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What are Valve's revenue, profit and value numbers?
- Thread starter EsqBob
- Start date
I get this, but we basically at the point where we say "Valve have got this, nobody else can try"?
Nobody is saying that. But they really should try better to compete with Valve.
Not sure what that is, but I guess not. If valve closed tomorrow, there's no way to find out "financially" (as in, not corporate listings or whatever)
No issues with others trying. The issue is, so far, everyone else that has tried has released sub-par products
I really wanted some company to try and fight valve for my money.
With the exception of GOG all other clients mostly use exclusives to try and bring me to use their clients.
When was the last time a new costumer friendly feature appeared outside of GOG and steam? origin refunds in 2011?
[edit] thank you eonden. corrected the date
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Origin was the first one to offer a decent refund policy in 2011. It was also quite decent for the time. It just stagnated HARD.
Any company is free to try their hand at a store front but when you're releasing a new product that competes with another and you're claiming to solve a problem it's wise to actually solve it. Example, everyone keeps talking about discoverability. That sucks on EGS currently and has been that way since it launched. As it's library of games gets bigger it'll become more and more apparent just how bad it is. It seems like EGS solution simply hinged on being a new store with not a lot of content
If you call what epic is doing..'trying' then iam sorry to tell you that its not like that. The only company that are actively trying to compete with steam is GOG but its not finding a lot of success due to its DRM-Free stance but its certainly a stance worth standing for which i applaud them. In order to try and compete with steam you need to cater customers away from valve and in the PC market you can only permanently do that by prioritizing customer convenience and service. Steam in the past has had the power to convert many pirate customers into paying customers by offering the features which you don't get when you're pirating a game. Steam isn't forcing anyone to stay in its ecosystem, people just flock there themselves.
SteamSpy estimated $4.3BN in game sales in 2017. At the same growth rate that would mean $6.5BN in 2019. Valve gets at most 30% from that, let's say 25%, so $1.625BN. However that doesn't include MTX, DLC or IAP, nor does it include the 100% of revenue Valve gets from CSGO etc. They could easily be over $3BN in revenue. Their profit margins must be huge, with about 400 or so employees. That's maybe $100M-$200M for employee costs, plus overhead. Then whatever servers and other misc costs there are.
SteamSpy: The top 100 games on Steam accounted for 50% of sales revenue last year
Steam saw an increase in game sales revenue of $800 million in 2017 over the year prior, according to Sergey Galyonkin …www.gamesindustry.biz
Steam spy includes third party sales too and incorrectly assumed everyone bought from steam and also lives in US. So this number is very inaccurate. Even without accounting for dlc or mtxn missing.
2011? shit. It is even worse then i thought.
thank you for correting me
I think it'll take a lot of effort to get up to speed with Valve, I mean that is testament to what they do - this is including the stellar work around VR, the Linux compatibility work. Very high bar and a lot of people look incredibly pale in comparison. Anybody starting up, I would expect it to take years, and that is if they even survive.
Not at all. We're at the point where we say "Valve have got this, if you want to compete, do better".
Third party sales is why I lowered the royalty rate in the calculation from 30% to 25%. With your US comment do you mean that other currency sales would be for lower dollar amounts due to regional pricing? For DLC and MTX I roughly doubled the total, since iirc that's about the ratio of game sales to live product sales that the big publicly held publishers report.
Yeah it was but it was for EA made games only btw and not for every game being sold on their store.
You cannot hit the market at the same level as Valve. Nobody can. That's setting a bar that nobody can get over.
Third party sales are more like 50%.
Because of regional pricing, his assumption will screw price up too, most regions are cheaper than US. (Europe and Australia being exceptions).
Of course this varies a lot per game.
Yeah it's not really comparable with Valve's policy, even if it is certainly better than many other stores.
Iirc, GOG will offer refunds, but you need to provide evidence of technical problems that can't be resolved in order to get one.
To defend GOG here, I think that's a side-effect of their DRM-free stance. They can't turn off your installed copy remotely, by definition.
Sure. I understand what their policy is and why it exists, but it is a downside vs Steam, even if a reasonable and for many people an acceptable downside.
Steam does give refunds on DRM free games too.
Most of the games with discoverability issues on Steam wouldn't get a spot at all on a curated marketplace. There would be a few exceptions, sure, but the issue is simply that there are more games released than players (or a curated store) can possibly keep up with.
A lot of people like to pretend Valve created this problem by flooding the market with games. Fact is the vast majority of games without significant marketing budget have always struggled to find an audience, and people are forgetting all the games that got rejected from Steam prior to it opening up. Valve have done a great deal to solve these problems, they did not create them. Indie devs overall would be far worse off without Steam having existed.
Besides (almost) no one will buy DRM free games just pirate them. So it's actually more dangerous for DRM'd games (Even Denuvo is easily beaten by abusing refunds until you update Windows anyways abusing it's offline support)
Sure if say 25% of sales are in regional currency for 50% of the price in the US, that would mean the earlier revenue estimate would be 12.5% lower. Where are you getting third party sales at 50% from?
Someone here did a detailed analysis and estimated 72% of game sales were through Steam and 28% third party. The revenue split would be more in Steam's favor once you factor in sales of DLC and MTX, more of which is probably sold through Steam.
Why Valve actually gets less than 30 percent of Steam game sales
Commission-free Steam key sales through other stores cut into Valve's bottom line.
arstechnica.com
OP
OP
thanks!SteamSpy estimated $4.3BN in game sales in 2017. At the same growth rate that would mean $6.5BN in 2019. Valve gets at most 30% from that, let's say 25%, so $1.625BN. However that doesn't include MTX, DLC or IAP, nor does it include the 100% of revenue Valve gets from CSGO etc. They could easily be over $3BN in revenue. Their profit margins must be huge, with about 400 or so employees. That's maybe $100M-$200M for employee costs, plus overhead. Then whatever servers and other misc costs there are.
SteamSpy: The top 100 games on Steam accounted for 50% of sales revenue last year
Steam saw an increase in game sales revenue of $800 million in 2017 over the year prior, according to Sergey Galyonkin …
Googled a bit and that seems to come from 2011 when they had 250 employees.
If the 2016 number of ~360 employees is still somewhat accurate they would only have to make like $150m profit to be above current Apple lol.
Nobody outside of Valve knows and can say. But as I was told once upon a time: "Money is not a limited resource at Valve (...)".
The mystery is the beauty of being private and not having to disclose this info to anyone, but the IRS
For private companies? Absolutely not.
There are records held by private banks, and there are City, State and Federal tax records, but none of those are for public viewing.
Galyonkin's GDC presentation says PUBG "sales" brought in $600m, so user geographic data must have been a factor in his napkin maths, as otherwise that number would be well over $800m (27,795,000 x $29.99).
I'm not so sure. Considering many publishers have experienced a significant or otherwise notable increase in microtransaction revenue in recent years, I'm inclined to disagree and strongly suspect you're underestimating the extent to which user engagement beyond the point of sale represents Steam's revenue pie. I'd actually be surprised if it didn't make up the difference.
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They are incredibly generous to employees; unparalleled benefits even in a place like Seattle (well, Bellevue) full of tech companies known for lavishing their employees.
Essentially no real limits to expense accounts beyond just not being corrupt; you can take your spouse on business trips on the company dime.. they have on site free day care.. all kinds of crazy things in general in their office, etc. Entire company gets taken to Hawaii once a year too.
It's (I think) partly why leaks are so uncommon from them. Who would risk getting fired from that?
Essentially no real limits to expense accounts beyond just not being corrupt; you can take your spouse on business trips on the company dime.. they have on site free day care.. all kinds of crazy things in general in their office, etc. Entire company gets taken to Hawaii once a year too.
It's (I think) partly why leaks are so uncommon from them. Who would risk getting fired from that?
Would make sense. Most Steam related "leaks" are inadvertent putting stuff online early or whatever, rather than an employee deliberately sharing privileged information.
Ah ok. In the UK, they're all public, whether the company is private or not.
To add to this, there's a strong culture of not talking publicly, ever, to anyone, about anything. Support and localization (where lots of leaks tend to happen at larger companies) are also mostly handled off-site via a contracted partner, except for a small core internal FTE team to manage said partnership.
Also, sushi. Every week (unless it has changed).