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According to Epic vs. Apple lawsuit average commission rate on Steam is apparently 10.7%
- Thread starter dex3108
- Start date
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
I don't think we'll know the exact specifics, but in general, Valve makes no money on keys sold via other marketplaces like Humble.
Just look at the difference between user reviews posted in total, and user reviews posted for purchases made through Steam. You can see that many games are played on Steam without Valve making a penny.
Although we don't really know if people buying on Steam review at the same rate as people buying outside of Steam. You could imagine that people buying on Steam day 1 are more likely to post a review than people getting a game in a bundle years after release.
Although we don't really know if people buying on Steam review at the same rate as people buying outside of Steam. You could imagine that people buying on Steam day 1 are more likely to post a review than people getting a game in a bundle years after release.
User Warned: Trolling
How is a second launcher incumbering me as a consumer of games?
I'd expect that people who buy off Steam are less likely to review games on Steam, since their reviews don't count towards the review score.
Not everyone is aware of that, but those who are aware are probably less motivated to leave a review, resulting in key reviews being underrepresented.
I really want to know their deffinition of average commision rate. Are they including Valve own games as 0%? Are they removing some payment methods out of the comision rate?
If they remove the payment costs and the average commision rate is 10.7% would make more sense.
If they remove the payment costs and the average commision rate is 10.7% would make more sense.
The post you quoted didn't say that, it said the experience is worse, which it is.
It makes the experience worse in that it locks some games to a platform that lacks features which some gamers would consider essential.
Comission is the same for all, and the lawsuit said that IAP is not a different market than normal sales, so all revenue.
I'd like to see more, because that sounds very hard to believe. Surely billions in IAP there, almost all at full commission (before payment processing, which I gather is higher in some territories than others).
It's unfortunate that there's no citation or elaboration on the 10.7% commission rate. We can only guess at what that means. The explanation that makes the most sense to me is that they're trying to take keys into account. But the document doesn't actually say that.
That is correct. The cut starts at 30%, and drops to 25% and 20% after certain amounts of money have been made.
As I said, I really want to see the numbers of how theyu calculate that. If they are removing transaction cost from the calculation I could see that being the case with a % of like 17-18%. Or if they are accounting for Valve own games cut as 0% (as Dota 2 and CSGO are probably like a good chunk of Steam money).
If you use Steam Big Picture because you're a comfy couch PC gamer, launching games from other launchers is a pain in the ass.
That's just one example. I'm sure others will have more examples of how EGS and other bad launchers are a nuisance.
It took multiple years for Epic to start accepting payment in my currency on EGS. Sucked complete ass for their exclusives.
EGS launcher prevents Tetris effect from being able to use steam input because steam can't hook into it, and the game can't be launched from outside EGS. So if you have the EGS version of Tetris effect and have a controller that is not supported by default, or if you want to use your own mapping, you are screwed.
I wasn't even trying to bring up the notion of EGS exclusivity and its impact on the value-adds that Steam-as-a-platform brings to the PC gaming ecosystem, because that subject has been litigated to death already. My point is, one of the common refrains in the Epic narrative is that "Valve don't do anything to earn their 30% cut". This just shows that a) their effective cut is much less, so there is less for them to need to "earn", and b) the delta between the 30% and this 10% effective cut is exactly why they DO to earn the higher marginal cut. That 20% is a result of things that directly benefit the consumer, things like currency cards, 3rd party storefronts and the price competition that those engender. Even if Valve did nothing else to improve the ecosystem (they do), their supposedly obscene 30% cut is a net positive for consumers.
Seems to me this is mostly caused by the free key generation (and in turn sold on other market places). If this is actually the case EGS really needs to go home.
Oh I 100% agree. Some developers don't like the 20-30% cut but I think Valve have used it well to subsidise a feature rich platform that people like to use.
They've literally made the PC a viable place to buy and sell games by serving lots of little niches and markets all around the world.
Exactly this. Epic Games Store is an absolute mess still and the user experience is a complete joke compared to Steam. Steam has made the PC experience on par with console experiences and made buying digital PC games much simpler and pretty much the norm now.
Why would IAP be conflated in this discussion, specifically on the comission Valve get as an average per game sold overall?
That's its own discussion
Didn't take long for this strawman redirection to be posted
Like a clockwork.
lack of a steaminput equivalent
lack of a shopping cart (edit: true, but seems to be by design for the sales that encourage repeat separate purchases. Still a bad design I guess but w/e).
no reviews or reviews analytics
no support forums
no/minimal social or community features like mod guides, configs and the like
different/worse regional pricing
lag in the launcher
lack of betas/beta branches/launch options
no big picture mode/controller supported frontend
far fewer alternative places to buy cd keys.
no shelves/collections as far as I can see or customization with box arts etc.
no way to choose download servers
no equivalent like steamdb which is a godsend for seeing different depots, branches, and what keys are region locked, family sharing locked, and to what countries, down to literally what files you will receive in the depot you register an entitlement to. (edit: I think there's an epic store db thing but it's far less user friendly and also doesn't seem to have as much information).
no console utilities to download certain depots
no family sharing I think.
steam has in the past talked about contingency plans for EOLing the store and worst-case scenarios which is nice for preservationists.
Easy region changing on steam as long as you have the required payment methods.
and I would guess a lot of backend analytics and features for devs that I just have no clue about.
Just off the top of my head. It's an abysmal launcher and I hate the 'it's just another launcher' rhetoric. It feels like the apt console comparison would be like the PS5 doesn't let you use a controller without plugging it in, and the Xbox does -- just a substantial diff that severely negatively impacts the game playing experience. If there was this substantial a difference in features between consoles, most players would lambaste one console over the other easily. But because we get to play the game at all, we should just be content to have a significantly compromised experience. If players are allowed to be disappointed by cross gen releases being held back on newer hardware, this is a conceptual equivalent. Like that, it's probably not something worth becoming exceptionally incensed about, it's something you can probably work around, but should you? It's a valid complaint.
Steam is the gold standard for PC launchers by a country mile, and is in such a different league in terms of features that PC games more or less don't exist in the cultural PC zeitgeist until they release there, outside of the exceptionally big Ubisoft/Bethesda stuff (though even the latter looks like it might go away). Just look at the sales numbers.
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I am no fan of the EGS, but some of these criticisms are a little outdated.
lack of a shopping cart
Correct, but I feel this is a moot point as Epic rarely does sales where you can load a cart up with cheap games and buy in one transaction. Due to how their coupons work it's generally more economical to do multiple transactions.
no reviews or reviews analytics
Correct. Epic seems to feel like this is a feature rather than a flaw, though.
no support forums
Correct. There have been a few instances where there have been store-specific bugs with multistore releases and developers had a hard time triaging bug reports for the EGS versions because Epic has no centralised forum support and the developer never had the forsight to set their own up.
no/minimal social or community features like mod guides, configs and the like
Correct. Some games have mod support in the client but it is a threadbare feature. There's nothing quite like the comprehensive community features/improvements that Steam offers.
different/worse regional pricing
Not too sure on this. Depending on the country, some people tell me EGS has better pricing than Steam or GOG.
lag in the launcher
Can confirm it's still an issue.
no big picture mode/controller supported frontend
Correct.
far fewer alternative places to buy cd keys.
Correct. This is by design as key sites generally offer discounts by cutting into their 30% cut and Epic wants to stop that to keep prices artificially high, which is especially true on their exclusives.
no shelves/collections as far as I can see
Correct.
no game streaming as far as I can tell
EGS doesn't have an in-client streaming solution, but it works with most others including Steam Link.
refund process is a bit more involved. Last time I had to send a order number to an actual human.
They've automated this now and it's as good as Steam's.
no way to choose download servers
Correct.
no equivalent like steamdb which is a godsend for seeing different depots, branches, and what keys are region locked, family sharing locked, and to what countries, down to literally what files you will receive in the depot you register an entitlement to. (edit: I think there's an epic store db thing but it's far less user friendly and also doesn't seem to have as much information).
Epic Store DB is pretty threadbare, like the store itself. No surprises there.
no console utilities to download certain depots
No idea on this one.
no family sharing I think.
Correct.
Easy region changing on steam as long as you have the required payment methods.
From what I gather, publishers hate this and Valve is clamping down on it.
no built in proton support like steamplay, so fuck linux gamers I guess.
Lutris should do the trick with EGS - I don't see this as an issue in terms of Proton. But the fact there's no native Linux client eliminates the chance Epic will ever release native Linux versions of games. This is no surprise, as Tim Sweeney has previously compared/mocked switching to Linux as being like "moving to Canada".
The short answer, though, is EGS is definitely poor value for customers. Epic's stranglehold on third party key sites artificially keeps prices high and strips away useful features that players have come to expect as standard. People say Steam needs competition, and maybe there's some merit to that opinion as Valve can be very complacent, but Epic isn't bringing them any meaningful competition. Buying up exclusives and running a slim margin operation, in my mind, is only killing platform innovation and good customer service.
The way I see EGS as far as being a competitor goes, is by looking at things Valve have done for the PC space and thinking, "Has or would Epic ever do this?" If the answer is no, and the prospect of a third party doing it is also zero, then that's an area where Epic is failing to compete with Steam in a meaningful way. The same works on the flip side - if Epic does something Steam doesn't/wouldn't, then I think that's a good competitive edge for Epic. Alas, I've yet to see anything of value that EGS has which Steam doesn't.
Thanks for the clarifications -- I admittedly try and use EGS as little as possible which is why I assume some of my info is outdated. But it's still surprising how few of my initial concerns have been fixed in like...3 years?
Customer service/innovation/quality is clearly not a concern of Epic's. If it was, they'd invest in it, and to invest in it they'd need to take a bigger cut and stop setting cash on fire with short term exclusives and freebies.
Maybe one day a few years from now they will give up after they get bored and/or realise that running a platform is expensive and hard work.
That 10.7 figure is almost hard to believe. I know a lot of Steam sales are from keys, but getting a level like that would mean over half of all Steam games are from keys. I didn't think it would be so high, but with things like bundles I guess it becomes more clear. If that commission rate also includes payment processing/gift card fees coming from their cut it becomes easier to believe.
One thing that might be important is that there is presumably a difference between Valve's commission percentage and the take home percentage for the dev/publisher. This probably doesn't mean on average a game dev gets 89.3 percent of all revenue if we consider that most Steam keys are sold to resellers for 20-40 percent below MSRP (this is how key stores make money as well as offer cheaper keys to us). If we consider things like bundles/Humble Choice, a 20 dollar Steam game may get a dollar of revenue per bundle sold. If payment processing is figured in this number tjen obviously that doesn't effect devs much either.
Over all, I think we really need to see the methodology for getting this number before much can be said about it. But it may explain a somewhat unseen reason Valve doesn't drop their store commission to 12 percent baseline. Of course as I mention earlier, that 10.7 percent may not mean 89 percent for devs. No offense to the devs though, I do like the key and bundle market quite a lot and I can't see it existing in its current capacity without Steam's key policy. (Well, itch.io has done some ludicrous bundles)
One thing that might be important is that there is presumably a difference between Valve's commission percentage and the take home percentage for the dev/publisher. This probably doesn't mean on average a game dev gets 89.3 percent of all revenue if we consider that most Steam keys are sold to resellers for 20-40 percent below MSRP (this is how key stores make money as well as offer cheaper keys to us). If we consider things like bundles/Humble Choice, a 20 dollar Steam game may get a dollar of revenue per bundle sold. If payment processing is figured in this number tjen obviously that doesn't effect devs much either.
Over all, I think we really need to see the methodology for getting this number before much can be said about it. But it may explain a somewhat unseen reason Valve doesn't drop their store commission to 12 percent baseline. Of course as I mention earlier, that 10.7 percent may not mean 89 percent for devs. No offense to the devs though, I do like the key and bundle market quite a lot and I can't see it existing in its current capacity without Steam's key policy. (Well, itch.io has done some ludicrous bundles)
There are ways to creatively get to a low average. Is it the average of all commissions for each title? So e.g. sell 1K games at $60 each and get 30%, and activate 2.8K cheap Humble Bundle keys, there's a 10.7% average. They might also be treating those activations of games with real world value of $1 or $2 each, as the official Steam price of $10 or $20, so the final averaged commission as a fraction of total revenue appears lower. They might not be including IAP. Etc.
Does this mean that we now have to protest against EGS' exorbitant 12% tax?
The interesting thing is that Dr Evans, the economist who came up with that number, was Epic's expert witness. In trying to win the court case against Apple, Epic had to essentially destroy its argument against Valve. The 10.7% average commission rate for Steam was meant to show the judge that, in an open market, competition pushes commissions way down therefore iOS should be opened up.
The interesting thing is that Dr Evans, the economist who came up with that number, was Epic's expert witness. In trying to win the court case against Apple, Epic had to essentially destroy its argument against Valve. The 10.7% average commission rate for Steam was meant to show the judge that, in an open market, competition pushes commissions way down therefore iOS should be opened up.
I am surprised by the very small number of posts in this topic. Previous threads on the matter were quite contentious.
I'm not sure why everyone is focusing on keys; to me, the word "declined" in the second sentence indicates that Steam's effective cut changed because a large part of their revenue is coming from AAA games that hit the revenue threshold for the lowered cut. That change almost certainly happened because of competition from EGS, so credit where credit is due.
Although the change was implemented mere days before Epic announced EGS, it was motivated primarily if not exclusively by AAA publishers leaving, which is why the thresholds are as high as they are ($10m and $50m, respectively). EA, Acti, and Microsoft were all-in on their respective platforms, and even Bethesda was toying with the idea (Rage 2 initially wasn't going to launch on Steam, which would've made it the first single-player game to be exclusive to Bethnet, and Bethesda was coy about whether Doom Eternal would follow suit).
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I've thought that would be a good idea too, but then I wonder if that would just promote certain devs pumping out lots of low effort stuff like hentai puzzles that won't sell a lot, but will always be getting the better cut.
That was before EGS, unless we're talking about a different thing.
Data from Epic given during a lawsuit is hard to refute, so the Epic trolls are avoiding this topic.
The problem is that without those better rates, the big publishers would leave. And as shitty as it is, indie devs need them on there, because otherwise the steam store would be not interesting at all for a large part of people who play videogames. So in order to remedy that, valve can either lower the cut across the board, likely stop swallowing money transfer fees, as well as removing free keys -- or they implement the system as is.
Absolutely. It also proves though that Steam's effective commission percentage was already much lower than 30%.
It was announced a few days before EGS was revealed but I believe that there is definitely a connection between the two. I am sure that Valve was aware of Epic's plans ahead of time.
Devs will be cut whatever the store that's selling the keys will give them, often that will still be 70% or whatever is negotiated for a bundle inclusion or whatever. Unless the dev is able to sell them directly then they can get 100%.
The point here is not about the dev cut being different at all, it's about how the free key generation system means Valves virtual cut per game is much lower than perceived as they are providing infrastructure for a large bunch of games purchased off steam. This gives them much less leeway to reduce thier own store cut.
The key generation system has provided such great price competition in one platform, to match the Epic cut they would almost certainly have to end that. Devs may not care and just want more money from everyone buying in the same place for a low cut, but I'm sure many consumers would disagree.
Huh, last thing I've heard was that Steam takes something between 18% and 19% on average. I Wonder what that 10.7% number is based on and what is included.
But I feel like that average commission rate ist too low and does undercut some of Valves own statements in regards of what is required to run a profitable platform.
But I feel like that average commission rate ist too low and does undercut some of Valves own statements in regards of what is required to run a profitable platform.
Since it comes from Epic's expert witness, they surely do have incentive to overstate EGS effect. Missing comparison to previous is really shame.