this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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What's the efficiency in taking 30% of almost all game sales on a platform? I know we all love valve, but the efficiency here is having a store that everyone has to use if they want to make sales at all.
Valve's 30% is high, sure. But you're not seeing the total cost of selling a game.
And yes, I've done this before.
Besides the user count, besides all other factors. Digital sales are kinda hard.
You need to offer the actual game. If you're selling an indie game that's a few hundred megs, well you get to go sign up for a service to deliver it. Could be as simple as a google drive link, but because this is business use you get to pay business prices.
Are they charging a flat rate per month, per gig? Per download? Some combinations?
Now there's updates and patches that need to be delivered. Same deal as before, but also now you need to handle the actual patching. Do you ship one big patch that checks for previous patches? Small individual patches that your users have to figure out what one they need?
Does your game have multiplayer? Well damn have fun with that.
What about support and refunds and GDPR stuff? Gotta factor all of that in too.
Now we get to do payment processing. You get to pay a company to accept payments on your behalf because you are NOT doing that yourself you WILL get stuck on inane and silly laws.
That's part of it. Paying steam 3 bucks on my 10 dollar game to handle ALL of that? Yeah that's fair. Could it be cheaper? Sure. a lot of things could. I don't spend months on a game and then cheap out on the most important part: sales.
My time is valuable and worth 30%
Let's not describe this as "paying valve three bucks" because that's not accurate and is misleading.
It's paying valve 30% of your revenue.
It is misleading. It is 30% of the entire revenue of the game. And it is objective whether Valve deserves 30% of that revenue. It's also true that games aren't locked to the Steam platform and can absolutely make money outside of Valve's influence. History has shown though that it is less profitable then being inside the Steam ecosystem.
Except that Steam allow their keys to be sold on other platforms and don't take a cut on those. So it is 30% on the key sold on steam, but 0% on the other storefront.
So there is no reason to not go on steam because it doesn't restrict you to steam.
You still need Steam on your computer to install it which means if your computer no longer supports Steam you are out of luck.
If your computer doesn’t support Steam, there’s really no reason to install Steam, because better chance than not your computer doesn’t support almost any game you’d want to play on Steam.
There are still plenty of stubborn people that cling to Windows 7, Steam dropped support a few months back when they upgraded the... Electron version, I believe? Had something to do with chrome/chromium removing win 7 support.
Steam is 20 years old so we have now reached a point where people have retro gaming machines where parts of their libraries come from Steam.
If your computer is incapable of even running Ubuntu. Then I don't think it's worth using.
It is not a great trend, but you need a launcher anyway today be it Steam, Origin or any other launchers.
Only GOG offers DRM free games but it is not the norm.
Some games on steam are DRM free, meaning that you can run the game without opening Steam.
I'd rather have physical copies of my games, but it doesn't exist anymore unless you pirate it.
With that said, Steam is the most convenient and feature complete and that is why it is so widespread. Epic games with their money printer Fortnite could not reproduce a fraction of Steam dev tools and functionality.