Comment by notafraudster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by notafraudster | Hacker News Reader

One of the things Steam's 30% cut subsidizes is the generation of unlimited free license keys for developers to do with what they please. So, for instance, if I am an independent developer, I can sell my game on Steam. Say I sell 5,000 copies. I can then turn around and generate 25,000 keys gratis, and sell those on my website (paying maybe a 5-8% fee to my payment processor, but otherwise taking everything). Those keys activate on Steam, at which point my customers get the benefits of Steam and I pay nothing for the bandwidth or upkeep.

This also allows me to give keys to other vendors, like Humble or GreenManGaming, who do take a cut (in some cases close to Steam's 30%, in other cases closer to 10-12%). Those vendors may choose to discount my game beyond the discount I offer by giving up more of their margin to the consumer.

It is not uncommon to see games on Steam where the origin of user reviews is 50% Steam purchases, 50% off-site key activations, which implies that Steam's effective margin may be as low as 15%.

Now, I think most independent developers are willing to sell on any platform who will have them and for whom the marginal costs of submitting / uploading are lower than gross sales, so certainly I don't think Epic is making a bad move here and I suspect they'l get decent developer uptake, but I also think the sort of "topline sticker comparison" obscures some of what's going on.

To some extent there may be value in having this discussion a week from now when Epic has rolled out the store and we have a better idea of how other considerations stack up.

The keys are not unlimited. They cracked down on this quite a while ago. You have to submit a request for keys which Valve may or may not approve, and they will definitely not approve a request for 25K keys on a game you have sold 5K copies of.

Most of the reporting suggesting this was coming from spam games that sold literally <10 copies on Steam and requested 100k copies for Russian penny bundles. If that foreshadows further cracking down, then fair enough, but as-is it's fair to say that any legitimate commercial request by a developer would be approved.

I've heard rumors from people I trust that they are going to crack down even further on keys, possibly to the point of making it so you can't resell elsewhere.

This may not be a bad thing, though. (As long as they're doing it with discretion.)

A comment by 'vatueil' in this thread hinted at an important point: Steam is currently battling the massive library of half-baked 'crapware' that snuck onto the platform for the _sole purpose_ of being sold off as cheap keys in bulk. It's really more of a scam than anything.

Valve has a reputation to uphold, and it's no wonder they want to put this practice to and end.

Ditching the keys thing sounds strange. It seems like the perfect vendor lock-in approach.

It's a huge insentive to remain on platform despite other sales channels. It basically prevents competition, why build a steam clone when you can just build out the front end and let people use steam keys?

As a user I actually prefer it.

I already maintain a small handful of steam copy cats that annoy me to no end.

Maybe they should not have let crapware onto their platform in the first place?

It did not passively sneak in, it was actively let in by Steam.

I feel like there's some hindsight bias here. By that I mean:

If I took two equally bad games-- one by a legitimate developer who may need some practice, and another by a developer whose intention is to scam the system-- would you be able to tell which is which?

I would argue that the former has a right to be on the platform (good luck trying to objectively define what constitutes a 'good' game, after all) and the latter does not. But there's no way to tell them apart until the devs show their true colors.

Seems fair to me.

> Valve has a reputation to uphold

They're not doing very well there though. See any of e.g. Jim Sterling's videos about Steam over the last couple of years for excellent "Why are Steam sliding into the crapper?" commentary.

If Valve are going to drop their commissions to compete with Epic, they will pull in third-party key sales. Those third-party stores and bundles will die off.

Valve really needed a kick in the pants though. Their store is thoroughly out of date. Crowdfunding new games and sales bundles should have been a part of their offering. They are too worried about being a monopoly, and not focused enough on innovating their offering. The quality of games on the platform needs to be dramatically stepped up, and all of the porn/hentai games kicked out to avoid national censorship.

Didn't they restrict the practice somewhat?

https://www.vg247.com/2017/08/18/valves-new-policy-on-large-...

They've tried to prevent people from publishing shell games that no one actually buys to play, that exist only for the sake of generating keys that e.g. make the discounts on game bundles look more attractive, yes.

But in general what notafraudster said is true, and generating keys to sell is in fact explicitly condoned:

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

> Steam keys are meant to be a convenient tool for game developers to sell their game on other stores and at retail. Steam keys are free and can be activated by customers on Steam to grant a license to a product.

> Valve provides the same free bandwidth and services to customers activating a Steam key that it provides to customers buying a license on Steam. We ask you to treat Steam customers no worse than customers buying Steam keys outside of Steam. While there is no fee to generate keys on Steam, we ask that partners use the service judiciously.

In practice, as long as you're selling a real product and your keys are for legitimate sales then you'll face no restrictions. Pretty much common sense.

Those other stores only made sense because they offered a lower commission than Steam.

If you already have the lower commission, you don't need the ability to print keys.

Instead of going through a bundle, which yielded about 50c per copy then sunk your later sales since tens of thousands of keys ended up on G2A etc, just sell your game for 95% off - same result (mass appeal, even to people who are not really interested in your game), doesn't impact your future sales, and probably yields more revenue.

However, the one gap I can see is from Kickstarters - backers need some method to access the game on Epic Store.

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