4 ms·

I think the elephant in the room is that Apple is just doing what other closed platform distributors do, in an area where we aren't quite as used to it. I make

• Red_Leaves_Flyy 2y ago
  I am especially curious what games you make to have such experiences and strong opinions. Interesting that you left that part out.
  • dijit 2y ago
    It wasn't very important to the point I was making, but in case you're curious; * The Division and it's sequel The Division 2 (ubisoft games, so- uplay): https://steamcommunity.com/app/2221490/discussions/0/3768983445362214712/#c5371139102163593699 https://steamcommunity.com/app/2221490/discussions/0/3768983... * VtM Bloodhunt; which launched on Steam despite being a Tencent property, due to fan backlash. * RENNSPORT; Where we also bent to pressure from the community and will release early-access on Steam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1dl0v6mevg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1dl0v6mevg First comment on that YT video: > Good. I refuse to use the Epic Store and I really wanted to check Rennsport out. Glad it's gonna be on Steam. for context.
    • ahartmetz 2y ago
      Well. Valve is a pretty customer-friendly company, and their customers like them for that. The same does not seem to be true for Epic. That's all.
    • LegitShady 2y ago
      thats because epic store is trash, and on top of that they buy exclusives, which created a lot of hostility with customers. I won't make an epic account, not even for free games, after they started with buying exclusives as their first move. Thats not because valve is a monopoly or because I love valve, but because epic is actively garbage and I won't give them money.
      • dijit 2y ago
        I don't really mind, but you can't levy this same criticism against UPlay and it gets the same level of vitriol. From the gamedev perspective it just looks like people have decided that Valve is the desired monopoly. A fact that Valve are very content to use against game developers, it seems. (I say this, owning an OLED steamdeck and being extremely pleased that proton exists; but don't forget that Proton exists because Microsoft was doing to Valve, what Valve does to game developers, and Valve wanted leverage)
        • LegitShady 2y ago
          I also don't use uplay - I haven't bought a ubisoft game in many years, because uplay is trash and ubisoft is a garbage company.
          • dijit 2y ago
            Thank you for proving my point. (not sarcasm, I find it ironic and beautiful)
            • LegitShady 2y ago
              But Uplay is trash. It's a totally unnecessary piece of drm with its own login that delays how long it takes to get to playing games. There is nothing positive about it. At the same time I don't think Ubisoft has made a game worth playing since far cry 3, so not buying their games is normal and good.
    • hnbear 2y ago
      That’s great. I loved the Division games and most of the mechanics in them. I don’t play online and still really enjoyed playing through the stories. I thought it was so much as an NYC dweller to walk around the city in chaos. They early Covid days made me think of it too, the trailer was fantastic.
• manquer 2y ago
  > ironic that Xbox of all people would complain They are not complaining, they have only responded(in June) to a EU watchdog query and saying it not possible for them pay for IAP at 30%[1] to Apple and sell profitably, even though EU made Apple open up the App Store in EU recently. [1] Apple does not mandate using their IAP per se, but forbids instructing on how to pay outside etc i believe.
• daghamm 2y ago
  I think this is an invalid comparison. 1. Steam is voluntary, you are free to instead use gog, epic, whatever or maybe buy physical boxes from the devs. 2. PC games these days can be huge. The hosting cost alone will be significant. 3. Valve have significant R&D costs for getting games run smoothly in multiple environments, some of which they have no control over. 4. It's up to 30%.
  • paulryanrogers 2y ago
    > Valve have significant R&D costs for getting games run smoothly in multiple environments Does Steam do this? I thought they left it up to the developers. Except for their first party titles and perhaps for Proton support of major 3P games.
    • daghamm 2y ago
      Proton is developed by Codeweaver + Valve.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • scarface_74 2y ago
    Xbox though is not voluntary
  • sunshowers 2y ago
    To be fair, most users think Steam is much better than any of the alternatives on PC, which is part of why Valve gets away with charging a 30% cut. So "voluntary" isn't the right word, there is significant customer pressure to release on Steam.
  • paulmd 2y ago
    Steam isn’t voluntary on PC, since that’s where the users are. And that’s the same dilemma as with any of the other gatekeepers like MS or Sony or Apple. Right now sure, you can choose not to play ball with any one of them… but if you want to have users you need to play ball with one of them, and they’re all offering the exact same deal. People have a-priori determined that “only steam is ok” and that itself is anticompetitive and market-distorting. It’s already a monopsony at that point. It’s the Walmart situation where even if there’s notionally a market with millions of end-users… they’re all fronted by a single merchant with monopsony or oligopsony pricing power. Aka what the EU calls a “gatekeeper”. Market fairness isn’t just fairness to consumers after all, or epic wouldn’t be in court. And from a gamedev perspective it’s the exact same as apple: if you want to access the pc market you don’t have a choice, steam is the pc market and retains a functional ~100% control of this market (in a gatekeeping sense) such that valve should be subject to DMA-style rules and restrictions. Again just like apple, you can go elsewhere, but if you want these users then valve retains a chokehold on your revenue and you don’t really have a choice. You can decide for yourself whether that’s a reasonable perspective and consideration but that’s the one that’s been applied to apple and their own App Store. Doesn’t matter if people can sideload (altstore/altserver exists) or use a different device, they worked themselves into a gatekeeper position and should be treated as such. People don’t like that comparison, steam is a mostly benevolent gatekeeper, at least to users… but other people are happy with apple too, and from the gamedev side the deal is equally coercive. If market access is a thing we protect then steam is a absolutely a gatekeee in the apple sense. This is the tension with apple too: apple being a gatekeeper is largely good for me as a user (or else I’d change away, which I am very free to do). When they slap, it's generally in my interest for them to have slapped whoever was stepping over the line - like when they slapped Facebook for bribing customers to install spyware. It is, however, bad for studios and corporate entities. Steam is just a more pronounced version of this dichotomy - they are generally a very benevolent gatekeeper, but they control ~100% of the PC market revenue, so if you are a developer who wants to release on PC, you have very little market choice. Some small indie titles do it, but you're leaving money on the table and certainly no major studio wants to do it. Hence all the third-party stores - and that proliferation is what consumers don't like. The thing is, people actually like steam gatekeeping... and others actually like apple gatekeeping.
• tehbeard 2y ago
  Part of what is missing with those raw numbers, is what you get for it as a developer. I don't know about the others (And Nintendo's in particular is probably ironclad in NDAs and lawyers if their attitude towards their userbase is anything to go by), but for Steam you can read all about the technical, financial and sales/marketing features you get through the platform here: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/home https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/home EGS and MS Store compete on a lower %, partly because they offer less of this.
  • j_maffe 2y ago
    It's hard to believe they're offering a lower cut for any reason other than to attract more offerings. It has to be the main reason at least.
    • deafpolygon 2y ago
      Embrace, extend, extinguish. Crack the market first (embrace) by offering the lower cut.
  • deleted 2y ago
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• jsheard 2y ago
  Valve has had a tiered system for a while now, it does still start at 30%, but then it drops to 25% for titles with >$10M in revenue, and again to 20% for titles with >$50M in revenue. They switched to that model after the major publishers started leaving Steam and releasing on their own launchers instead, so Valve structured it to give those AAA juggernauts a discount while still taking 30% from the small fry who basically have no choice but to release on Steam.
  • phs318u 2y ago
    So actually widening the moat between the behemoths that can easily step across it, and the startups for whom staying alive long enough to gain a following is a struggle in and of itself.
• cybwraith 2y ago
  From a consumer perspective, Valve is the only one that comes close to deserving that cut. Between Proton, Steam Input mapping, Remote play, Family Sharing, etc... they are by far the most feature rich platform
• echelon 2y ago
  With gaming: - You're not producing a good that people need. Gaming entertainment is actually a pretty thin segment of goods. - You can get free distribution easily (desktop, web, etc.). Other platforms are just increasing your market opportunity and you can charge a thicker margin to get onto them if you want to. - Physical distribution has costs - Servers and multiplayer have costs With mobile: - Applications do everything from dating, jobs, food, payments, etc. It's anything and everything, and a lot of them are absolutely essential for modern life. - Apple and Google are the market. There is no alternative. They're a duopoly and embed their talons into everything. - The app store is artificial. There's nothing stopping web downloads of applications, and any security concerns could be met with signing, risk signal heuristics and reporting, and application sandboxing. There should be no "App Store Requirement" to deploy a native app. Period. Furthermore, there should be no requirement to integrate with the duopoly's payment stack, messaging stack, or any other platform choice enforced upon you.
  • dijit 2y ago
    Not 100% sure I agree. You can distribute anything you want; as long as it's a web-app. Nobody is running random .exe's in 2024; but you have random, arbitrary, untrusted code that runs in heaps and has access to the GPU via websites. You have the same constraints we do, except it's easier to make a web application for dating, jobs, food, payments - than it is to do high-poly AAA games.
  • ProfessorLayton 2y ago
    > You're not producing a good that people need. Gaming entertainment is actually a pretty thin segment of goods. The gaming industry is larger than the film and music industry combined, and is the single largest revenue source for mobile app stores, by far. The worldwide industry was worth roughly ~282B last year [1] For comparison, the entire US farming industry is 203.5B [2] Hardly small. [1] https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/gaming-market-105730 https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/gaming-market-105730 [2] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=58270 https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...
• Affric 2y ago
  Yeah, but the problem with that is EPIC isn’t great on Linux, the licenses aren’t portable, and the stores can increase their fees at will once they gain market position. In fact, if you become market leader for AAA it would arguably be your duty to shareholders to put it up to 30% Consumers don’t actually want to be in the business of dealing with many different systems to minimise their costs in these sorts of markets. Steam are predictable and are yet to dick me. Can’t say that about many companies having dealt with them for 20 years after regular consumption.
• voidwtf 2y ago
  I am conflicted. I love Valve, but 30% seems like a lot. On the other hand, I doubt the developers are being charged for the bandwidth or for Steam platform integration. Which means that long after the developer has walked away with their money for the sale Steam is still providing licensing management, platform integration in the form of user management, and the bandwidth for every time the user redownloads the game at 0 cost to the user. While that fee may seem high, the developers are in someways subsidizing other developers that could never afford to build and maintain that infrastructure. They're also reducing the friction and on-ramping of new players/users. They are also providing the payment processing and handling billing/chargeback resolution. Just the merchant fees alone would be would be 2-4% of revenue (not including losses to chargebacks and fraud/risk controls). The raw cost of bandwidth usage would be ~2 cents per 12GB game download (not including infrastructure to host/facilitate the amount of simultaneous downloads). The staff to manage billing issues/refunds. The raw amounts are small, but not insignificant considering that for every $20 they collect on a AAA title there are several indie games getting all the same functionality which only nets Valve $2. Valve, Epic, Playstation, Xbox. The platforms are providing the ecosystem and platform that has allowed gaming to flourish at incredible rates, outpacing the motion picture industry and the sport industry.
• zaptheimpaler 2y ago
  The surprising thing is that PC is an open platform where people could compete with Steam on even terms if they actually did it well. Gamers don't like installing 5 different game launchers and Steam is the oldest one with all their games and is mostly a neutral party. I recently installed Playnite [1], an open source game library manager and its been incredible. It pulls in games from all launchers/sources and gives you a unified library. I think all it would take to bring down Steam prices is for studios to adopt one such project but they are too blindsided by the ambition to have their own platform. You still have to do all the downloads,licensing etc. but the fact that it's a unified launcher for all stores is enough for me to prefer it over others. [1] https://playnite.link/ https://playnite.link/
  • hakfoo 2y ago
    I wonder if what's actually needed is an interoperabiity feature for launchers. If I'm going to use something like Lutris or Playnite or even Steam to organize my games, a non-zero number of them are going to launch a game-specific launcher. Live-service games seem particularly fond of this, likely so they can show you a teaser while downloading a refreshed client. But if they could just publish a RSS feed for updates, the launcher could pull the new files and cut out the middleman.
• saurik 2y ago
  FWIW, there are large publishers which successfully negotiate with the ilk of Microsoft[1] and Sony[2] to get a better revenue split, as consoles in fact have more functional competition than mobile phone app stores: people who own a gaming console might could reasonably own a second one if they were interested in some game that was only available on one console or the other; this simply doesn't happen with phones, as only a small handful of particularly-crazy power users would ever carry around a second cell phone. If you want to not release on Xbox unless Microsoft gives you a better deal, it doesn't sound anywhere near as ridiculous to tell your potential customers "you'll have to also own a Playstation" as if you tried to explain to people that to use your new social network they have to also own and carry around an Android phone (or, worse, whatever the third option might be... is there even a third option anymore that would make any sense? ;P). You can tell that Apple has some insane amount of fundamentally market-distorting power as they seriously charge large publishers -- the ones you would expect to have the most leverage -- more than smaller ones; and, with maybe a sole exception of WeChat, we have never heard of anyone getting a better deal out of them, ever. [1]: https://x.com/tomwarren/status/1671981463040819200?s=46 https://x.com/tomwarren/status/1671981463040819200?s=46 [2]: https://x.com/twthereddragon/status/1672270407179665409?s=46 https://x.com/twthereddragon/status/1672270407179665409?s=46
• kderbe 2y ago
  Some of these platforms are less closed than others. Steam, for example, will give developers "Steam keys" for free to sell on other platforms or through their own storefront. So a developer can sell on Itch.io which only takes 10% (IIRC), the customer can use their preferred game client, and Valve pays for the bandwidth. Can you imagine Apple or Nintendo doing such a thing? https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
  • kderbe 2y ago
    Correction: Itch.io lets developers choose their own revenue split. It's 10% by default but sellers can choose any amount, even 0%. https://itch.io/docs/general/faq#why-buy-on-itchio https://itch.io/docs/general/faq#why-buy-on-itchio