 30% cut are not being passed onto the consumer.There's no reason to pass on the operational savings to the consumer.
I'm not saying Steam shouldn't make a profit. They should make a lot of money, instead of obscene amounts of money.
Well MS tried to Break this quasi Monopol. But thanks to your shittalking its Not happening
You show up in a a thread with over 10 pages with the same tired excuse for an argument that has been debunked over and over, double down on it and expect a red carpet?Lol, yeah, I'm done...too many know-it-all angry fans for this know-little tired non-fan.
I just remembered the fee wasn't always 30%. It actually used to be higher several years ago before Greenlight. I remember a time when the standard fee was 40% and you had to negotiate to get it lower.
Great list to show to an indie dev after you told him he doesn't absolutely need to be on Steam, because lol.I'll parrot for the millionth time, the 30% is the same across all platforms. The App store, Amazon store, Google Play, PSN, XBL, and every other store take the same cut.
Steam is not a monopoly. I'll prove it. Let's play a game. Which of these games were sold on Steam?
Great list to show to an indie dev after you told him he doesn't absolutely need to be on Steam, because lol.
Good post. The people posting in this thread saying "but Apple/MS/Sony" are missing this context.
This is ultimately something developers, publishers, and storefronts have to fight out in between themselves as part of their business. It's interesting to watch and wonder why 30% has been becoming standard. I suspect the issue is that the publishers with the biggest leverage simply create their own storefront rather than deal with someone else getting a 30% cut, such as Origin or the Windows Store. The ability to easily set up a competing store where you get 100% and have total control prevents the market from forcing steam to lower their 30% cut.
Valve adds very little into the chain: all three are parasitic rent seekers, and valve is worse because they take 30%. It is a slam highlighting how little valve does for gaming in general given how much they take from it.
...but because its steam its always right what they do no matter how greedy and anti consumer and anti dev they are.
Well MS tried to Break this quasi Monopol. But thanks to your shittalking its Not happening
And how many games did you buy on the Games for Windows Live Store?
0. Lol
Well MS tried to Break this quasi Monopol. But thanks to your shittalking its Not happening
0. Lol
It is.I thought 30% was common knowledge. Pretty much the same as the consoles.
Your point is well reasoned and clearly explained. You will be ignored.
The sad thing about this 30% standard isn't really Steams monopoly, it's the collusion between all the stores to not undercut it, even companies like MS & Epic, even GOG who are trying to break into the market mysteriously still set their revenue share at 70/30.
Clearly the thinking is "we could lower the cut, but then if we do well Valve will just match us and we'll all just make less money, so stick to 30%"