Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheFreim | Hacker News Reader

I would note that they do provide quite an immense amount of value to developers. Achievements, transferable inventory system, multi-player (steam networking), among other things. The 30% cut still feels high, especially since most games can't or won't take advantage of every single service Steam provides, but I do think they provide quite a bit of developer value that needs to be factored in.

View on HN

The multiplayer isn't actually used that much, since it doesn't support console players/cross-play which is expected these days. Many games will use Azure PlayFab or Epic Online Services. EOS is free and doesn't require the game be sold on the Epic Store or the Epic client.

Those are all there for platform lock in, not for the benefit of the game developer.

You really missing my point here. Problem with platforms is that platform-holders are taking bigger cut from a small struggling companies than they take from likes of EA or Ubisoft. If you look at majority of small and mid-size game development studios Valve is basically taking half of their income unless your game earns more than $10,000,000.

It's totally okay to like Valve or Steam as gamer. As fellow gamers I totally agree with you.

Just next time when you wonder why you favorite studio went bankrupt or why you niche genre game never got a sequel this is why: because some monopoly took 50% of their profit.

On other hand how much developer time would have been spend on building own distribution, billing and related customer support. Time spend on doing it yourself would not be free either.

30% for this is high, but then there is also the discoverability. Which I think does beat google by long way. So they probably would not have sold as many copies without popular platform.

This is exactly what I was trying to point out. Steam's developer services can save a massive amount of time for developers, time which is especially valuable to indie studios. I still feel that the 30% is steep, I'd prefer if Steam took a cut based on how many of their underlying services you used, but its wrongheaded to deny that Steam provides many useful features for developers that can save a lot of time.

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

I think such model can lead to messy scenarios. Say you start without cloud saves and sell million copies. Then you add cloud saves. Now should your commission increase on past sales meaning that for while you make nothing? Or should it only apply moving forward and on future copies sold?

And I am absolutely certain that some developers would exploit this in someway.

Nothing of what Steam provides costs 30%. Discoverability and free marketing only provided to games that are already successful and have hundreds of wishlists. That's only possible to achieve if you game already have it's own following and community.

12+ years ago if you released on Steam it was a big deal and platform provided traffic to everyone, but today it's flooded with games so basically you're on your own.

The only thing that allow Valve to charge this much is network effect. They are not vendor-locked platform like App Store, but they do have nearly monopoly on PC.

Little correction: obviously not hundreds of wishlists, but hundreds of thousands. You need at least 100,000+ to even be considered to have a successful Steam page.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com