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Discord thinks about developers, 90/10 developers split is coming to its game store in 2019
- Thread starter Rodjer
- Start date
Thank god Valve is finally getting some proper and varied competition, because Steam has been stale as fuck for years, and their sales have been getting worse and worse for a while now.
Because a 90/10 cut is gonna result in better sales, right?
It's not like stores like GMG and similar stores don't rely on their own 30% cut to have better sales than Steam or store wide coupons, right?
That's bs. Just this year we got Input VR to remap specific VR controllers, we got Steam Proton to run Windows titles on Linux, we got a total remade chat system and a new wishlist makeover.
As for the sales, Publishers decide of the price. Not Valve.
Who says they are barely breaking even at 10%? Even if they are, that's probably more to do with low revenue than the 10%. If their revenue was in the billions like Steam, I'm sure they'd be doing just fine with 10%. When fixed costs like employees and property costs decline as a % of revenue that means more profits.
Sales are entirely determined by the dev / pub, not Valve.
Also as discussed to death in each of these threads and this very thread, Steam - while certainly with a stale client and multiple features, also has a ton of massively useful features that no other service is providing, both to devs and customers.
Challenging the status quo for ALL digitial distribution services, including Steam, is excellent - as Itch have done well before Epic. However, no one is challenging Steam where they have been succeeding for so many years, which is the myriad of dev tools as well as features and benefits for Steam users, that Valve add to year upon year consistently. I can't think of another PC ecosystem focused entity putting this level of effort in (as far as gaming and open ecosystems go)
Discord is actually very smart for a game client because it's something a lot of people have open on their PC all the time anyway.
i'm all for steam ceding marketshare but i don't want all the standard features they provide to just disappear
Was going to post the same thing. That race to the bottom will very likely mean some kind of online subscription like on consoles as they won't be able to sustain all the free services. As an end user I much rather have them keep the current model.
They have store for months now. And they already had to cut loose exclusivity for 2 games from 3 months to 1 month so devs can release it on Steam.
I love people just up and showing their absurd ignorance of how literally anything works in these threads.
Hey genius, you know who are the ones setting sale prices? It's not Valve.
UPlay shouldn't be there, Uplay is like Maw, it compliments Steam well and have no problem with Steam.
Would AAA games being 10% to 20% off be the only way to justify a free market? The more open, flexible and far reaching the market becomes, the more options and creativity companies will have to offer value to consumers. The market is and will be more than AAA games being sold at $60.
The Multiplayer version of No Mans Sky was delayed for several weeks on GoG.
Several different launchers (not stores!) with different infrastructures will make it mandatory to have different SKU's for the PC Version.
- Anything that integrates Steamworks for Multiplayer (because it is basically an industry standard if you don't want to make your own net-code) will only work on Steam. If the dev wants Multiplayer on every launcher, he needs to code it himself. That would make the cost of developing the game bigger.
- Mods would have to be ported to several launchers most likely, unless the dev invested in proper agnostic mod-tools.
- if the game doesn't have controller support, you can explain to your customer why it only works on Steam.
I'll sell games out of Poppy's appartment and I'll give you 98%. You can also eat anything you want from Poppy's fridge!
What we have actually is the more open option for consumers.
One big launcher that is complete in term of feature set and that allows devs to sell keys outside its storefront for 100% of revenue.
Most of these devs decided to sell them on more than 10 different storefronts, all competing in term of price and selling a key to redeem on that big launcher that is complete in term of feature set.
What we have right now is a free market that is fair to customers.
What's about to happen is a total shitshow of publishers paying devs to release in one place and lower cuts for storefronts which means the death of any storefront without a client.
That's sooooo amazing indeed. Hurray for competition.
I just cant wait for these subscription based shit too because these launchers see they cant make money by undercutting each others in term of cut.
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It already tried exclusivity bullshit and got about the same reaction.
There's actually open source version of Steamworks for Multiplayer, that devs are free to use on whereever.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/GameNetworkingSockets
Something I'll remind people is that discord is also a platform that can and will ban you for things you are even just adjacent too (a NSFW server I lurked in got a blanket ban due to something a small group posted) and they will 100% not work with you at all which means you will lose your purchases.
Yes, you can get banned from other platform holders but those things tend to be from actual financial matters like chargebacks, discord is specifically a place where you can lose your account due to discussion moderation.
Again, something to keep in mind.
Yes, you can get banned from other platform holders but those things tend to be from actual financial matters like chargebacks, discord is specifically a place where you can lose your account due to discussion moderation.
Again, something to keep in mind.
Different customers have different prioritizions. Market is changing. Technology is changing. The reason companies are jumping into the PC market with their own launchers is because they realize in 5-10 years, these launchers will just be apps on the devices most people use. It'll expand be number of people any platform can reach and create an ecosystem where your games will travel across multiple devices regardless of platform.
It'll introduce new issues of course...which will be new opportunities for companies to find solutions to.
There will be an overall larger market of people asking for more things. Demanding new features. Ecosystems that don't demonstrate value will die.
Bigger market. More opportunity to offer new and better features due to advancement in technology. More money in be industry. More strength for developers. Options for consumers. New players have a right to compete. No company should be an aristocracy. It'll play itself out.
First of all, yes, exactly, like you all say devs/pubs set the prices, therefore a bigger cut for the developers/publishers absolutely means the potential for better sales.
Secondly, yes, they have actually improved the chat system this year (about fucking time because it was way behind, to be nice) and some of their features, like controller remapping, while not working perfectly well (for me) are nice. Still not really something I can't accomplish on a PC in other ways. There's also gifting and refunds, which are great.
On the other hand, like I said their chat was reaaally far behind, some features had been in beta forever (Broadcasting for Mac for example) or just are not that robust/haven't been updated significantly for a while (Big Picture).
It's still my opinion that for a company as wealthy as Valve, Steam (and especially its client) has been stale for a long time and not really pushing itself very hard since it had a huge market share and virtually no real competition.
Competition is ALWAYS good. The 30% cut that was okay way back is not really that great anymore. Devs and pubs getting more money from their own products means more and better games for the players. 30% is definitely too high now.
Indeed, the status quo challenge is what I believe will be healthy for the industry, and I definitely see your point here. I've used Steamworks in UE4 and had a pleasant experience with it. However I believe it is way easier to implement all those tools and standards when you have such a large market share. If every other distribution service made their own API for achievements, matchmaking, etc etc. its adoption by devs would be way (s)lower, since their much smaller market shares would make it not really worth implementing.
I've been gaming my entire life and working in the industry for my entire career, but sure. Take it easy buddy.
More options, sure, despite being proven the opposite.
3 new launchers buying exclusivity distribution for different games is more choice for us despite these games being sold in only one place. Do you really believe in that bullshit ?
It can be your opinion of course but I don't see how you can make a convincing argument to support it. Steam is not only miles ahead of every other client in terms of features and services but Valve has also been steadily improving it and adding new features pretty much constantly. I think you have to explain in more detail how Valve and Steam have been stale.
What? Where is all this subscription talk coming from? Do you not realize the only way those key resellers can have the margins to offer discounts and be profitable is because the original 30% margins were so damn fat to begin with? Steam should have dropped their % a long time ago. Do you also not realize that Steam could shut down those free keys in an instant? And likely would if they were 95% of total keys redeemed on Steam.
Working in the industry your entire career and you didn't realize until now that Valve isn't the one setting sales prices?
Did you miss the part where I explained how the better split means potentially better sales?
The whole Argument is, that devs have more money at the end of the day because of the split.
So how can the customer expect better sales and the devs more money? One excludes the other.
If we have better sales then before, nothing changed for the devs money-wise.
Potentially sure, but potentally it won't do anything, or be worse. A lot of the best sales for Steam games are on 3rd party websites also, because they're the ones who have to compete, so they'll cut their own margins lower or possibly sell at loss for time limited durations to get customers to buy stuff again from them later and such. There's nothing like that on Discord/Epic though, they're exclusive, if you want a game on Epic, you have to buy it from Epic.
Now you might think, "but if the devs get 20% more, maybe they can give 10% to consumers more and still have 10% more than on Steam". And sure they could. But is it going to happen though? Meh. I think they'll just keep the 20% and align their prices on the general sale prices.
Obviously, we don't know, maybe it will be better, but also maybe not. We'll have to wait and see. Until then though I'm not going to bet that devs getting more money means I'm getting more stuff either at the end.
Who cares about game sale pricing?
Steam has been problematic for smaller devs for ages.
From the disastrous greenlight program, to visibility and now screwing them out of profits because the arent mega producers.
Not to mention that they have harbored Nazi groups for years.
The death of Steam is good for everyone.
Steam has been problematic for smaller devs for ages.
From the disastrous greenlight program, to visibility and now screwing them out of profits because the arent mega producers.
Not to mention that they have harbored Nazi groups for years.
The death of Steam is good for everyone.
Yes, all those Indie devs that would have never had the chance to publish their game at any other place.
How so?
Steam hasn't been good for the industry and has am effective monopoly for far too long.
There's a reason publishers are jumping ship so quickly.
Not only has this not been a thing for a long time, plenty of games got passed over becaus of how Steam treated indie devs.
I'm not a dev.
What's the weather like on your planet?
...okay.
Does the Discord Store offer an easy-to-use leaderboard implementation to developers?
Does it allow developers to add controller support for all of the major controllers to their games without having to do anything?
Cloud saves? Stats? Achievements? Multiplayer lobbies and matching? Anti-cheat? Community features? Cross-platform support? DRM?
Even the ability to have the client automatically install popular 3rd-party libraries (such as DirectX), so users don't have to download them by themselves?
If not, I'll stick to paying my 30% so that I can offer the best possible experience to the people that choose to buy my games.
This race to the bottom isn't actually better for gamers. There should be a race between storefronts to add features. That, and only that, possibly in combination with developer share increases, will both increase competition *and* give gamers something better than what we have now.
Does the Discord Store offer an easy-to-use leaderboard implementation to developers?
Does it allow developers to add controller support for all of the major controllers to their games without having to do anything?
Cloud saves? Stats? Achievements? Multiplayer lobbies and matching? Anti-cheat? Community features? Cross-platform support? DRM?
Even the ability to have the client automatically install popular 3rd-party libraries (such as DirectX), so users don't have to download them by themselves?
If not, I'll stick to paying my 30% so that I can offer the best possible experience to the people that choose to buy my games.
This race to the bottom isn't actually better for gamers. There should be a race between storefronts to add features. That, and only that, possibly in combination with developer share increases, will both increase competition *and* give gamers something better than what we have now.
I mean, problematic I can agree, but...
Why was greenlight a disaster? How would steam dying actually benefit devs and give visibility. Btw, they weren't "screwed out of profits". It's fair to complain that Valve only benefitted the biggest developers, but everything was exactly the same for the rest, not worse.
