During Gamelab 2019 at a panel hosted by GamesIndustry.biz, Paradox Interactive's former CEO Fredrik Wester (now the Executive Chairman of the Board at Paradox Interactive) talked about the cut "platform holders" take from sales and they're not impressed.
The one this always comes back to is Valve's store Steam, which has a standard 30% cut they take from developers. Although, they did tweak this for higher earning games in December last year so for games that earn $10 million it's reduced to 25% and 20% at $50 million and that does include money from DLC, in-game transactions, Steam market fees and so on.
Wester said "I think the 70/30 revenue split is outrageous", noting that it was likely established in the '70s by Warner Bros when distributing physical media like boxed VHS tapes and so on saying "That was physical. It cost a lot of money". Wester went on to say "This doesn't cost anything." and thanked Epic Games for what they're doing with their much smaller 12% cut.
Claiming it "doesn't cost anything" isn't quite right though, considering all the services Steam actually provides including things like Cloud Saving, Achievements, Leaderboards, Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC), Inventory Services and quite a bit more. Valve also provide free keys to developers to sell on other stores like itch.io, Humble Store, Fanatical and many others (there's a huge amount of Steam key stores out there) of which Valve don't see a penny from. That's on top of various open source projects Valve fund too like DXVK, improving KWin and a ton more those are just two very recent examples.
Wester isn't the only one who has mentioned this of course, former Valve staffer Richard Geldreich said on Twitter back in April:
Steam was killing PC gaming. It was a 30% tax on an entire industry. It was unsustainable. You have no idea how profitable Steam was for Valve. It was a virtual printing press. It distorted the entire company. Epic is fixing this for all gamers.
The State of the Industry Survey done by GDC also noted how only 6% of developers asked thought Valve's 30% cut was justified.
What are your thoughts?
Hat tip to Mr. Doomguy in Discord.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quote"This doesn't cost anything."
Sure, Steam should be basically free.
This guy fits the EGS bandwagon quite well.
Quoting: GuestI'm not saying Valve are evil. I might have given that impression, so allow me to say that they are investing in areas that are useful to GNU/Linux users. That doesn't mean they don't need a bit of competition though. That 30% cut is from lack of competition more than anything else, and I think developers are starting to suffer slightly from it. If only the epic store could adjust to being _healthy_ competition, then it might be alright.
Hell if anything the cut percentage should go up the bigger the sales and go down for indies ... but that's just me being a commie ...
gradyvuckovic Jul 2, 2019
It's a 20%-30% cut, depending on sales. For almost all games that sell over 200,000 copies, it's actually a 25% cut which is below industry standard. And it only applies to sales on Steam, not to sales outside of Steam.
For high selling games that are also sold outside of Steam via key resellers, etc, the true cut could be as low as 15%-18%.
Quoting: gradyvuckovicI feel like so many people, including the Paradox CEO and Epic Games CEO, just completely ignore the fact that it's not strictly a 30% cut on purpose and just feel the need to constantly say '30%' as a form of misinformation.They also seem to leave out any information about what Valve is actually spending money on, what none of the other companies are doing: R&D... open R&D that benefit those other companies too.
If Valve did not exist, we were probable locked into a store with DX10 as the best graphics API, paying $120 for a game.
People need to adjust to the idea that development costs money, and Valve can take a fee from a sale to pour that into development. In return the development usually benefits all.
Wine took huge leaps, and wine is also used on androids to play old windows games (with an x86 emulation layer).
If this continues, we could be playing DX12 games on android, without involvement of Valve...
So yeah, all those other stores should first make a list of unselfish contributions they made to the gaming industry.
If none, screw them.
For now it is Steam, GOG, humblebundle or itch.io that I will be supporting. In that order though, I am lazy.
Quote"This doesn't cost anything."
They really should open their 0% cut store, then.
Schattenspiegel Jul 2, 2019
What is the average publisher's cut, btw while we are talking money?
Last edited by Schattenspiegel on 2 July 2019 at 11:25 am UTC
Last edited by Lomkey on 2 July 2019 at 11:27 am UTC
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