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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 gros

by 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.

by SXX 3y ago

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.