And you want to start with Valve, which is one of the smaller game companies and is one of the few players not guilty of buying up their competition, instead of Sony, Microsoft, other Big Tech players, media conglomerates like Disney, ISPs like Comcast or AT&T, or meat distributors who are price fixing algorithmicly?
Why even buy games period? Why risk giving money to any of them since things that become popular risk making the people selling them to become wealthy? Not like indies are immune to it looking at Minecraft becoming too popular that too many people wanted to buy it making one person then a corporation wealthy, so why not just not buy period to prevent the issue from even becoming a possibility?
The best solution is prevention. Don’t buy anything.
Not on Steam and not in ways that enrich billionaires. If devs don’t make their game available another way then too bad, they chose to deal with the devil, I don’t have to encourage them, won’t keep me from playing their games through other means or by getting them through giveaways.
There’s a difference between making profit and becoming one of the richest person in the world, in the second case it means you clearly made too much profit by selling for a higher price than required.
According to Shotbolt, the developer and digital distribution company is “shutting out” all competition in the PC gaming market as it “forces” game publishers to sign off on price parity obligations - supposedly preventing them from going on to offer lower prices on other platforms.
But I thought those are only for steam keys? That’s always been what devs found out when trying to vary their prices on storefronts: Sell the game standalone, Valve sleeps. Sell a steam key or use the steam backend, real shit.
Epic is good at making it sound like it applies to sales in general though, while technically not being wrong from how they word it: You do sign a price parity obligation, yes. And it does prevent you from offering lower prices on other stores. For, well, steam keys. But they’re not mentioning that last part as that makes it sound like Epic just sells stuff for the same end-user price because they can.
I’ve seen some comments agreeing with you and others citing examples of individual developers being told not to sell at lower prices. Don’t know if the prosecutor is citing those cases or they’re just a chancer who hasn’t done their research properly.
But it doesn’t need to be sold for more? As evidenced by not being sold for more despite the cut Valve takes? If that were an issue the games would cost say 70 on Steam but 60 elsewhere?
It needs to be sold for 70 on Steam in order to bring in the revenue per copy they need for their RoI, why would they go and sell for less elsewhere if Steam with their 30% share sets the bar? People won’t feel ripped off, the price is the same, what they don’t realize is that the only reason the price is that high in the first place is that Valve gets 21$ from each sale! The company needs 49$/copy in their pockets, if the distributor’s share had always been 15% instead of 30% we would be buying games for 58$ instead of 70$ right now.
I find it absolutely wild that you seem to think Steam’s 30% cut is the sole reason AAA games cost $70. Have you ever looked into how much it costs to sell a game at a retail store? From what I’ve seen Steam takes roughly the same cut as most retailers do and then the publisher still has to produce the physical copies and distribute them. They would make the same amount on Steam if and only if they printed, burned, packaged, and distributed their physical copies for free, not to mention the promotional materials they’re sending out to retailers.
Everything I’m seeing indicates that compared to a physical copy (which is given for a majority of AAA games) a major publisher would earn far more money per copy on Steam than at GameStop, Target, Walmart, or any other retailer where they’re charging the same $70 price at. But Steam is the real problem that’s hurting their RoI, apparently.
I’ll agree I think Steam’s cut is high and they could earn a lot of favor by turning it down a bit, but your argument seeming to insinuate that their 30% cut is the sole reason games cost $70 is absolutely wild to me.
This discussion is about Steam, they have control over the market, all distributors are in the wrong and take too high of a cut, I’ll talk about the other distributors when we have a discussion about them.
So companies made due with the same cut from retailers for decades, Steam comes along and offers the same cut with none of the other expenses associated with those retailers (thereby giving them a better RoI than the same retailers they made due with for decades) and suddenly Steam is the reason games are so expensive.
For all of your talk that Steam’s awful cut sets the bar for the price or else they won’t make their RoI on games sold there, you suddenly don’t seem to care very much about the very many retailers these AAA publishers still regularly sell through that cost them a significantly larger percentage per game sold than Steam does.
In a world where Sony and Embracer are running around saying we need to be paying $70+ for games (while tipping the devs and buying micro transactions like a good like wallet)… You’re mad at the storefront?
Yeah, go into Walmart and demand they take less of a cut so… The publisher can take more from the devs?
Gabe is rich because he spearheaded a good service (which I’ll admit I thought was a scam back when I was forced to make an account way back when I had dial up) but… 30% is standard. For the price of games? Be mad at Embracer. Be mad at EA. You’re free to not like or use Steam but they let the publishers set the price. Their cut is a drop in the bucket. The whole ‘cut’ debate is just EGS propaganda.
…(which I’ll admit I thought was a scam back when I was forced to make an account way back when I had dial up)…
Oh man, I cursed Valve and Steam back then. It effectively made LAN parties of the time impossible since you could no longer share media and needed Internet access to play. Back then, only business had the “fast” Internets while everyone else had 56k baud modems. Hard to do much when your max download speed for the entire connection was 5kb/s.
They lowered the cut for people who didn’t need it. Massive publishers selling tons of games. Arguably indie games that only sell a few copies need a larger cut than EA on their latest blockbuster.
There isn’t much in the way of scale here. Their bandwidth isn’t monitored on a per game basis, and if that was a factor in the cost they’d be basing the cut on the size of your game. Some 1 gb indie game pays the same cut or larger than a 100gb mammoth from EA. Valve is also way more strict with that indie game in getting itself published than they are with the EA game as well.
By default, as per the old rules, Steam takes 30 percent off the top of any revenue that a given title generates on the storefront. In the new system, once a game earns $10 million in sales, Steam will adjust its share to 25 percent. If a game proceeds to hit the $50 million mark, Steam’s share further declines to 20 percent. The total revenue includes any and all income sources for a given game, such as package deals, add-on packs, in-game transactions, and fees applied to trading on the Steam Community Marketplace.
According to Steam’s post on the subject, “Our hope is this change will reward the positive network effects generated by developers of big games, further aligning their interests with Steam and the community.”
In other words, this is meant to encourage big developers not to take their games elsewhere by rewarding them with a bigger slice of the income. $10 million may sound high, but at a $60 price point, that’s around 167,000 sales. As a glance at SteamSpy can tell you, that’s nothing special for a mainstream PC game. Conversely, even a successful indie game may not reach $10 million in revenue over the course of its entire operational lifetime. In practice, the terms of the new revenue system appear to mean that a big “triple-A” mainstream title is being rewarded with a more favorable income split by Steam simply for showing up on the market at all.
They get a 30% cut and make enough money that Gaben is a billionaire so yeah, games prices could be much cheaper.
I mean literally everything could be cheaper. Welcome to a capitalist society.
Wow, you’re starting to get it, maybe we should start doing something about it instead of defending those who profit, right?
the solution to that is taxes, not suing successful business one at a time.
Or breaking them or nationalization so profit goes to everyone instead of a single guy.
And you want to start with Valve, which is one of the smaller game companies and is one of the few players not guilty of buying up their competition, instead of Sony, Microsoft, other Big Tech players, media conglomerates like Disney, ISPs like Comcast or AT&T, or meat distributors who are price fixing algorithmicly?
Who said I want to start with them?
Why even buy games period? Why risk giving money to any of them since things that become popular risk making the people selling them to become wealthy? Not like indies are immune to it looking at Minecraft becoming too popular that too many people wanted to buy it making one person then a corporation wealthy, so why not just not buy period to prevent the issue from even becoming a possibility?
The best solution is prevention. Don’t buy anything.
Who said I do?
You don’t buy games?
Not on Steam and not in ways that enrich billionaires. If devs don’t make their game available another way then too bad, they chose to deal with the devil, I don’t have to encourage them, won’t keep me from playing their games through other means or by getting them through giveaways.
If there was no method by which people could ever profit from a system like Steam, why bother building it?
There’s a difference between making profit and becoming one of the richest person in the world, in the second case it means you clearly made too much profit by selling for a higher price than required.
As evidenced by games costing less on stores where the cut is lower!
Oh… wait…
That is addressed by the lawyer:
But I thought those are only for steam keys? That’s always been what devs found out when trying to vary their prices on storefronts: Sell the game standalone, Valve sleeps. Sell a steam key or use the steam backend, real shit.
Epic is good at making it sound like it applies to sales in general though, while technically not being wrong from how they word it: You do sign a price parity obligation, yes. And it does prevent you from offering lower prices on other stores. For, well, steam keys. But they’re not mentioning that last part as that makes it sound like Epic just sells stuff for the same end-user price because they can.
I’ve seen some comments agreeing with you and others citing examples of individual developers being told not to sell at lower prices. Don’t know if the prosecutor is citing those cases or they’re just a chancer who hasn’t done their research properly.
They’re also the prosecutor, they can word it like that if they so desire. It’s on the opposing attorney to correct them.
And possibly demand sanctions if they can convince the bar that it was willful omission of details.
Why would they lower their price if the same game needs to be sold for more on another platform in order to see a RoI?
But it doesn’t need to be sold for more? As evidenced by not being sold for more despite the cut Valve takes? If that were an issue the games would cost say 70 on Steam but 60 elsewhere?
It needs to be sold for 70 on Steam in order to bring in the revenue per copy they need for their RoI, why would they go and sell for less elsewhere if Steam with their 30% share sets the bar? People won’t feel ripped off, the price is the same, what they don’t realize is that the only reason the price is that high in the first place is that Valve gets 21$ from each sale! The company needs 49$/copy in their pockets, if the distributor’s share had always been 15% instead of 30% we would be buying games for 58$ instead of 70$ right now.
I find it absolutely wild that you seem to think Steam’s 30% cut is the sole reason AAA games cost $70. Have you ever looked into how much it costs to sell a game at a retail store? From what I’ve seen Steam takes roughly the same cut as most retailers do and then the publisher still has to produce the physical copies and distribute them. They would make the same amount on Steam if and only if they printed, burned, packaged, and distributed their physical copies for free, not to mention the promotional materials they’re sending out to retailers.
Everything I’m seeing indicates that compared to a physical copy (which is given for a majority of AAA games) a major publisher would earn far more money per copy on Steam than at GameStop, Target, Walmart, or any other retailer where they’re charging the same $70 price at. But Steam is the real problem that’s hurting their RoI, apparently.
I’ll agree I think Steam’s cut is high and they could earn a lot of favor by turning it down a bit, but your argument seeming to insinuate that their 30% cut is the sole reason games cost $70 is absolutely wild to me.
This discussion is about Steam, they have control over the market, all distributors are in the wrong and take too high of a cut, I’ll talk about the other distributors when we have a discussion about them.
So companies made due with the same cut from retailers for decades, Steam comes along and offers the same cut with none of the other expenses associated with those retailers (thereby giving them a better RoI than the same retailers they made due with for decades) and suddenly Steam is the reason games are so expensive.
For all of your talk that Steam’s awful cut sets the bar for the price or else they won’t make their RoI on games sold there, you suddenly don’t seem to care very much about the very many retailers these AAA publishers still regularly sell through that cost them a significantly larger percentage per game sold than Steam does.
Oh, is it other retailers the article is talking about? No, it’s not.
In a world where Sony and Embracer are running around saying we need to be paying $70+ for games (while tipping the devs and buying micro transactions like a good like wallet)… You’re mad at the storefront?
Yeah, go into Walmart and demand they take less of a cut so… The publisher can take more from the devs?
Gabe is rich because he spearheaded a good service (which I’ll admit I thought was a scam back when I was forced to make an account way back when I had dial up) but… 30% is standard. For the price of games? Be mad at Embracer. Be mad at EA. You’re free to not like or use Steam but they let the publishers set the price. Their cut is a drop in the bucket. The whole ‘cut’ debate is just EGS propaganda.
Oh man, I cursed Valve and Steam back then. It effectively made LAN parties of the time impossible since you could no longer share media and needed Internet access to play. Back then, only business had the “fast” Internets while everyone else had 56k baud modems. Hard to do much when your max download speed for the entire connection was 5kb/s.
On which Steam gets $21 or more so in reality they need to sell games for $50.
Epic with a lower cut has the same game prices. Additionally Valve lowered their cut ahead of a launch of Epic Games Store
They lowered the cut for people who didn’t need it. Massive publishers selling tons of games. Arguably indie games that only sell a few copies need a larger cut than EA on their latest blockbuster.
There isn’t much in the way of scale here. Their bandwidth isn’t monitored on a per game basis, and if that was a factor in the cost they’d be basing the cut on the size of your game. Some 1 gb indie game pays the same cut or larger than a 100gb mammoth from EA. Valve is also way more strict with that indie game in getting itself published than they are with the EA game as well.
https://www.geekwire.com/2018/valves-new-steam-revenue-sharing-tiers-spur-controversy-among-indie-game-developers/
BuT vAlVe DoEsN’t UsE aNtI cOmPeTiTiVe TaCtIcS!