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That lawsuit against Steam’s 30% cut of game sales is now a class action, meaning many other developers could benefit
(www.rockpapershotgun.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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As a mobile app developer who has been in the business since before the iPhone was even announced, this is hilarious.
No, you can’t compare it to the App Store. With the Apple App Store you get so much more for that 30% cut than you get with Steam, it’s not even close. You kids have no idea how bad it was in the before times.
Can I ask what you get? I'd like to understand what steam provides for a 30% cut vs what app stores like Google or Apple provide and what you value more from one vs the other.
Stockholm syndrome, it sounds like.
Well, a complete development toolchain for example. Does Steam provide an IDE, compiler, debugging tools, etc? No. You got to license that shit from someone else. Does Steam provide developer support for any of the OSes their client runs on? No they don’t. If I’ve got a question about Windows internals, I have to pay Microsoft for help. Then there’s lots of services my apps can use for free, like the push notifications service.
People like to shit on Xcode, but they likely didn’t do any mobile development before the App Store was a thing. I’m talking 2005-2007 era. Development tools for S60, J2ME and BlackBerry were so bad, it was like they were built by someone who hates developers. The software was actively developer-hostile.
You want on-device debugging? Haha, why don’t you go fuck yourself instead? Oh no, I need to sign my iOS app. which takes all of 1 second and is done locally. With BlackBerry your app would be split into dozens of small chunks, and each chunk would need 3 different signatures to be able to access all APIs. Of course this signing wasn’t done locally, no it was done on one of BlackBerry’s servers which was slow as molasses, and each signature, which any non trivial app would easily need 100+, was requested separately. Of course you needed to do this every time you wanted to run your app on a device. To add insult to injury, the signing server was down all the time, to the point that someone made a website (something like ‘isthesigningserverdown.com’) to easily check its status.
Of course, that was if you were lucky and even got access to the signing server. You’re not a Fortune 500 company and want access to BB api’s that require signing? Why not go fuck yourself instead?
Of course you’re thinking, if testing on device is so painful, I’ll just test in a device simulator, right. Hahahaha, no. Because fuck you.
Also, all phones were super buggy to the point that our codebase was full of device-specific workarounds. We actually had a kind of database that kept track of which specific bugs were present in which device that was used in combination with a pre-processor to build a device-specific version of our apps. We didn’t upload 1 build to an app store, we built 200+ versions of our apps (which took hours btw). We didn’t have to buy a few ‘expensive’ iPhones to test on, no we literally bought every single phone that had any significant market share. We literally had to test our apps on hundreds of phones. We’d buy new phones every week. We had an entire team of people who did nothing all day but test our apps on different phones.
Also, since there was no app store we had to host the apps ourselves, that meant we had to buy and maintain our own servers (including writing all the server code) just to let users download the apps. There was no app store to handle payments, payment was usually done through reverse-billing SMS (a.k.a. premium SMS). You text a keyword to a shortcode and you’d get an SMS with the install link. We had to write and maintain the code to handle that. We had to pay to receive the SMS. Then the mobile operator took a 70% cut. Not for any kind of app store, there wasn’t anything like that. Not for hosting the app. Not for providing development tools. No, just for sending the premium text message with the install link.
So when Apple announced the app store. With good development tools. With them handling payments. With them handling the download. With an actual good OS that wasn’t buggy as fuck and actually got updates. And they only took a 30% cut? You bet everyone in the mobile app industry was jumping for joy.
You are giving props to the Apple store (among others) for a couple of things here 1. Good Development Tools. 2. Handling payments. 3. Handling downloads. 4. A good OS.
So okay. Let's break this down a bit. Apple is a closed system. It provides a lot of the tools you reference because you literally cannot get those tools anywhere else and meet the standards required to publish anything to their store. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but it is important context in comparing steam to Apple and their ecosystem.
I'm also not sure what debugging tools you'd expect to get from Valve in regards to Microsoft as a platform. You have to pay Microsoft for help because they're the ones with the source code and other system elements. Steam doesn't have control over those. The same goes for Apple. So for the record I don't know that this is relevant unless you're specially comparing their steam OS and what it should provide as a platform for designing games for steam OS and working within the steam ecosystem with that of other players like Microsoft, Apple, and Google.
Steam handles payments and even refunds.
Steam handles downloads.
My understanding and use case is that steam OS is pretty decent as far as gaming OS's are concerned and I haven't seen them catch a whole lot of flak for that. However I actually don't know and can't speak to this but would be happy to have you or others elaborate on the experience of developing for steam OS specially or just Linux. I'm sure it has its own set of pros and cons.
Followup question. Do you receive any of this stuff from Nintendo? Sony/PlayStation? They also take an 30% cut. They also have closed ecosystems as far as development. They also appear to handle payments, and downloads. I know that devkits have historically been exhorbitantly expensive but don't know what the barrier to entry is now or how that compares.
Borg is arguing in bad faith, don't give him more attention.
A good part of what the said about Apple is not even true, and nothing he said has anything to do with Steam vs Apple Store.
From the first line, recently Apple released an OS update that broke some software from the Apple Store, like MS Office. They made people call the support from the app developers, Apple did not help anyone with that.
Borg went on an unhinged rant about how bad they are at deploying software to specific hardware, and how little they know about the industry. Completely unrelated to what you are asking.
It is not worth spending time, please don't feed the troll.
If you want to talk seriously about the industry, there are better places to do it.
I mean. On the one hand you may have a point. But I wouldn't have learned any of what I have learned in this thread by not engaging with the people making comments here. I'm not sure that Borg intends to be a troll. The rant was unhinged but Borg is correct in that Apple and their app ecosystem aren't comparable to Steam and their storefront. They obviously have some feelings about development for app stores vs development for steam and obviously this wasn't the place to do it, but I'm not sure they were intending to be a troll.
Some people in this thread are obviously laboring under some pretty interesting and unfounded assumptions. We can't understand how they came to such conclusions without interacting with them. Some of these discussions may be worth it. Others may not.
SteamOS can really only be a good thing for devs, as I understand it. The steam deck gives them fairly limited hardware to target for development if they're inclined to do so, and Valve's effort with Proton have done wonders for general Linux compatibility, even in the absence of a native Linux version of their games. That's opened up a sizable market for them that was previously unavailable.
My point was that you can’t really compare them because Steam provides a lot less value than Apple to developers, yet they still take a 30% cut. With Apple you get a lot more for your 30% than you do at Valve.
I don’t develop for consoles but a quick Google search shows that PlayStation provides support and even free development kits (special console hardware for development) to indie developers. They all obviously provide SDKs as they are the only ones who can.
Steam is great, but it’s just a storefront. Steam doesn’t get involved until your game is done and ready for sale. This is very different from Apple/Google/Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo who are much more involved in the entire development process than Steam.
I guess I'm trying to compare the bits and pieces that are the same across these platforms and that's why I was wondering about developing for things like the steam deck. I agree that providing a development space and tools for development when you are the entity providing the hardware is different than acting as a management and aggregation tool with appropriate included services. I'm still reading this https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/home
And seeing if I can find answers to some of the questions I have about what services they do provide on the development side for the hardware they do sell.
Steam has multiple dev kits and various other tools available for free. Steam also has enormous resources available for after you publish that the companies you list do not have.
Really? Never heard of it. How does it compare to e.g. Visual Studio, XCode, Android Studio and the like?
"it" is an entire massive list on steam.
I wasn't aware apple was behind visual studio, android studio, xcode and the like. Those are all tools anyone can use.
It's ok to say I was mistaken and don't really know what I'm taking about.
As a developer who has done mobile development, I agree Xcode is solid. Still doesn’t excuse Apple for killing backwards compatibility and losing access to iOS games that aren’t even 10 years old.
The key feature of Steam to me is that it is better at game preservation.