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Valve creates new revenue sharing tiers to give big sellers a break

gamasutra.com

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Re: Valve creates new revenue sharing tiers to give big sellers a break

#91

Post by jamp897 »

scoot_718 wrote: post #17
seanalltogether wrote: post #13

Some of the big publishers have been requiring user accounts on all their AAA games sold through steam, so I think Valve knows it won't take much for these guys to switch to exclusive sales through their own platforms if Steam becomes too costly.

Is that what's behind that crap? Too many games require some fucking account I don't care about, when it should be linked to steam.

Yes, it’s also because platforms control what you can expirence, and if they feel it competes with their platform in someway they disallow it. So studios aren’t going to tolerate that going forward.

Re: Valve creates new revenue sharing tiers to give big sellers a break

#92

Post by mschuster91 »

azhenley wrote: post #53
user5994461 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize that it takes a lot of work to make a website to accept payment from a hundred countries in dozens of currencies and handle customer support and chargeback and fight fraud? You can try to run your own website, to save 10% fees on a minuscule userbase, it simply doesn't cover the costs.

Serious question: isn’t this what services like PayPal are for? Along with customer service services. Certainly not trivial, but it seems doable.

Paypal only handles payment. You still gotta do customer support, CDN infra (with games running at over 60GB each, that's not easy!), fraud detection, client dev and technical support for over three platforms (Win with 3 major versions, OS X with probably the same, and a myriad of Linux distros/kernel versions/GPU drivers), social networking/messaging stuff and a whole lot of small-ish stuff to get at half the functionality Steam offers.

Re: Valve creates new revenue sharing tiers to give big sellers a break

#93

Post by cheez »

Retric wrote: post #85
cheez wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They were able to stop paying a third employee when they went to Steam. That's a lot of value to the business. They were able to stop paying? Doesn't that mean they make less money?

Revenue is fairly useless it’s profit that you care about. Having less employees also means less effort managing them.

Ah I see.

Re: Valve creates new revenue sharing tiers to give big sellers a break

#94

Post by qasdf »

Zelmor wrote: post #72

Valve's cuts are fine. I remember the times when developers were glad if they got 20-30% of the profits in general, with publisher deals starting at 70% cuts for IP-first game releases, and way higher if it was your first game. This after you pitched the game with a tech demo running, of course. Steam is a blessing on digital distribution, and the most competent platform to date, albeit it has its problems.

A friend of mine released a game that sold around a million copies in the late 90s or early 2000s sometime and had a deal like that. Except the publisher claimed that after all the distribution and physical costs the profit of the game was 0 and so he never got any money from his profit sharing agreement. Steam and online distribution in general is a godsend.

Re: Valve creates new revenue sharing tiers to give big sellers a break

#95

Post by diminoten »

skinnyarms wrote: post #28
jsheard wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its also a hedge to prevent every large game seller from setting up their own store. That ship has already sailed - EA has Origin, Ubisoft has Uplay, Activision/Blizzard has Battle.net, Microsoft has the Windows store, and Bethesda and Epic have their own launchers. Nearly every major publisher has already made the investment to develop their own store and digital distribution infrastructure, so they have little re…

Most stores keep their numbers private, but I'd wager that Steam has most (if not all of them) beat by a large margin. Presumably these companies believe that the higher margins and control they get from running their own stores are worth the customers they lose by not being in Steam. As the Steam Tax lightens however, the results of that equation could change.

The major publishers aren't trying to "beat" Steam, they're just trying to release their games without paying the Steam Tax.

The point is, it's too late to do the math on the Steam Tax now, those R&D dollars are spent. Steam was too slow.

Re: Valve creates new revenue sharing tiers to give big sellers a break

#96

Post by maxxxxx »

qasdf wrote: post #94
Zelmor wrote: post #72

Valve's cuts are fine. I remember the times when developers were glad if they got 20-30% of the profits in general, with publisher deals starting at 70% cuts for IP-first game releases, and way higher if it was your first game. This after you pitched the game with a tech demo running, of course. Steam is a blessing on digital distribution, and the most competent platform to date, albeit it has its problems.

A friend of mine released a game that sold around a million copies in the late 90s or early 2000s sometime and had a deal like that. Except the publisher claimed that after all the distribution and physical costs the profit of the game was 0 and so he never got any money from his profit sharing agreement. Steam and online distribution in general is a godsend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

Re: Valve creates new revenue sharing tiers to give big sellers a break

#97

Post by TheForumTroll »

mbesto wrote: post #82
PakG1 wrote: post #32

I actually am surprised that services like Steam, the Apple App Store, and Google Play are able to command as high a margin as they do for sales commission. I mean, it's obviously possible because it's reality, but it's nonintuitive. I wonder if it will continue to be that way. For iOS, you don't really have a way to install apps outside the app store without jailbreaking, but you do for macOS, and I've seen a number…

> are able to command as high a margin as they do for sales commission. People are surprised that the entity that controls distribution and maintains the relationship with the customer can command whatever premium they want? I don't know how to say this any in any non-snarky way, but this is business 101. Control distribution = control the market.

But Valve doesn't charge premium prices..

Re: Valve creates new revenue sharing tiers to give big sellers a break

#98

Post by zeroname »

ken wrote: post #79
philjohn wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand - the big publishers need Valve less, so from a purely business perspective it makes a ton of sense to keep them on the platform, which is the biggest storefront for purchasing games. Yes, smaller developers have to pay more, but they're getting a heck of a lot of exposure for that take, without having to spend big on traditional advertising like the large publishers have to.

Economically this is true, but I'm deeply uncomfortable with it. The whole reason I got into computers in the first place is because it put everyone on equal footing. As a kid I could write a program on my C=64 that was equal in every way to a commercial program that my parents bought. Personal computers were the great equalizer. (You don't even need a company! Magazines published amateur submissions all the time.) T…

I don't get your historic analogy. Yes, you could make a game that rivaled the games of the big guys, all on your own. However, there's no way you could've gotten your game into the major sales outlets without a publisher. That publisher would've never given you a 70% cut. In that regard, you're far better off now.

Re: Valve creates new revenue sharing tiers to give big sellers a break

#99

Post by TheForumTroll »

jsheard wrote: post #21
acomjean wrote: post #19

This makes sense. the share drops to 25% after 10 million in sales. and more after. One would imagine that there is some fixed cost for adding new titles and maintaining steam store. After a certain amount of sales the cost per title is just bandwidth so steam is making more per game anyway. Its also a hedge to prevent every large game seller from setting up their own store. Even if you are large its cheaper to use s…

> Its also a hedge to prevent every large game seller from setting up their own store. That ship has already sailed - EA has Origin, Ubisoft has Uplay, Activision/Blizzard has Battle.net, Microsoft has the Windows store, and Bethesda and Epic have their own launchers. Nearly every major publisher has already made the investment to develop their own store and digital distribution infrastructure, so they have little re…

I don't know about them all but the games I have bought that use other platforms than Steam I bought on Steam and they got installed with the game (like uplay). I'd say the ship is full of water and being pulled along by Valve's tug.

Re: Valve creates new revenue sharing tiers to give big sellers a break

#100

Post by zeroname »

giobox wrote: post #75
zeroname wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never seen any of these on "my" Steam. It's not part of my shopping experience in any way. I know they exist because Jim Sterling sometimes makes funny videos about them, but I can't fathom how they make a significant impact on "genuine" developers.

You only need to read their blogs to see how it’s hurting the “good” indie developers. Heck just use steam - the discoverability of good indie software has suffered hugely as Steam dramatically lowered the cost of entry to the platform. It’s now incredibly hard to stand out. The numbers speak for themselves, with steam going from adding several hundred games a year to their catalogue to nearly 8000 last year. The gro…

> You only need to read their blogs to see how it’s hurting the “good” indie developers.

I don't think so. The odds are that if they failed with sales on their indie game, instead of admitting that there a thousand developers just as good as them who are fighting for a slice of the pie, they'd rather blame the platform.

Again, I have never been presented any of these asset flips on Steam. I do see hundreds of games that appear to be well-made every week and I don't even have the time to take a closer look at even a fraction of them, much less buy and play them.

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