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I'd trust a group of employees doing this out of curiosity over, say, HR doing it.
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%
Not to mention Valve's effort with Proton, allowing non-Windows gamers enjoy what they pay for on multiple platforms with great ease; their efforts have been massive for gaming on Linux, and without it, I wouldn't have paid for a lot of games, earning their developers a whole lot of absolutely nothing.
Also the community hub, the workshop, the review system, the cloud saving, the functional wishlist, the gifting system, the shopping cart, the anti-cheat (you're better of with it than without it), the discovery queue, the sales dedicated to specific types of games that actually help people discover games and drive the revenue up for the developers, the (I think) complete transaction history, the refunds system, the friends and the chat and profiles - and probably many more things that I'm either not aware of or couldn't list off the tip of my tongue, combined with internal works that, again, do help the devs in the end.
Steam is much more than a place where one pays for a game to then simply download and play it. It's much greater and more functional than that. None of the developers have to put their games on Steam - nobody forces Epic Games Store or GOG to be this subpar in comparison. Same way nobody forces gamers to use Steam. People use Steam because they love it - or because there's no good-enough alternative, but that's hardly Valve's fault.
Steam charging 30% is not just worth it, but also surprising, given what putting your game on Steam gets you as the developer, and what it gets us, the players.
Not to mention Valve’s effort with Proton
And their VR efforts. VR seems to have lost popularity lately, but I was really glad that someone out there was competing with Palmer Luckey, especially once he sold out to Facebook.
And... holy shit, I just found out he's Matt Gaetz' brother in law. That explains a lot.
Man, Epic must be patting themselves on the back for all the money they paid getting people to believe 30% was outrageous, because it's paying massive dividends.
It may shock you to know that before Steam, your options were to fuck off or offer your product in a store where you would only get 30% of the profit, with the rest going to the publisher, the retailer, licensing, etc. These days it's closer to 50% for physical copies, and Apple/Nintendo/Sony/etc all standardized with Steam on you getting 70% for digital.
Don't like it? Pull a Valve and make your own alternative that's better. If you build it, they will come... which is why nobody uses EGS.
EGS has become free games store.
EGS is like walking around a grocery store offering free samples and leaving without buying anything.
Sort of. Except all the shelves have weird lips on them to keep you from grabbing the product easily, you kinda have to wrangle each item. Also it's layout and design is archaic and super hard to navigate. And on every aisle there's these little 3 inch steps that you have to go up and down and constantly trip on, or your cart gets stuck on them and you have to lift it up or drop it down. And then if you do manage to buy things, their support is terrible; at the other store if you need help cooking they have a 24 hour recipe hotline to help you out, but this one promises the same, but you actually wind up on hold for hours half the times you call.
So they got tons of free samples, but all their products are kinda a nightmare.
30% is more or less the standard. Not just in the games industry, but everywhere.
Steam does more to promote and support games than many other platforms out there. Epic does not have workshop and forum, Google Play does not promote games as good as Steam.
The efficiency is doing it so effectively that on an open platform competitors can create there own store, pay for AAA games to appear on their store, take the smallest of pay cuts, pass it on to the consumer, and still have customers prefer to pay more to be in the Steam ecosystem. I'm against monopolies but Valve's is absolutely efficient.
Did you know that almost every other marketplace out there (except that fucked up one) has the same 30% revenue split?
The whole debacle over it is artificial. It won't change much if it looked better to people who complain now. It won't remove Valve's ability to provide the best service.
There is a difference though in that you do not have to publish on Steam for your game to be available on Windows or Linux or MacOS, but you do need to use the App Store to publish on iOS, so the 30% is mandatory there.
You can host your own site, you can publish on another app store, it just makes marketing harder.
There are other game marketplaces out there, but they're bad.
This isn't like the Apple App store where it's the only option on the platform. In fact, they've competed with Microsoft's store on some things. It's not even like Amazon where they strong-arm people selling things on the platform. Amazon does things like forbid anybody who sells on Amazon from selling the item at a lower price anywhere, including on their own site. I don't think Steam has any requirements like that. Steam's store has a huge market share because people like using Steam. AFAIK, Steam doesn't even do exclusivity deals, which suck for the consumer but are pretty standard for games, except with their own (Valve) games, and those are rare.
Not only does Steam have a user-friendly library and a user-friendly store, if you launch a game you bought on steam but that is published by a company with a shitty launcher / store / library (EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar), Steam goes a long way to neuter the shittiness of that launcher / store / library.
Maybe a 30% cut is too big. I don't know. It would be great if someone tried to compete with Steam while keeping the consumer-friendly approach Steam has. Maybe competition would reduce that 30% to something lower. But, most of the other game stores I know of have much less consumer-friendly approaches. The only one that's at all similar that I know of is GOG, and I do occasionally use them, especially for old games.
Revenue per head is no doubt a sexy metric, especially for private companies. If it was a public company then investors would call for the company to try and grow its overall profits by spending more on growth related initiatives... Perhaps by releasing half-life 3 for example, lol.
The great thing about keeping your company private is that you can get it just where you like and keep it there no matter what outside parties want. I could totally see Gaben is perfectly satisfied making bank at this level while also having a chill lifestyle.
If the company were public the shareholders would say “great, now give the employees less and give us the difference”
When your employees are so efficient they start using their spare time to audit each other's efficiency on an industry-wide metric.
I have heard that its not too hard to start your own project when working at valve.
Maybe it will turn into their next game, or a new steam feature or it will get canned.
“So we’re getting pay rises, right?” Annakin.gif “Right?”
You should dive down the rabbit hole. Valve does not have a workplace like anything you've seen before, and the pay is just as fucked.
How much did they compensate that bald man who they installed a valve in the back of his head for the loading screen photo?
That guy had it easy compared to the guy that had his eyeball replaced with a valve, and after everything he sacrificed they just stopped using his picture.
My favourite factoid about that is that the minister of finance in Greece who was in charge during the Greek Debt Crisis was Yanis Varoufakis, the former economist-in-residence at Valve.
And that for being a non-public company.
Non public should be more efficient from the labor cost savings of not having to file all the sec documents quarterly and legal costs of following public company regulations.
Not to mention that an obsession with increasing share price is massively distracting and self-defeating.
Public companies focus on short term profit to keep share holders happy. Private companies can actually focus on long term profit, especially if it's at the expense of some short term profit.
It's because Valve is a private corporation, Gabe Newell has managed it well, they don't hire idiots, and they pay their employees well.
Please invest some into the Linux client. The dropdown click-through problem exists for years already, the source of the problem is known and would be easy to fix on your side.
Or develop an API coupled with your DRM, so the community could develop some good interfaces already.
Tried to? Revenue per head and profit per head are very easy metrics. Not sure I would count that as efficient though.
Praise GabeN.