Indie developer behind 'Overwhelmingly Positive' rated shipbuilder argues that Steam's "free advertising" is worth the 30% cut

You know what also justifies Valve's 30% cut? Their outstanding efforts in getting games to run on Linux, and the overall impact that this had on the Linux community.

Since the headline blew it, the game mentioned is called Cosmoteer.

Is this controversial? You're paying for the storefront.

30% seems rather high

but... when they handle payments, refunds, advertising (within their application) and game download costs (server infrastructure?), etc etc etc. it doesnt seem that crazy.

at least, for a lot of indie developers, not having to worry about those things, might easily be worth those 30%

Anyone who is old enough to remember trying to buy digital copies of games pre-Steam knows how much value Stream brings to the table.

If it's not on Steam, I don't even consider it.

A few indie devs who hated the idea of storefronts because of the bad taste of Apple self published only on their website. When they finally (after years) switched to steam, every single one of them shared how they got like a multiplier of sales.

One indie dev shared how he made more in revenue in a month on Steam than he did in a decade of self publishing.

That's life-changing.

In this thread:

Steam is bad because they are a company that makes money. They would be better if they made no money and all games were advertised at their expense. Oh and I must post my game on Steam because it's their fault no one else has bothered to even try and make a truly viable alternative.

the only ones that conplain the 30% cut are bilionaries companies

I have mixed feelings on it.

When I was putting out games, publishing on Steam would mean a guaranteed 1 million impressions on the "New releases" list. That's incredible exposure for an indie title, which often succeed or fail on exposure alone.

But 30% can be a lot for those same indie teams, especially combined with taxes. You can put years of work into a title and lose half the money it earns to groups that didn't directly contribute at all. It can easily be enough money that long-term support or follow up games just aren't viable. It can be your entire outsourcing budget or a whole employee for a year.

And after that initial exposure, you're not getting much for your perputual 30%. The value of Steamworks can vary greatly game by game so you could end up paying $30k for $100 of bandwidth and minor marketing through things like sales and rich presence.

I would much prefer to see something like "30% after the first $X in sales". Their cut would kick in only after they've demonstrated their value as a platform and small teams wouldn't have to watch a company with billions of dollars take a very large bite out of their very small pie.

Of course it's worth it, there's no question about it. Depending on the case it might probably be worth it if Steam took 95%.

For me, the question remains if 20% were "enough" for Steam and still make a shitload of money, or even 10%. Of course we can't know but it seems likely.

Ah, Cosmoteer. Extremely fun for like 10 hours, then you realize there is nothing left to do. I guess that dev has made a fortune off of it though, so hats off to that guy.

Just a few days ago, I wrote a comment about how you would theoretically try and become a significant competitor to Steam, and one of the points I raised was that Steam's storefront and recommendations are very generous (compared to others). It makes a huge difference that even indie games can appear on the front page regularly, both improving user and dev experiences. Players find games that they enjoy, while devs pay a very small amount to get effective, targetted advertisements.

It's also just the standard for selling your game on a big storefront.

It absolutely is.

This is a really decent game. I do have a complaint about it though. In late game you NEED 3 or 4 ships just to still be relevant against all the threats (not a bad thing, I like the difficulty being like this). Then you need a cargo ship to haul around all your junk. Resource and supply transfers between ships have to be done manually. This eventually gets tedious and ultimately causes me to stop playing after I get to that stage of the game. I hope some day someone makes a mod for this or the developers add something to address this issue. Some kind of system for automatic resource sync between ships while stationary or parked in stations could fix this.

Where does it say you can only choose one store?

Upload to all and get all the benefits. Lower prise on those with lower cut, more exposure on those that don't.

"Steam will probably still outsell everything else combined by 100x"

Yeah, it's a monopoly.

That's not a complaint. It's not a value judgement. People think the word is automatically negative or criminal, because of how often that market power gets abused - but it is just the label for having that market power. Valve is not a trust. Valve does not do any anti-competitive practices. (Their 30% cut is obscene, but it's the same obscenity demanded by other monopoly storefronts.) Nonetheless, company after company keeps saying:

This store is the only store that really matters.

If you're not on this store, you're probably fucked.

We have a word for that.

It's worth it if you're in the 1% of titles that succeed because of Steam. The next question is should any company have that kind of power. Steam's monopoly is a real problem. Microsoft had less of a monopoly on computers when they got investigated.