…what? Yeah, 30% is the standard when there are higher costs and higher risks. Why would it not follow that Steam using the same percentage - with lower costs and none of the physical-based risk - is simply greed?
If you look at the overall cost of running a platform though, especially one that does several things, you can see where that 30% becomes viable.
A few things to highlight are, long-term storage and availability of purchases. There is not a single game I have bought on Steam in close to 20 years that I can’t still download and play to this day. Many of those are games that are no longer available for sale on the storefront yet valve as a content provider keeps them available to me and likely will in perpetuity.
There’s an argument to be made that storage is cheap but they are also storing other people’s things that are no longer generating revenue for them. Also, they are providing the bandwidth for us as users to download those games whenever and as many times as we like without concern for how many copies of title sold or who the initial publisher or developer was.
When you look at something like a console provider such as Nintendo or Microsoft who will completely shut down legacy stores, it makes the value of valve taking a unilateral 30% all the more attractive. Anything I buy on Steam I will be able to download and play in perpetuity. That 30% goes to making sure this isn’t just for big-name or the current hot shit. This is for everything ever put on their platform.
Sure, in a vacuum 30% seems like a lot but when you consider the overall maintenance costs and the fact that they have seemed to be pretty pro-consumer all along, The intrinsic value in what they’re offering becomes a lot easier to see.
I also wanted to add on a recent experience I had that highlights this even more so.
I was going through old archive drives and found a digital copy of “The Club” that I had purchased from Direct2Drive. I don’t know if anybody remembers them or not but, they were one of the early digital storefronts that focused on PC digital downloads.
Anyways, I had the installer and my provided key in the directory so I installed the game and attempted to launch it only to be met with an activation screen. When I attempted to activate those servers had long since been decommissioned so I was dead in the water. Feeling that sting that one gets when they can no longer play something they legally purchased I started searching around for information on workarounds before I grabbed a crack. I found a thread from the company that had purchased the rights to all direct2drive purchases that had a workaround for doing the authentication through an alternate method.
I tried all the steps listed including performing a recovery process for an account that I had long since lost the login information for only to be met with a failed authentication once again. By this point I had invested close to an hour maybe an hour and a half of my time trying to get some shitty old game to work and decided it wasn’t worth it.
I hopped over to Steam and saw that I was able to purchase the game directly from them for $5 and download it immediately without any need for additional authentication steps or trying to track down who had purchased the rights to give me access rights to the thing that I had purchased 15 years ago.
Sure, my one experience may be anecdotal but I think it highlights some of the greater issues people might not take into consideration when talking about what valve’s cut is and what that represents to us as the users of the services they provide.
If their revenues were close to their running costs Gaben wouldn’t own multiple yachts, stop defending a company that made a billionaire out of its owner while you’re making less a year than he burns in a day on his boat.
Two issues, you can download and play your games in ‘perpetuity’ so long as Valve continues on the current operating model.
And Valve has not been particularly consumer friendly in the past.
They were found to be violating consumer rights in Australia at the very least and had to put a large notification on their storefront to disclose exactly what they had been wrong.
Valve were forced into providing a refund model and even then it often conflicts with consumer interest. Though admittedly bad actors will always try to abuse any refund model on digital products.
Why would it not follow that Steam using the same percentage - with lower costs and none of the physical-based risk - is simply greed?
Most of the retailers mentioned in that article were also digital only and had the exact same or less risk. Steam certainly does a lot to try and get people’s money, but they aren’t just greedily fucking over Devs for that 30%, that is in fact industry standard.
I also have no doubt that Epic will enshitify itself and raise its rate closer to 30% after growing.
Its not one to one, but providing digital services is not exactly cheap. Data centers and servers take a lot of costs, both the electricity and salary for a team of ops engineers to keep it running smoothly. The building, conditioning, maintenance, insurance, storage, equipment. To ensure low lag and high download speeds you need several data centers with data caches in different regions of the world. If anything it is actually more risky. If a store closes the stock was already paid for by the the owner to the publisher. Zero risk for the publisher. If Steam goes down, it brings windows of opportunity for sales with it and not a dime is secured. They pay for the uptime and quality of service, not just processing a payment once and a download link with a shitty 72 h expiry time. People expect access to their digital goods 24/7 virtually forever. Steam provides it all with a myriad more of business and client facing services that a physical store would simply be incapable of providing.
30% is the standard. And it’s absurd. They all do it because they all have their own walled garden territory, and it doesn’t benefit any of them to lower prices.
You’re telling me that Steam does 30% of the effort to create and publish a game?
They distribute games, which is something in addition to creating and publishing.
Whatever percentage they use is based on an average across wildly different games. A large game with frequent updates doesn’t need to pay steam for the work on steam’s end each update. They don’t need to pay for each tine someone downloads their game, or for the ongoing costs to upgrade steam over time to continue supporting their game. They have a set percentage per sale so they can easily calculate how many units they need to sell to break even.
If the game’s sales die off they don’t need to pay for steam to continue support. At any time they can use the popularity of a new release to renew interest in past releases without any extra requires work. When game sequels blow up, the publisher doesn’t need to do anything to get sales money from new sales of the prior versions. The prior games are just there, waiting to make the publisher money.
How much value do you think any distribution platform provides?
There’s the weakest defense of a capitalistic business practice you could come up with…
“It’s the industry’s standard!”
Ok, if the standard was 50% and someone came along and said “Know what? We can do the same thing for 20%” would you be defending those charging 50%? What if it was 75%?
The reality is, they’re taking 30% because their position allows them to do so and people don’t care enough about those actually doing the work to create games to push Valve to change their ways. Valve is as greedy as any other company.
Remember folks, Gaben is a billionaire that owns multiple yachts, he’s not your friend, he’s making a fuck load of money instead of making sure you get the most from your money, Valve could lower their cut by a whole lot while still being extremely profitable.
Uh, not to take away from your point about Steam making it possible to ditch Windows, but that money is absolutely being put towards buying yachts. Gabe Newel owns $1 billion worth of yachts, 6 of them in total. Like, good on Valve for making Linux accessible, but the money is still quite literally going towards Gabe’s yacht collection.
Yeah, I meant to throw a “not just yachts” in there but my brain don’t work right. We all have our passions. At least the guy looks out for the industry through the eyes of a consumer and doesn’t behave like a pissbaby.
Only if we ignore that a lot of Valve’s pro consumers practices are things that were legally imposed and that their 30% cut is driving up costs for consumers and that they actually use anti competitive tactics to prevent other platforms from actually competing.
that money is absolutely being put towards buying yachts
Did anybody claim that Valve’s entire earnings go into Linux gaming? Of course it’s only a tiny fraction but that tiny fraction is more than anybody else put into Linux gaming.
Also, Gabe Newell also owns an Aston Martin sportscar team called Heart of Racing, so it’s not just yachts. They’ll compete in Le Mans next weekend in case anybody cares.
I’m not sure I follow. The comment I was replying to said Valve’s 30% cut isn’t being put towards buying yachts, but it is. Apparently racing teams too. Whether they’re doing good things for linux gaming or not, Gabe is still a billionaire and he sure spends the money like one.
He can go fuck himself with a 6" railroad spike.
At least Gaben is pushing the Linux gaming community forward!
BUT 30%!!!
Yeah, that 30% means I can ditch Windows. At least it’s being used for good and not just* yachts.
30% is the standard, including for physical media on retail stores, and physical stores require all the overhead of stocking with the negatives of losing sales if demand is higher than supply.
Anyone who actually complains about steam’s cut is either misinformed or lying.
…what? Yeah, 30% is the standard when there are higher costs and higher risks. Why would it not follow that Steam using the same percentage - with lower costs and none of the physical-based risk - is simply greed?
If you look at the overall cost of running a platform though, especially one that does several things, you can see where that 30% becomes viable.
A few things to highlight are, long-term storage and availability of purchases. There is not a single game I have bought on Steam in close to 20 years that I can’t still download and play to this day. Many of those are games that are no longer available for sale on the storefront yet valve as a content provider keeps them available to me and likely will in perpetuity.
There’s an argument to be made that storage is cheap but they are also storing other people’s things that are no longer generating revenue for them. Also, they are providing the bandwidth for us as users to download those games whenever and as many times as we like without concern for how many copies of title sold or who the initial publisher or developer was.
When you look at something like a console provider such as Nintendo or Microsoft who will completely shut down legacy stores, it makes the value of valve taking a unilateral 30% all the more attractive. Anything I buy on Steam I will be able to download and play in perpetuity. That 30% goes to making sure this isn’t just for big-name or the current hot shit. This is for everything ever put on their platform.
Sure, in a vacuum 30% seems like a lot but when you consider the overall maintenance costs and the fact that they have seemed to be pretty pro-consumer all along, The intrinsic value in what they’re offering becomes a lot easier to see.
I also wanted to add on a recent experience I had that highlights this even more so.
I was going through old archive drives and found a digital copy of “The Club” that I had purchased from Direct2Drive. I don’t know if anybody remembers them or not but, they were one of the early digital storefronts that focused on PC digital downloads.
Anyways, I had the installer and my provided key in the directory so I installed the game and attempted to launch it only to be met with an activation screen. When I attempted to activate those servers had long since been decommissioned so I was dead in the water. Feeling that sting that one gets when they can no longer play something they legally purchased I started searching around for information on workarounds before I grabbed a crack. I found a thread from the company that had purchased the rights to all direct2drive purchases that had a workaround for doing the authentication through an alternate method.
I tried all the steps listed including performing a recovery process for an account that I had long since lost the login information for only to be met with a failed authentication once again. By this point I had invested close to an hour maybe an hour and a half of my time trying to get some shitty old game to work and decided it wasn’t worth it.
I hopped over to Steam and saw that I was able to purchase the game directly from them for $5 and download it immediately without any need for additional authentication steps or trying to track down who had purchased the rights to give me access rights to the thing that I had purchased 15 years ago.
Sure, my one experience may be anecdotal but I think it highlights some of the greater issues people might not take into consideration when talking about what valve’s cut is and what that represents to us as the users of the services they provide.
If their revenues were close to their running costs Gaben wouldn’t own multiple yachts, stop defending a company that made a billionaire out of its owner while you’re making less a year than he burns in a day on his boat.
I don’t begrudge him running a successful business. And I didn’t give a shit about who you feel I can or cannot defend. Lol.
If people can become billionaires from selling you stuff it means you got ripped off and overpaid, so yeah, you should be pissed.
Funny how you look at people’s history and they all have anti rich comments in there, but when it’s Gabe Newell? Oh he doesn’t count.
Two issues, you can download and play your games in ‘perpetuity’ so long as Valve continues on the current operating model.
And Valve has not been particularly consumer friendly in the past.
They were found to be violating consumer rights in Australia at the very least and had to put a large notification on their storefront to disclose exactly what they had been wrong.
Valve were forced into providing a refund model and even then it often conflicts with consumer interest. Though admittedly bad actors will always try to abuse any refund model on digital products.
Most of the retailers mentioned in that article were also digital only and had the exact same or less risk. Steam certainly does a lot to try and get people’s money, but they aren’t just greedily fucking over Devs for that 30%, that is in fact industry standard.
I also have no doubt that Epic will enshitify itself and raise its rate closer to 30% after growing.
Its not one to one, but providing digital services is not exactly cheap. Data centers and servers take a lot of costs, both the electricity and salary for a team of ops engineers to keep it running smoothly. The building, conditioning, maintenance, insurance, storage, equipment. To ensure low lag and high download speeds you need several data centers with data caches in different regions of the world. If anything it is actually more risky. If a store closes the stock was already paid for by the the owner to the publisher. Zero risk for the publisher. If Steam goes down, it brings windows of opportunity for sales with it and not a dime is secured. They pay for the uptime and quality of service, not just processing a payment once and a download link with a shitty 72 h expiry time. People expect access to their digital goods 24/7 virtually forever. Steam provides it all with a myriad more of business and client facing services that a physical store would simply be incapable of providing.
30% is the standard. And it’s absurd. They all do it because they all have their own walled garden territory, and it doesn’t benefit any of them to lower prices.
You’re telling me that Steam does 30% of the effort to create and publish a game?
They distribute games, which is something in addition to creating and publishing.
Whatever percentage they use is based on an average across wildly different games. A large game with frequent updates doesn’t need to pay steam for the work on steam’s end each update. They don’t need to pay for each tine someone downloads their game, or for the ongoing costs to upgrade steam over time to continue supporting their game. They have a set percentage per sale so they can easily calculate how many units they need to sell to break even.
If the game’s sales die off they don’t need to pay for steam to continue support. At any time they can use the popularity of a new release to renew interest in past releases without any extra requires work. When game sequels blow up, the publisher doesn’t need to do anything to get sales money from new sales of the prior versions. The prior games are just there, waiting to make the publisher money.
How much value do you think any distribution platform provides?
Steam would be profitable at 12%.
There’s the weakest defense of a capitalistic business practice you could come up with…
“It’s the industry’s standard!”
Ok, if the standard was 50% and someone came along and said “Know what? We can do the same thing for 20%” would you be defending those charging 50%? What if it was 75%?
The reality is, they’re taking 30% because their position allows them to do so and people don’t care enough about those actually doing the work to create games to push Valve to change their ways. Valve is as greedy as any other company.
Remember folks, Gaben is a billionaire that owns multiple yachts, he’s not your friend, he’s making a fuck load of money instead of making sure you get the most from your money, Valve could lower their cut by a whole lot while still being extremely profitable.
Uh, not to take away from your point about Steam making it possible to ditch Windows, but that money is absolutely being put towards buying yachts. Gabe Newel owns $1 billion worth of yachts, 6 of them in total. Like, good on Valve for making Linux accessible, but the money is still quite literally going towards Gabe’s yacht collection.
Yeah, I meant to throw a “not just yachts” in there but my brain don’t work right. We all have our passions. At least the guy looks out for the industry through the eyes of a consumer and doesn’t behave like a pissbaby.
Only if we ignore that a lot of Valve’s pro consumers practices are things that were legally imposed and that their 30% cut is driving up costs for consumers and that they actually use anti competitive tactics to prevent other platforms from actually competing.
Did anybody claim that Valve’s entire earnings go into Linux gaming? Of course it’s only a tiny fraction but that tiny fraction is more than anybody else put into Linux gaming.
Also, Gabe Newell also owns an Aston Martin sportscar team called Heart of Racing, so it’s not just yachts. They’ll compete in Le Mans next weekend in case anybody cares.
I’m not sure I follow. The comment I was replying to said Valve’s 30% cut isn’t being put towards buying yachts, but it is. Apparently racing teams too. Whether they’re doing good things for linux gaming or not, Gabe is still a billionaire and he sure spends the money like one.
Gaben is well-known for being a yacht aficionado, and owns several large ones.
Pretty sure Gaben has a yacht too.
A bunch of them, he’s just another billionaire but people can’t help defending him.