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Valve changes revenue sharing for Steam to allow successful developers to earn bigger percentage cut
- Thread starter Dusk Golem
- Start date
Hi I'm Lead Reporter, Joe Comm EnSense
In tonight's story,
Private business makes a move that is in its best business interest.
Local people we interviewed are aghast that said business didn't think about anything else other than being a good business.
In our next upcoming news story water is wet and people may or may not like this.
Back to you John.
Seriously though this move makes sense from a business perspective. Basically keep as many big names on your platform as possible even if you have to cut them better deals.
In tonight's story,
Private business makes a move that is in its best business interest.
Local people we interviewed are aghast that said business didn't think about anything else other than being a good business.
In our next upcoming news story water is wet and people may or may not like this.
Back to you John.
Seriously though this move makes sense from a business perspective. Basically keep as many big names on your platform as possible even if you have to cut them better deals.
Yup ubi will stay they have been adding achievements etc to there main titles something they never use too
greedy company trying to make money!!!!!
grrr!! 30% too much!!!
grrr!! 30% too much!!!
this, seriously
if I own a platform that relies on good games bringing in new people to spend on other shit in my store
i give an incentive for good games to get onto the store
They never left. Shelter, Legends and ESO all launched exclusively on the Bethesda Launcher.
They were reported as being unhappy with destiny sales. They had to give away their game.
Can't really speak to CoD, but that was doing poorly regardless, because people on PC abandoned that franchise long ago.
Fallout 76 seems to be on their launcher only. Doom Eternal has no page yet either. Although GMG said it would be.
So fine their next game (Sekiro) is for Steam :P
B.net is seemingly only for GaaS like CoD/Destiny.
You do know that a game like Tomb Raider sold 5 million copies and didn't recoup it's dev cost, right? When a single bomb can destroy a AAA company, methinks you overestimate the high end profit margins.
Feel free to complain all you want, but complaining about a company seeking to make more money in a way that hurts literally no one is strange as fuck to me.
Valve , "we will take less money if your game is successful"
era, "greedy valve!"
Well F76 launched only few weeks ago? even ESO was exclusivity for few months. So that says nothing really.
They wre unhappy with Destiny 2 Forsaken Sales. The PC launch was a success in 2017. Also Black Ops 4 sold 3x the amount as WW2.
Destiny 2 was Activisions biggest PC launch ever
3 Million sold in 3 months
Black Ops 4 triples WW2 Sales
The people making platform decisions on AAA games like to see clearly-phrased policies
So why didn't they change it to a global 20% rate ? Taking more from the poorer devs is an asshole move.
F2P card games and MMOs are expected to have their own launcher, AAA shooters not.
Imagine the refunds if it WAS on Steam, one reason it didn't release there.
Large devs have far more leverage.
Want RDR2 on steam? It's going to sell 10m+
Lower your fee to 15% per copy sold after 2 million.
Little indie dev: Can we lower our fee to 20%? We are going to sell 50k copies....
It'll definitely disincentivize publishers from putting their games there.
Either they continue taking 30%, disincentivizing them from selling their game there at all or them taking a lower cut and making even less revenue than they already do.
And publishers large enough to be able to afford AAA games would usually be able to get them. Or will know from prior experience.
None of the consoles clearly state their cut in a public place either. All we have to go on are developers who say it's about the same.
Steam are now ahead of the others on that front.
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The first tier doesn't need to be clearing ten million dollars to do this. This will basically exclusively benefit AAA publishers, despite the fact the %30 cut hurts indies in particular.
Indie games will lose a lot more than 30% of their sales if they dont launch on Steam so I am not sure they are victims here.
There isn't literally a single negative thing about this news for anyone involved, and yet somehow is generating complaints. Bizarre.
I don't think they had to do this at all, but it's pretty reasonable.
There are indies who would have gained from this (huge breakouts like Stardew Valley, etc) / will gain from this in the future.
As someone struggling to survive with a niche title this doesn't feel great, but you'd have to completely misunderstand how the market works to not see the logic here.
Valve doing the best thing for the health of their platform, which theoretically benefits those of us still on 70/30 in the long run.
Valve doing the best thing for the health of their platform, which theoretically benefits those of us still on 70/30 in the long run.
Indie developers benefit far more from Steam than AAA developers so for them the 30% cut is probably worth it.
Probably?
It would also put a lot of pressure on all their competitors, which would be forced to adapt.
They could've announced that they're taking no cut at all and the haters would've still found a way to spin it as a negative.
That's not really it. They probably don't give a shit about other pub stores. What they do care about, is when Steam is not included at all.
The idea here is as it says:
In other words, Valve wants to continue to have growth by ensuring the biggest titles / pubs continue to have a relationship with Steam and its player base. Whether there are other stores isn't going to bother them much
And it is true, that the value of Steam comes from players being attracted by these big titles and then hooking into all manner of other titles they discover.
That's exactly what this is.
So would I, but it's pretty clear who has the leverage here.
If people want to support indies, they should buy keys rather than from the Steam store, or buy from Itch. They'll get a better share (100% for a key, variable but often 90% from Itch).
Why would Valve do this? They would just lose revenue for no reason as all games that would be on at 20/80 are there 30/70.
Valve is a business, they don't owe anyone anything (except maybe the fans and another Half-life). If you dont want to launch your game on Steam they are not holding a gun to your head.
Yeah, this is about avoiding big publishers creating their own platforms.
If I were in charge of a publisher with enough pull though, no way I'd pay more than 5-10% in an open platform.
If I were in charge of a publisher with enough pull though, no way I'd pay more than 5-10% in an open platform.
I'm going with a stab in the dark and guess that they would prefer to keep selling on their store the games that sell a lot and not the failures?
Not really a shock.
I would vastly prefer they just shift to 80/20 for everyone, but it's extremely possible that there's no split that would satisfy major publishers and all of them moving exclusively to their own launchers may be inevitable.
I would vastly prefer they just shift to 80/20 for everyone, but it's extremely possible that there's no split that would satisfy major publishers and all of them moving exclusively to their own launchers may be inevitable.