Valve creates new revenue sharing tiers to give big sellers a break • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by reitzensteinm » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 3:17 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #87

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…

Collecting money is an important part of a business, but also not trivial. It therefore makes sense that people would outsource this. If you get big enough, you probably don't want a middleman in the way; this is why companies like Blizzard have their own store/launcher app. For everyone else, whatever they take is cheaper than having their own army of software engineers, lawyers, billing phone support, etc. In a wor…

I've sold 7 figures worth of game copies over my career, through Steam, the App store and my websites in roughly equal quantities.

This completely misses the value proposition of Steam. Collecting a million dollars of game sales through Stripe or PayPal is not hard, nor is dealing with payment issues a large overhead, even if you're paying the people replying to the emails programmer salaries.

Supporting the game itself is an order of magnitude greater even if it's decently written. Steam doesn't prevent that support, it just obfuscates the customer's connection to you so if you don't care you can mostly get away with ignoring them (at your peril, as it will invite bad reviews).

Steam puts you in touch with an immense audience. That's the value they're bringing to the table, and it's a big one.

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

#162

Post by richardknop » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 3:28 AM UTC

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.

What about billing support? You need people on the phone to handle complaints and issues from customers, deal with chargebacks, refunds and thousands of various weird requests from people that will keep coming. Also you need a software engineer team to work on the payment processing system / website. It's not "build it once and leave on autopilot". These things need continuous maintenance, bug fixes and improvements. All of that costs a lot of money and you have to have a really large revenue to be able to handle this yourself.

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

#163

Post by richardknop » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 3:36 AM UTC

ksec wrote: post #22

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…

Are any of those you mentioned popular with Gamers though? I only ever hear Steam in gaming. What do you mean by own launchers? Surely not a Store right? Is Battle.Net a "Store"?

Battle.net is very popular. There are tens of millions of players that play Hearthstone, Overwatch, WoW, SC2, Diablo 2. All of them launch the games by opening the Battle.net launcher. You can buy and pre order games and game content through the launcher also. Plus it also acts as a social network, you can add friends via their Battle.net tags and chat with them, spectate their games, challenge them to a duel etc. I agree Steam is probably number one but Battle.net and Origin are not small either. They each have millions of not 10s of millions of users I would imagine.

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

#164

Post by ehsankia » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 3:36 AM UTC

AmVess wrote: post #150

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…

25% is a steal. They handle all the financial transactions and host and distribute the game files on the most popular client on the planet. They also handle the security. Handling your own billing is expensive and time consuming. Setting up your own distribution and hosting is also expensive and time consuming, and then there's the bandwidth cost. All this adds up rather quickly. Having someone else do the business e…

Steam provides many other things too, past CDN and billing. They provide a game hub, steamworks (match making, voice communication, friends list), workshop, cloud saves, advertising for your game, and much more too.

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

#165

Post by ehsankia » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 3:37 AM UTC

MattRix wrote: post #153

user5994461 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> 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. What makes you think that they have high margin? It's not like each game creators could run a worldwide distribution and payment operation with just a few percent more of revenues.

uh, see Itch.io or Humble, which do the exact same thing for a fraction of the cost

Does itch.io have a world wide CDN delivering high enough speeds to handle 50GB games? Do they provide match making, voice communication, game hub, cloud saves, workshop, achievements, stats, and so on? Steam provides a huge amount of services behind the scenes.

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

#166

Post by ehsankia » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 3:39 AM UTC

badsectoracula wrote: post #37

mentos wrote: post #11

As an indie dev this is great news for me. Hoping Valve may come around and just drop the share to 20% for everyone eventually and then I won't have to forgo a salary to keep my 4 person studio alive.

FWIW you may also be interested in selling directly from your site[0] since you can give away as low as 5%. [0] https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2018/11/23/selling-gam...

I'd like to see stats, but historically, a game being on Steam brings enough extra sales to make up the steam cut. Now that Steam is overloaded with small games, that may no longer be true, but it's still worth doing a fair comparison.

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

#167

Post by baroffoos » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 3:56 AM UTC

reitzensteinm wrote: post #161

jrockway wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collecting money is an important part of a business, but also not trivial. It therefore makes sense that people would outsource this. If you get big enough, you probably don't want a middleman in the way; this is why companies like Blizzard have their own store/launcher app. For everyone else, whatever they take is cheaper than having their own army of software engineers, lawyers, billing phone support, etc. In a wor…

I've sold 7 figures worth of game copies over my career, through Steam, the App store and my websites in roughly equal quantities. This completely misses the value proposition of Steam. Collecting a million dollars of game sales through Stripe or PayPal is not hard, nor is dealing with payment issues a large overhead, even if you're paying the people replying to the emails programmer salaries. Supporting the game its…

Essentially steam has created an almost walled garden. You already have all of your games on the steam client so if a game is sold on another store its inconvenient. Another part is steam has a lot of eyes looking at their store. Everyone checks steam for new games so if you are not on that store then people wont see you.

Its an unfortunate system because steam isn't actually providing that much value but they have just managed to centralize everything on their platform.

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

#168

Post by beerlord » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 4:12 AM UTC

slfnflctd wrote: post #24

zeroname wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just lack of marketing, it's the fact that there are now far more games, but gamers have neither more money nor time to compensate. There are too many game developers, it's as simple as that. Too many millennials don't want the regular old "grown up" jobs anymore, they want to be creatives or artists and the market just can't soak them all up. If you think it's hard as a game developer, try living off painti…

I don't know how they do it, honestly. Back in the day, when things were simpler, being a game dev sounded pretty cool. Now? No thank you. Lower wages, longer hours, much more difficult work, and 'fans' who continuously insult you in the worst possible ways no matter what you do... sounds like a nightmare. If I'm going to go the creative route I think I'd be happier on the sidewalk with a guitar. Career-wise, I would…

An advantage the Gaming Industry holds is that it is completely global.

The salaries for game artists and programmers in Eastern Europe are actually quite high, by local standards. And when you consider the very low cost of living in those countries, they are even appealing at a global level.

Working for a games studio in those countries, particularly if key management are Westerners or the local studio is a branch of a Western company, also gives a professional and modern work environment, whereas many older (non-Gaming) companies in Eastern Europe still have old-fashioned work styles (managers holding less respect for workers, for example) which are somewhat a legacy of the Communist era.

Los Angeles is 147% more expensive to live in than Wroclaw (4th biggest city in Poland) for example. https://www.expatistan.com/cost-of-living/comparison/wroclaw...

Typical Unity Developer salaries in these mid-sized Polish cities are about $35,000 annually, which enables an excellent upper-middle-class lifestyle. Plus, because the cost base in Eastern Europe is so low, if the game your company makes is very successful, you stand to receive a very large bonus.

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

#169

Post by ksec » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 4:20 AM UTC

doyoulikeworms wrote: post #160

ksec wrote: post #159

So what exactly is "Valve" now without Steam? They don't have new games any more ( And none of the the "newer" ones were anywhere as good as CS ). They don't improve or compete in Game Engine any more, which they did in the Golden Era between Unreal, DOOM, and Source. What have they got left? Steam OS and Gaming Machine got no where. HTC Vive doesn't look like they can compete with Sony or Oculus.

Valve is still a quite an admirable game studio. Not only do their top games CS:GO and Dota 2 have large and healthy player bases, but they also have large and vibrant competitive scenes. I don’t compare Valve to the likes of Nintendo or Bethesda anymore wrt game development, but instead to companies like Riot and Blizzard. These studios revolve around franchises-as-services and don’t release new IP often. Their core…

> but instead to companies like Riot and Blizzard.

But both Riot and Blizzard is like 10 times larger than Valve. And has games and franchise that is sustainable business if the worst happens in the next 10 years. Does having CS:Go and DOTA only enough to feed them? I mean even DOTA 2 is like 5 years ago already. And Artifact doesn't seems like a hit at all.

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

#170

Post by wingerlang » Mon, Dec 03, 2018, 5:11 AM UTC

ksec wrote: post #159

So what exactly is "Valve" now without Steam? They don't have new games any more ( And none of the the "newer" ones were anywhere as good as CS ). They don't improve or compete in Game Engine any more, which they did in the Golden Era between Unreal, DOOM, and Source. What have they got left? Steam OS and Gaming Machine got no where. HTC Vive doesn't look like they can compete with Sony or Oculus.

They have 2 upcoming games listed on their website (https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/about) and 3 'ongoing' games. They have also stated they are working on 3 full-length VR titles.