If all the games respected HID and Valve did something proprietary, I would understand the skepticism. The truth is that most games are engineered with platform integration (e.g. for achievements, controller mapping, etc.), and fallback to the Xbox API. It's reasonable for Valve to sell a controller that takes full advantage of their platform.
Also, Valve's primary OS is Linux-based. There's surely either already a module upstream in the kernel or one is coming soon. That is: open source software to take full advantage of this controller. That's not the same thing as a walled garden.
Seeing as the original Steam Controllers kernel drivers were community reverse engineered rather than Valve contributed, I don't know if I believe in them to make one for the new one either: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Controller-RE-Kernel
Of course 30% seems reasonble to you, you're not the creator of the games. It's quite confusing to me that you're endorsing the side that has an insane ROI instead of the side that is sufferring greatly to make ends meet.
A 70% take would have blown the minds of developers pre-Steam. Retailers took 40% and were ruthless about shelf space and inventory. Distributors took 20%. Plus you had to actually make a box/CD/etc. They were lucky to keep 30% not pay it.
This doesn't mean Valve is perfect but if a developer is "suffering" because of a 30% cut they probably need to improve their pricing/game/community/etc.
Retailers and distributors had actual costs they needed to cover for the services they provided. Steam largely does not seeing how profitable they are.
It still is a damn good deal. Steam abstracts a whole lot of messes. In ye olde times you as a game developer had to acquire a publisher for each country you'd plan on selling your game to deal with local distribution structures and laws, taxes, payments, update distributions, DRM and anti-cheat, user management...
Steam conveniently abstracts all of that for you. One stop shop. No complex deals just to deal with getting paid for your game (or additional content), barely any chargeback fraud, you don't even have to deal with stuff such as Germany's highly complex age rating because Steam abstracts that with a questionnaire. Steam claimed to recognize and support 237 countries [1], although that list includes disputed countries, so take it with a grain of salt, but in general I'd say unless a country is affected by US sanctions (i.e. North Korea, Iran, Russia, Belarus) or has its own restrictions (i.e. China), chances are 99% you as a publisher can sell your game in this country with everything being taken care of.
And on top of that, gamers likely will already have a Steam account with payment already set up, which means far, far less friction than the likes of Epic Games impose.
The market rate for this is low single digit percents.
>update distributions
Bandwidth is not worth a percentage of game revenue. If it were it would be <1%.
>DRM
Steam's DRM is terrible.
>anti-cheat
Also terrible.
>user management...
This is not worth a percentage of revenue.
All of these together is not worth 30%. The only thing worth 30% is the ability for the Stram store to put your game in front of a random person. Being able to reach new customers.
> The market rate for this is low single digit percents.
We're talking about virtually every country on Earth. Good luck trying to replicate that, the taxes/legal entity part alone will cost you an arm and a leg in setup time, not to mention ongoing costs in accounting, filing reports and dealing with other bureaucracy BS.
> Bandwidth is not worth a percentage of game revenue.
I'm not talking about bandwidth or a CDN here. I'm talking about a reliable and easy mechanism to get updates distributed to end-users - consisting of a management backend, the CDN and finally a client side software that's actually doing the upgrades. And the latter is something many have tried and failed to do or ended up getting 0wned in the process (e.g. just recently notepad++ [1]).
> Steam's DRM is terrible.
Is it? Sure, for some AAA titles you'll see Denuvo slopped on top, but for the wide masses, Steam's DRM is more than enough.
> [user management] is not worth a percentage of revenue.
Managing user data is an utter PITA in the era of GDPR et al, and on top of that it creates a need for customer support resources - people forget their password, get hacked, god knows what else. As a game dev under any of the major storefronts, you don't have to deal with that at all.
Why would you need to? Notice that the comment you replied to used the phrasing "market rate". The service you're describing is commoditized today and none of the major players charge anywhere near 30%.
> The service you're describing is commoditized today
Payment, yes, that is effectively commoditized. But Stripe, Paypal or cryptocoins only solve the "collect and move money across the world" part, not the "deal with the BS around taxes and tariffs in an N-N matrix of countries for publishers and consumers".
As a publisher of a game or other piece of software, I either have to use one of the global storefronts (Apple's App Store, Google's Play Store, Steam, Epic, Microsoft Store) to abstract this problem away for me (and all of them but MS have a somewhat comparable revenue share), or I have to find publishers in each jurisdiction I want to sell and negotiate with them and have additional expenses and efforts in repatriating the income, or I have to go and create my own legal entity for each jurisdiction and deal with filing the proper taxes and other BS on my own. Oh and notably the latter case also applies to dealing with sanctions lists - can't imagine OFAC being happy when my, say, Swiss subsidiary has the sanctioned offspring of a Russian oligarch buy a game from them?
This regulatory moat of doing international business is what keeps revenue shares at ~30% across the global stores. It is extremely difficult to build a competitor for the messes I mentioned - otherwise, someone else would have stepped up long ago to capture this gigantic money spigot.
You're implying that Sales, Marketing, and Distribution is not a valuable service by saying 30% is not reasonable. I work in the electronics industry selling components. Suppliers regularly give us 30% margin, far more on some products, despite the upfront cost of making a new microcontroller or FPGA being far in excess of the most expensive video games ever made, with our value add being, to be frank, much less than Steam. 30% margin is about average for distribution, be it food, minerals, cars, or any other industry.
If I didn't have Steam (or equivalent service like GoG), I wouldn't buy new games. That's just reality. I would play the same games I have for decades. Instead, Steam has created a very effective recommendation engine that gives me a great selection. That's more than worth a 30% cut.
I'm endorsing my side. Not Steam's side, or the creator's side.
Maybe their business model is awful, but I love what they do, and what they have done. They have made my linux machine a top tier gaming option, freeing me from the only use of windows left. They have brought me the steam deck, which has a thriving accessory market due to their creative commons licensing. Etc etc. They are pro consumer.
I want steam to continue largely as is. In an ideal world all artists would be better compensated for the joy they bring to the world, but I'm quite happy as a consumer of art. Not to be too harsh, but frankly, the existence of struggle for recognition does not entitle artists to a penny of my money or a second of my time beyond the transaction they propose, nor does it entitle them to anything that Valve does or makes. That we can all work together well is a function of a local solution to the tension of conflicting interests. Valve is seeking a balance. It could be much worse for both sides.
But if you want, think of it this way - all of Steam's profits, billions of dollars, are only 30% of the sales they have brought. They made 17 Billion in rev last year, so nearly 25 Billion went to game makers / publishers. This is 2-3x what spotify paid to artists in the same year.
Regarding the 30% cut. Developers can actually generate steam keys and publish them on third-party sites which can be redeemed by users on Steam. Developers then get 100% of the profit.
But they're only limited to 5000 keys. beyond that requires special approval, which is not given if the game is being sold more outside Steam than inside.
The complaint is that the platform they are using for advertising, distribution and/or community isn't giving them enough free keys? Just want to make sure I understand the relationship and expectations.
> Are the developers allowed to sell those keys for less than the Steam price?
I believe so. However, even if it's not I don't see any other platform allowing you to use their service and sidestep platform fees. Someone mentioned above that there might be limitations for the number of keys, but I'm not aware.
They're demonstrably not. I'd advise you to read up on the concept of a monopoly.
> They made 17 Billion in rev last year, so nearly 25 Billion went to game makers / publishers. This is 2-3x what spotify paid to artists in the same year.
And? I don't understand why you're just comparing two values in absolute values. You're talking as if Valve is giving away money.
Steam gets me and many others to spend a lot more than 50% more on games than we would otherwise. I’m pretty confident that they push a lot more money to creators than they’d getting otherwise, even leaving aside the old publishing revenue splits that gave devs a lot less than 70%. A lot of those games, I’ve never even installed. Blasted Steam sales…
If they're suffering greatly to make ends meet, then why use Steam at all? The only reason I can think of is that Steam provides a great customer experience, making that 30% worth it for the developers.
Can we please do something about these AI slop articles? It's becoming really sadenning having to open a frontpage link only to find the same, meritless, braindead article one time after the other.
You're absolutely right! "Why Does This Matter?" was a dead giveaway that this article was not written by a human — it was written by a large language model.
But really: "Why does this matter?" When looking at an article like this, I rarely read the text. This is just fluff no matter if AI-generated or hand written. The info is "there's a LEGO set of that ASML machine" and the picture of that set. That's all I want to know before clicking the back button.
and then open up the comments section, just to see several identical "ai slop" comments and someone inevitably making a "you're absolutely right" joke.
Your source documents a real phenomenon but doesn't support the universal claim that "Israelis hate Arabs". Please provide evidence proportional to the scope of your argument.
Just anecdotally, I get the feeling telemetry often does more harm than good, because it's too easy to misinterpret or lie with statistics. There needs to be proper statistical methodology and biases need to be considered, but this doesn't always happen. Maybe a contrived example, but someone wants to show high impact on their next performance review? Implement the new feature in such a way that everyone easily misclicks it, then show the extremely high engagement as demonstration that their work is a huge success. For Git, I'm not sure it would be widely adopted today if the development process was mainly telemetry-driven rather than Torvalds developing it based solely on his expertise and intuition.
Not to mention it's really hard to statistically tell the difference between people spending a lot of time with a feature because it's really useful or because it's really difficult to get to do what you want
Telemetry is a really poor substitute for actually observing a couple of your users. But it's cheap and feels scientific and inclusive/fair (after all you are looking at everyone)
That is just poor analytics IMO, if you have a good harness you can definitely tell if a feature is not well designed. You have to optimize for things like number of clicks to perform an operation not time spent in app.
I think the seeing the underutilized commands and flags (with real data not just a hunch) would have helped identify where users were not understanding why they should use it, and could have helped refine the interface and docs to make it gradually more usable.
I mean no solution is perfect, and some underused things are just only sometimes extremely useful, but data used smartly is not a waste of time.
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