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If you selling Steam keys you paying Valve nothing for these sales. Keys are free and 100% profit going to you.

by SXX 3y ago

johnnyanmac 3y ago
And if you abuse it they take it away. Steam already had to stomp down on it. So it's clearly not the way out devs want.
- SXX 3y ago
  I am co-founder of game studio and I have lots of friends in gamedev too. I know people who sold under 100 copies of their game on Steam and got 10,000 keys for sales elsewhere no problem. I never gonna to defend Valve 30% cut since it is terrible for anyone in game development, but honestly so far Valve itself have superb reputation as business partner and they never abused their market power. My bet only trading card generator games ware affected when Valve cracked down on giving out umlimited number of keys.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    My bet is that, like many things for Steam, it's inconsistent. Some will get a warning. Others slip through the cracks. Some may even slip but get rejected after that. But relatively few legit are companies want to take a risk to their merchant profile to begin with. Wolfire isnt large by any means, but is definitely large enough where it couldn't get away with such obvious abuse. They could be lying, but I can believe with their general company ethos that they do/did legitimately just want an option to self-distribute, but pass on the 30% fee to the customer on Steam.
    - SXX 3y ago
      Personally I totally agree that Steam fee should be way below 30% because gamedev is tough enough to the point where actual indie studio get only 20-30% of gross revenue. Especially now when Steam dont provide any value of "organic" marketing. What I dont agree with is Wolfire case when they want to distribute through Steam, but still give Steam customers worse deal than for Steam keys they directly sell. It's just doesn't sounds right to me and it's certainly wont make life any easier for other indie developers without dedicated fan base. Only developers who already successful can really benefit from it.
      - johnnyanmac 3y ago
        >What I dont agree with is Wolfire case when they want to distribute through Steam, but still give Steam customers worse deal than for Steam keys they directly sell. as far as I hear, the threat (they claim) comes from Steam delisting their game even if they don't use steam keys or DRM at all. Which I feel is fair enough. Ultimately it's their game to distribute and I a dev should have an option to pass the cut on to the customer if it's really that drastic. That way, if customers feel slighted you can point back to steam and they can put pressure on to lower the cut. In the far future I was thinking of doing a similar thing where I have a build on Itch.io that is cheaper than Steam. Nothing drastic: probably something like $5 for itch (itch's default cut is 10%, but I'd probably bump it to 15% personally. So I take home $4.25) and $6 on steam (where my take home would be $4.20), so I hope I don't run into such difficulty. There's been so many stories with opaque Steam support for devs that I simply want some extra control of the situation (especially since the nature of the work I want to do means I was to make the codebase open source). I don't want to put all my eggs in Valve's basket but also want to balance out any potential cuts where possible.

If you selling Steam keys you paying Valve nothing for these sales. Keys are free and 100% profit going to you.

by SXX 3y ago

If you selling Steam keys you paying Valve nothing for these sales. Keys are free and 100% profit going to you.

And if you abuse it they take it away. Steam already had to stomp down on it. So it's clearly not the way out devs want.

SXX 3y ago
I am co-founder of game studio and I have lots of friends in gamedev too. I know people who sold under 100 copies of their game on Steam and got 10,000 keys for sales elsewhere no problem. I never gonna to defend Valve 30% cut since it is terrible for anyone in game development, but honestly so far Valve itself have superb reputation as business partner and they never abused their market power. My bet only trading card generator games ware affected when Valve cracked down on giving out umlimited number of keys.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  My bet is that, like many things for Steam, it's inconsistent. Some will get a warning. Others slip through the cracks. Some may even slip but get rejected after that. But relatively few legit are companies want to take a risk to their merchant profile to begin with. Wolfire isnt large by any means, but is definitely large enough where it couldn't get away with such obvious abuse. They could be lying, but I can believe with their general company ethos that they do/did legitimately just want an option to self-distribute, but pass on the 30% fee to the customer on Steam.
  - SXX 3y ago
    Personally I totally agree that Steam fee should be way below 30% because gamedev is tough enough to the point where actual indie studio get only 20-30% of gross revenue. Especially now when Steam dont provide any value of "organic" marketing. What I dont agree with is Wolfire case when they want to distribute through Steam, but still give Steam customers worse deal than for Steam keys they directly sell. It's just doesn't sounds right to me and it's certainly wont make life any easier for other indie developers without dedicated fan base. Only developers who already successful can really benefit from it.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      >What I dont agree with is Wolfire case when they want to distribute through Steam, but still give Steam customers worse deal than for Steam keys they directly sell. as far as I hear, the threat (they claim) comes from Steam delisting their game even if they don't use steam keys or DRM at all. Which I feel is fair enough. Ultimately it's their game to distribute and I a dev should have an option to pass the cut on to the customer if it's really that drastic. That way, if customers feel slighted you can point back to steam and they can put pressure on to lower the cut. In the far future I was thinking of doing a similar thing where I have a build on Itch.io that is cheaper than Steam. Nothing drastic: probably something like $5 for itch (itch's default cut is 10%, but I'd probably bump it to 15% personally. So I take home $4.25) and $6 on steam (where my take home would be $4.20), so I hope I don't run into such difficulty. There's been so many stories with opaque Steam support for devs that I simply want some extra control of the situation (especially since the nature of the work I want to do means I was to make the codebase open source). I don't want to put all my eggs in Valve's basket but also want to balance out any potential cuts where possible.