As consumer I very much agree with you, but as game developer 30% is abysmal amount of money. Imagine you're indie developer or owner of a small 3-10 people studio that finally released reasonably successful game:

  1 - Let's say you invested $100,000 of your own money for vertical slice and managed to find a publisher to give you $200,000 to complete the game.
  2 - Ignore that you had some failed games before, but this time you let's say sold 100,000 copies for $10 each average. 100k sold is a big success really.

But here is the math:

  1 - Valve got $1,000,000 as gross revenue for 100,000 sales.
  2 - Usually 16% is VAT and immenient refunds. So now $840,000 left.
  3 - Now Valve took their 30% cut. $588,000 left.
  4 - Now your publisher took $200,000 to recoup invested money. $388,000 left.
  5 - Now publisher split remaining $388,000 by honest 50/50.

Now your company sold 100,000 copies of a game, but only get $194,000 gross income as royalties. And if you will make any profit you'll likely pay at least 20% corporate or divident taxes so yeah at best your profit gonna be $155,000.

So you did all the work, somehow managed to fund it, worked on game for a year and got $155,000 while Valve made $252,000 for payment processing and CDN. Steam do not provide marketing - it only boost already successful products.

PS: This is best case scenario. Usually your publisher will also recoup whatever expenses they had on their end for marketing and whatever.

▲ TheFreim 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I would note that they do provide quite an immense amount of value to developers. Achievements, transferable inventory system, multi-player (steam networking), among other things. The 30% cut still feels high, especially since most games can't or won't take advantage of every single service Steam provides, but I do think they provide quite a bit of developer value that needs to be factored in.

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tapoxi 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The multiplayer isn't actually used that much, since it doesn't support console players/cross-play which is expected these days. Many games will use Azure PlayFab or Epic Online Services. EOS is free and doesn't require the game be sold on the Epic Store or the Epic client.

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account42 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Those are all there for platform lock in, not for the benefit of the game developer.

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SXX 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

You really missing my point here. Problem with platforms is that platform-holders are taking bigger cut from a small struggling companies than they take from likes of EA or Ubisoft. If you look at majority of small and mid-size game development studios Valve is basically taking half of their income unless your game earns more than $10,000,000.

It's totally okay to like Valve or Steam as gamer. As fellow gamers I totally agree with you.

Just next time when you wonder why you favorite studio went bankrupt or why you niche genre game never got a sequel this is why: because some monopoly took 50% of their profit.

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Ekaros 4 days ago | parent [-]

On other hand how much developer time would have been spend on building own distribution, billing and related customer support. Time spend on doing it yourself would not be free either.

30% for this is high, but then there is also the discoverability. Which I think does beat google by long way. So they probably would not have sold as many copies without popular platform.

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SXX 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Nothing of what Steam provides costs 30%. Discoverability and free marketing only provided to games that are already successful and have hundreds of wishlists. That's only possible to achieve if you game already have it's own following and community.

12+ years ago if you released on Steam it was a big deal and platform provided traffic to everyone, but today it's flooded with games so basically you're on your own.

The only thing that allow Valve to charge this much is network effect. They are not vendor-locked platform like App Store, but they do have nearly monopoly on PC.

	▲	SXX 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Little correction: obviously not hundreds of wishlists, but hundreds of thousands. You need at least 100,000+ to even be considered to have a successful Steam page.

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TheFreim 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This is exactly what I was trying to point out. Steam's developer services can save a massive amount of time for developers, time which is especially valuable to indie studios. I still feel that the 30% is steep, I'd prefer if Steam took a cut based on how many of their underlying services you used, but its wrongheaded to deny that Steam provides many useful features for developers that can save a lot of time.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features

	▲	Ekaros 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think such model can lead to messy scenarios. Say you start without cloud saves and sell million copies. Then you add cloud saves. Now should your commission increase on past sales meaning that for while you make nothing? Or should it only apply moving forward and on future copies sold? And I am absolutely certain that some developers would exploit this in someway.

▲ gdbsjjdn 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Steam isn't the right place to sell a game that does 1M in total lifetime sales. Because like you said, it won't hit any recommendations and they'll take a huge cut.

This is like complaining that AMC won't screen your student film. You're playing in a very niche space and the key is to keep costs under control so you can actually make money.

	▲	SXX 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		If your game is not on Steam (or big consoles) it doesn't exist. Platforms like Itch are only useful for part-time solo developers who trying to earn their $100 or $10 for ramen. Can be good marketing for solo developers too, but you only make money when release on "real" platform. Gamedev is a hit industry. Even of released games 90% never make back the investments. Then 1% hits make 90% of money. And situation is as bad for $3,000,000 game studio as it's for one like mine that makes $300,000 games.

▲ ploxiln 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This math is missing a step: $200k went to your publisher who already gave you the $200k, so really you got about $394k total (before your taxes).

And it's worth remembering that your publisher got $194k ... I'm not sure if this publishing arrangement makes sense for the publisher ($200k risk for not much more reward?) or for you (30% of your net income from the game, after valve's 30%) (I'm not in the industry so honestly I just don't know)

	▲	SXX 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		This step is certainly not missing. And yeah I somewhat simplified the agreement not to go into details. Usually publishers that invests money take 80-90% or even 100% before full recouperation of investments. This usually includes not only provided budget, but also whatever publisher spent on porting, QA, localization and LQA. Then after recouperation is complete all income is split between 50/50 and 40/60 for either side. And yeah in gamedev ROI like x2.5 is a good deal for publishers even if 90% of games never recover development costs. Everyone just hopes to make the next hit and make a bank. PS: This is math for indie and AA games with budgets under $5,000,000.