The issue isn't really the fee. I think It's in part the expectation of a certain degree of support (beyond providing SDK, documentation, and distribution), and parity with what others provide for the same fee (at least from my perspective).
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[Polygon] Steam developers speak: Maximum profits for Valve, minimum responsibilities
- Thread starter dex3108
- Start date
The issue isn't really the fee. I think It's in part the expectation of a certain degree of support (beyond providing SDK, documentation, and distribution), and parity with what others provide for the same fee (at least from my perspective).
I mean, the 30% cut is more or less identical to the console developers fees at this point. What you get for that cut, besides a platform and an SDK, seem to be markedly different between them.
This is absolutely correct and what everyone screaming about "too many shovelware games on Steam" is omitting.
The issue is not shovelware, the issue is that too many good to decent games are being released daily/weekly/monthly. My wishlist is over 500 games (~1.2K games in the library) and I add to it (and cull it) weekly. This is with me being fairly strict and dropping games that I wouldn't want to play immediately to purchase. It also doesn't include some games that I may have in GoG or through Origin Access or on consoles.
So again, too many GOOD or at least decent games not asset flip crap/troll games. I go through discovery queue a few times a week and I probably haven't seen a title that is outright shovelware more then a handful times over last couple years.
On the subject of what Steam provides. SteamVR, Controller Support, Steamworks, Big Picture, Cloud Saves, development tools and so on apparently don't exist in this 30% cut discussion?
How about EA Support, easy beta releases, great patching infrastructure, message forums, built in game streaming for devs and other options? Those don't exist either?
How about being able to generate keys completely for FREE and sell on other stores? That also don't count?
The answer is of course that all counts. I emphasize with dev posting but the problem is there are too many good games and not enough time to play it. Unless the game stands out it's going to get buried. Games get buried on PSN all the time and Switch will get there in a year and both platforms aren't nearly as busy as Steam with games, great games, stretching back 20-30 years.
That's another issue, you are competing not just against new games but also "Good Old Games" available for cheap (and old could mean anywhere from 2 to 20 years).
That's because most of the services and developer products Valve offers are free. They are more like Microsoft than Sony in terms of the product they offer.
There revenue doesn't come back to developers in the form of store support. It comes back to developers in the form of stuff like SDL2, vogl, dx2vk, etc.
If you're referring to me - I believe I highlighted that as only one aspect of a larger discussion about curation.
Edit: and to play devils advocate here, for all the OPTIONs the steam platform offers that you've highlighted, I'm certain more than a few developers would gladly trade things they don't use (like steamVR for some, cloud saves, etc) for the option of more personalized and responsive support, for example?
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It's pretty simple when you think about it: products that stand out will get noticed and sell; products that don't (because they are poor in quality, scarcely promoted, cost too much for what they offer and/or simply don't match what people are looking for) drown in a sea of shovelware.
But that's free. Developing software libraries, middleware and Linux support is easy! Clearly. That's why everyone else does it. Oh wait....
This article and thread is frustrating to no end. I get the indie dev predicament but piling on Steam despite all the great things it's doing to enable PC gaming is such BS.
That said, they do need to improve support.
It will be interesting to see what Nintendo offers on this front. We recently obtained switch Edev kits, but I've NOT dig into the publishing tools just yet (it feels like diving into the Stygian abyss at this point ;) )
Keeping in mind that game development is typically a "second job" for indie developers, they're probably working anywhere from 60 to 80 hours a week.
Sure, knowing the ins and outs of business is essential, but so is sleep, and far too many devs simply don't have the time for either.
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When it comes to videogames, I'd wager a number of devs out there are still enamored with this dream of hitting in big, even though we're well past the point of over-saturation. Hundreds of games are being released each month, and Steam's population simply isn't big enough to support them all.
The reality of it all is that there are no easy answers and the average indie dev has maybe a .01% chance of success.
Sure, knowing the ins and outs of business is essential, but so is sleep, and far too many devs simply don't have the time for either.
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When it comes to videogames, I'd wager a number of devs out there are still enamored with this dream of hitting in big, even though we're well past the point of over-saturation. Hundreds of games are being released each month, and Steam's population simply isn't big enough to support them all.
The reality of it all is that there are no easy answers and the average indie dev has maybe a .01% chance of success.
Yep.
I am certain and know of good games that get "buried" - except, the simple fact is by "buried", I and most people mean out competed by better games.
The great thing about Steam for me is that I can still find those games, make my own choice and still enjoy them. It is far harder if not impossible to do so in other ecosystems to the same degree
I'm shocked you are all arguing that "everything else Steam provides" somehow makes up for the utter lack of individual support and attention that indie devs get that should be freaking BASIC and intrinsic to all platforms.
FWIW, if a game is available everywhere I will always buy it on Steam (or buy it earlier, or for more money) because of the services they provide to me at a consumer level. So it's not like they are just resting on their laurels.
It doesn't really matter if actually selling the game they made is part of their true passion or not.
It's literally their job, a job they chose to have.
Sure it would be cool if every dev could just make videogames all day and let everything else solve itself, but that's not how the world works.
If you want to be an indiedev you also need to understand how to sell videogames, if you don't wanna do the latter, don't try to be the former, because as of now, these things go completely hand in hand.
In regards to the exchange rates/regional pricing, i hardly see any people actually making fun of them, however, the scrutiny expressed in this thread is entirely deserved. That's some really basic shit even the average steam customer knows about, if you can't handle that, if you don't even understand why regional pricing actually exists, you shouldn't complain about it, especially not in a B-Tier exposé of evil, greedy valve on a
I don't think Nintendo could possibly offer the types of things valve offers. I compared them to microsoft precisely because of the type of investments they make. Their investments go way, way beyond normal gaming things. The work they have done to linux is, again, comparable to the type of work microsoft does on windows. As in, beyond SDKs and tools for game development. We're talking standardized libraries for the entire operating system, not just the game related parts.
Steam in general has done crazy things for linux merely by being there, in a way that Nintendo offering an SDK for switch development simply cannot.
What makes you confident that your game would pass curation though? Valve said that Stardew Valley wouldn't have made it in during the duration era. Plus Magnum couldn't get into GoG.
Someone did quick research in a thread a few weeks back and even if counting games in mid-60s and up (which excludes things such as Europa Universalis for example), those games outnumber the rest by a large amount.
There are just too many games. Valve at least is trying. They now got publisher/developer pages and you can follow them so you get notifications of new games. You can customize your queues. You can ignore titles. Sure they need to do more and I think stronger ML/AI approach is needed so system could be trained on user preference but it's still better then pretty much any other store.
The "everything else steam provides" is literally the basis for viable software development. If you're talking about basic support, what Valve provides is literally the most fundamental support possible. Before you get on to things like market visibility, the development environment needs to exist in the first place, which is where Valve spends their money.
If you're merely a consumer, you literally cannot understand how fundamental Valve is to several development tools. As in, they outright would not exist without them. Extremely fundamental tools. Again, like SDL2.
Now, I do agree with this. Support needs to be provided. However Support costs money in general. So probably then you wouldn't have different tiers.
Let's say I sign up for AWS. I can do no support, dev support (basic email and such), business support (M-F call-in, etc) or Enterprise. Each tier is positioned and costed out differently.
Steam probably needs something like that.
- Base dev support
- Full dev support
- Business
- Enterprise
I'm talking about what's described in the article:
And the fact is that Valve used to do these things. So there's no excuse or justification that "well all this other stuff balances it out" can provide.
Those poor developers, they run a business without even nowing the basics and yet they think steam is the source for all of their problems:
Steam was a sellers market and now is a buyers market and that has scared them.
They want to develop games with talent from all over the world and sell it in all over the world aka international marketing but:
they only think as their homecountry as customers, they create a product for one specific audience without thinking international pricing, cultural differencies and such...
Anyway, every indie game would be better if those devs could hire a producer to do the "little" thinks that propel a game from the bunce of daily releases on steam to the ones on the top charts.
Edit: and now i saw that some members have said pretty much the same thing, nice era.
Steam was a sellers market and now is a buyers market and that has scared them.
They want to develop games with talent from all over the world and sell it in all over the world aka international marketing but:
they only think as their homecountry as customers, they create a product for one specific audience without thinking international pricing, cultural differencies and such...
Anyway, every indie game would be better if those devs could hire a producer to do the "little" thinks that propel a game from the bunce of daily releases on steam to the ones on the top charts.
Edit: and now i saw that some members have said pretty much the same thing, nice era.
Whole different discussion, friend :) but, fwiw, I'd be willing to take the chance.
Thats more a side effect of the traditional publisher model becoming increasingly marginalised under the advent of direct sale digital distribution than a deliberate action though.
At this point, all a publisher really offers for someone selling digitally is marketing muscle, and depending on the publisher assistance with things like localisation or porting costs.
Devs complaining about 'lack of exposure' - and I'm putting aside console comparisons here, because console owners have a vested interest in pushing sales of their platform as a whole in a way that steam as primarily a retailer does not - often seem like they would have been better suited to have given up some revenue share to work with a publisher who would offer that exposure if they didn't want to run their own marketing campaigns.
Its like... I dunno, the difference between putting a show on Netflix (where Netflix are going to push it as part of their efforts to promote Netflix) and selling your own copies directly through Amazon. Its not really amazons job to push every product they sell, its to make selling as frictionless as possible.
The fact is that was before curation was lifted. You can't do that when there are hundreds of games being released every month. They do other stuff which you ignore and which Sony and Nintendo do not (i.e. middleware work, Linux support, and many many other things you are skipping over). It's basically a tradeoff. Steam is pretty much just there , providing the pipes. It's on dev to provide everything else. Pipes aren't cheap though.
Uhhhhh, they have a monopoly on the user base, one can't just not release on Steam.
Agreed. While certain complaints about Steam are just, I'm still convinced Valve's decision to interfere with the evolution of PC gaming as less as possible is the right one. Because there isn't another ecosystem out there doing better than Steam. Many, many games and features that are being praised in these other ecosystems were born on Steam.
I do understand how frustrating it is for indies if their game doesn't sell. But nor shovelware nor Valve is responsible for that imo. Without a publisher, devs need to market their games themselves. As one of the devs said in this article, this isn't different on console, they only get "tips" how to do so.
For me, the key for finding hidden gems are curators on Steam. Follow a few curators that seem to like many games you like, and you'll get plenty of great new games to discover. Devs can provide free keys to curators they like to bring their games under attention.
Valve should improve the curator system tho, so that more people are using it. They should also reward curators for finding and promoting hidden gems. This would benefit both customers and devs more than Valve being the only curator for Steam imo.
When your game that looks like this
is the same price as this, one of the best games that has ever been created
That might explain your low sales, not the store you're putting it in. I mean there's certainly a conversation to be had about the indie industry pricing themselves too low, but the reality is that there are hundreds upon hundreds of other choices at that price point.
is the same price as this, one of the best games that has ever been created
That might explain your low sales, not the store you're putting it in. I mean there's certainly a conversation to be had about the indie industry pricing themselves too low, but the reality is that there are hundreds upon hundreds of other choices at that price point.
I wish people who keep saying this were forced to live in a third world country with a third world country's average salary for a year or two. Hopefully that would give them a little perspective.
I'd certainly be interested to see this from dev point of view. My experience with all other stores is terrible (MS store in particular is horrible whether online or on the Xbox especially if you are trying to find 360 games).
From ML/AI perspective, I have done some work on AWS side on that and it's surprisingly powerful even talking about fairly small samples of half a million events/items to couple of million events/items. And I am talking about base stuff in their PaaS (i.e. vanilla ML barely customized) and not tenser flow based containers on ECS/EKS or Sagemaker.
Yes, also another reason why software should have regional pricing is that otherwise it's either going to get outright pirated or simply skipped. It's better to sell 1,000 copies at 1/2 price vs 10 (or 100) at full price.
Edit: Forgot to add. Comparing with hardware is ridiculous. Your wafer for GPU or CPU is not going to cost less whether you are selling to EU, US, Mexico or Eastern Europe. However, with software, you are talking digital copies at minimum cost so there is a LOT of leeway.
We've been through this before. The "good old days" that some developers remember fondly were only good for those lucky few that made it through Steam's curation. For everybody else the "good old days" were actually really shitty old days.
Plenty of games do not release on Steam. I don't think that's a smart decision necessarily, but it absolutely happens. Any 'monopoly' Steam has is because consumers prefer using the platform over other options.
The problem is that assuming that console method and attitude is what should be the standard, which I don't agree with. Most consumer commerce doesn't work that way either, nor other gigantic software stores like the Apple App store or Google Play Store.
I prefer the app store model for Steam (mostly), because I don't want Valve drawing arbitrary lines around what I can and can't buy on Steam. The 30% cut Valve gets pays making a better user experience for buyers and I'm happy with that.
also people dunno what a monopoly is if they think Steam is anywhere close to one.
I prefer the app store model for Steam (mostly), because I don't want Valve drawing arbitrary lines around what I can and can't buy on Steam. The 30% cut Valve gets pays making a better user experience for buyers and I'm happy with that.
also people dunno what a monopoly is if they think Steam is anywhere close to one.
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Some of the most popular games in the world don't get released on Steam. The whole Steam monopoly schtick is BS.
Hell, they could just sell their keys elsewhere for FREE and still show up on Steam.
I don't see anyone pointing a gun at their heads forcing them to release their games on Steam.
The Microsoft Store charges way less than 30% afaik, so if enough developers leave Steam for the MS Store in the same timeframe, Valve might notice something (or not because they are too comfortable doing nothing). Whining but at the same time doing nothing to make a change is pathetic. So until I see the games of those developers in the Microsoft Store, I won't even remotely feel sorry for them.
The Microsoft Store charges way less than 30% afaik, so if enough developers leave Steam for the MS Store in the same timeframe, Valve might notice something (or not because they are too comfortable doing nothing). Whining but at the same time doing nothing to make a change is pathetic. So until I see the games of those developers in the Microsoft Store, I won't even remotely feel sorry for them.
Of course you can release games outside of steam.
Minecraft became the biggest game in the world while being sold from the developers own homepage.
But of course, it is easier if you do publish games on steam; almost as if steam happens to provide stuff, rather than doing "next to nothing"
Minecraft became the biggest game in the world while being sold from the developers own homepage.
But of course, it is easier if you do publish games on steam; almost as if steam happens to provide stuff, rather than doing "next to nothing"
MS Store charges the same cut. As does literally every other store that isn't itch.io
Yeap. Although they aren't really "competitors" in the most common way as they still rely on Steam Launcher and the myriad other services Valve provides around it. They are only competitors in the sense of a storefront but nothing else.
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Speaking of stores with terrible performance, usability, discoverability, heavy curation and sometimes the need to reinstall the Operating System of your box. Yeah, let's bring this shit in as an example.
I think I read during the summer months that they lowered the cut. Too lazy to search now though.
I expected to read some numbers in the article but I didn't find any. Do the developers of these games have better sales on other platforms? Are their games available on other platforms?
Some of them also sell games DRM free, which doesn't involve Steam at all, but insofar as they sell Steam keys you are right.
Both money and especially time available for video games are limited. The harsh or sad truth is that most people choose to spend them to the best experiences available.
I've personally never felt that Steam doesn't show me enough games for my tastes. I have about 30 games in my backlog and another 31 in my wishlist. I've reached a point where I only buy stuff I'm 100% sure I'll enjoy and finish.
I've personally never felt that Steam doesn't show me enough games for my tastes. I have about 30 games in my backlog and another 31 in my wishlist. I've reached a point where I only buy stuff I'm 100% sure I'll enjoy and finish.
Lifting curation sounds like a poor justification when it opened the door to asset flips and a lack of support options. I don't understand why people have a hard time believing that Valve choosing to be hands off like this is a negative thing after everything we've heard about the problems with their corporate culture and how it's driven multiple people out of their company.
Again, for vast majority of people asset flips are not a thing that causes any issues. They are invisible unless you go and look for them.
Support should be better.
I've seen some game that bypass the DRM information on the store page, I've seen this kind of trick for denuvo and other form of DRM and online analysis, by putting a special eula that ask the user the permission to use this things. If the bad review was about that the user was right by giving them a downvote as this is clearly a way to fool a customer
I see this mentality over and over again when it comes to Steam and it baffles me. Some people seem to think any day now one of the other PC companies will launch a competitor to Steam. Except that has never happened.
Blizzard has yet to turn Blizz.net into a steam competitor despite it's billions of dollars and years of popularity. The same is true for Uplay. Then there's Microsoft, who has struggled for years to get any slice of the PC market.
The only publisher that's tried to legitimately compete with Steam is EA with Origin, which is hilarious when you think about it.
Maybe that's because competing with Steam means sinking huge amounts of money, time, and resources into your own store. Something most profit driven companies don't want to do. Instead, big publishers are just pulling their games from Steam and putting it onto a launcher that will never sell an indie game.
I see no reason why Epic would put their hat into the ring when they could just spend that money into continuing support for Fortnite
