Comment by jdoe1337halo
4 hours ago
I agree that 30% is too large of a cut, but what would be appropriate? 15%? Steam does add a ton of value from an immediate audience, solid advertising opportunities, and amazing distribution for the developer.
4 hours ago
I agree that 30% is too large of a cut, but what would be appropriate? 15%? Steam does add a ton of value from an immediate audience, solid advertising opportunities, and amazing distribution for the developer.
As that has done both sides of games, I would like to propose some doubts for people to consider on that is dissimilar to the standard b2b saas; for to clarity I'm not saying 30% is good
- One chargeback for your 5$ game can consume you 55$ or more, handful and you permanently lose the ability to accept the payment anywhere including future businesses outside of games
- Amount of people that will take parents cards is eye watering
- The value of offline payment acceptance in the form of physical cards (kids do not possess standard payment rails but can acquire your game on steam in the cash)
- They don't take flat 30% for almost a decade now
- You don't often get to use Stripe or 2-3%. Your cost closer about 15% if you choose to process you own payments
> They don't take flat 30% for almost a decade now
Yes Valve is very generous.
They take MORE from developers who make LESS money. I sure bottom 98% of developers never sell above $10,000,000 to decrease cut from 30% to 25%.
Very few indie devs or small indie studios ever sell over 50,000-100,000 copies.
PS: In practice if your project funded by publisher it means that you as developer will make less money from a game than Valve.
> PS: In practice if your project funded by publisher it means that you as developer will make less money from a game than Valve.
So that essentially means a publisher takes even more than valve, while doing almost nothing.
> One chargeback for your 5$ game can consume you 55$ or more, handful and you permanently lose the ability to accept the payment anywhere including future businesses outside of games
This sounds like personal experience. Can you elaborate?
Edit: OHH perhaps you are saying this is one of the benefits of Steam; that it shields you from all this.
> Edit: OHH perhaps you are saying this is one of the benefits of Steam; that it shields you from all this.
Yes. In a sijmilar way: regular companies get Stripe at commodity pricing, games get xsolla, paysafe, tebex, and a massive compliance questionnaire, games are software (to you) but closer to porn or gambling on risk (to MoRs and processors).
People are less "likely" to charge back Steam because of their other games being frozen and Steam has volume to dilute chargebacks whereas you starting out may hit double digit dispute rates in one. Whether this is fair is an exercise best left to the reader ;.
Yeah - steam handle this for you.
Wait, does steam absorb chargeback fees and not pass them through to the developer?
likely what they are implying is that chargebacks have indirect costs that you can ballpark around $50 per chargeback. So steam would likely take back the $5 revenue from the developer for the $5 chargeback, but the costs of processing the chargeback are absorbed by steam. i do not know if they have a separate chargeback fee they charge developers for it but it wouldnt make sense to as steam is the one validating and processing payments
EA presented their numbers for their online store. They were making something like 12%, and losing money.
They ran it at a loss and try to use its existence to declare everyone else overcharging. Apple, Google, Steam. Meanwhile, they were unable to make money, just proving they don't know how business works.
Does that count the ludicrous number of games they have given away? That has to be a boat anchor on their financials.
You mean Epic Games, don't you?
And doesn't forbid you from using their platform for free if you sell the keys by yourself and you can also decide to publish your game to other stores...
How about charging for services rendered based on cost to produce them rather than some arbitrary number. Some effective competition would be good, but likely outcome is publishers taking more.
I never understood people who argue steam doesn’t have real competition.
The number of fully funded attempts to compete with steam is impressive. Steam has more competition than any other of the major app stores. Steam also had to provide additional value over pre-existing methods of installing games on the PC in a way the Android Play Store or the PlayStation Store did not have to.
It is incredible how much the other stores fumbled the implementation. As a rule, Epic, Origin, etc apps were terrible. Laggy, bad UI, sometimes difficult to even complete a purchase.
You would have thought that close relationship with the games industry- someone must know how to make a high performance native application. Yet it always felt like web developers pumping out another half assed Electron platform. The Steam store must generate billions in revenue -put some real manpower behind the engineering.
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I feel like that just becomes another situation where bigger organizations get more bargaining power and get better deals, so you’re just kind of shifting problems. I’m not saying a flat percentage like they have is necessarily the best solution, but I’m not sure trading problems is a good idea either. Just seems like a different way for smaller developers to get screwed.
> bigger organizations get more bargaining power and get better deals
This is exactly how it's setup right now.
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Linux releases they only take 10% FWIW
Edit: whoops that’s completely false. I do not know where I got that idea
That sounds great but I can't find any information about it. Do you have a link, please?
Nope
ok