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80 world-class engineers sounds like more than enough people. It’s not like Valve struggle to acquire talent and are thus forced to have teams and teams of juniors who are masters at building tech debt.
Valve will likely be hiring and retaining the kinds of engineers who love a good refactor and appreciate the time and space to do that rather than some product manager pressuring for the next shiny shit they wanted yesterday.
And Steam is their money printing machine that keeps them free to do whatever they want. It’s no surprise their team have stayed invested in continuing to build out the best gaming platform of all time.
80 talented, passionate, and healthily paid engineers > 800 junior, sleep deprived, and struggling to buy groceries “coders”.
This likely management 101 in action
Amazing what happens if you treat people right and let them do their job
Instead we got too much management constantly causing churn
From a comment below, Valve as a whole supposedly has around 350, of which around 80 work on Steam.
Also explains why Steam is still a 32-bit binary and didn’t get ARM port on any platform.
I think the point is that with this kind of upkeep costs it’s hard to argue that Steam sales cut is fair, especially given near-monopoly in PC gaming space.
it’s hard to argue that Steam sales cut is fair
It’s actually pretty easy to argue it’s fair once you look at everything. Steam offers a shit ton of resources for that 30%, including hosting, distribution, patching, workshop, etc. And that’s not even getting into the fact that the dev can get all of that AND get steam keys that they can distribute themselves (meaning valve doesn’t get a cut of that) that still utilizes the same infra.
I wish I could find it, but I recently saw a video of Thor (@piratesoftware, does his own game dev and used to work for Blizzard) talking about this and going into even more detail than I can remember at the moment.
As an Indie dev, a 30% cut of profit could be the death of my one man studio (if I ever get around to actually starting it)
Ok, so then handle all of that yourself at cost. Which will lead to the death of your studio faster?
Seriously though, a $15 game selling just 100k copies is still $1m to you (before taxes) and has no upkeep. You do all that steam does yourself, you’re going to drown in operations costs and upkeep time.
I agree with you but at the same time I feel like I should point out that this is the China fallacy, where there’s a billion people in China and if you could just tap into even 0.3% of their market you would make bank.
While it’s technically true, the fallacy behind it overshadows the difficulty of acquiring that percentage of the market. The grand majority of games released never become cash positive, and over 50% of games on steam alone never make more than $4,000.
https://vginsights.com/insights/article/infographic-indie-game-revenues-on-steam
This is not an issue with distribution, it’s an issue with marketing and market fit, and accompanied by the base fact of that if you’re the kind of person who is good at making games, it would be a rarity for you to also be the kind of person that’s good at marketing the games you made.
Those are two entirely different wheelhouses that function best with two entirely different personality types, and that’s not covering all of the different disciplines that you need to make a game or run a game making company in the first place.
Use Steams competitors then if you don’t want to pay Steams cut. If you’re getting less overall from them, that tells you all you need to know about the validity of Steams fees
I think you missed my point. I am in favor of steam and valve by far, my quibble is with the idea that anyone can sell 100,000 copies of a $15 game.
For every Stardew Valley there are thousands of other games no one has ever heard of and that almost no one bought.
By all means though, make great games. I’ll be buying them on steam.
The cut would be less if competition was possible. I will bet my arm, first child and souls on this.
And you’d lose all of that.
Competition isn’t possible? EGS is an active competitor that only takes 12% and they still can’t get fucking anywhere because their store fucking sucks. GoG exists and also takes 30%, their store/launcher are ok, but they don’t offer nearly as much for that 30%, but they make up for that with drm free games. There are other minor players out there, so competition is definitely possible, but not one of them offers a comparable product.
The only way steam would lower their cut is if someone came along and made a game store that actually offered a significant portion of the services steam offered and was about as good but also had a lower cut of sales. But good luck finding someone who can do all of that and also takes less than 30%.
You don’t seem to understand what a monopoly is. Having some small competition that’s not ever going to threaten you because you can leverage your dominant position is also a case of a monopoly.
Epic poured billions of Fortnite money with little to show for it. How is anyone going to compete with a platform that most gamers have all of their games on? This is why they need to be broken up or brought to order via regulations. Companies are not your friends.
Success is not illegal. Valve isn’t buying up smaller competing storefronts, or paying off developers for exclusivity, or burying competition in legal fees and prepared 80-page lawsuits. The only thing holding back real competition is the competing platforms being dogshit.
I was excited for the EGS when it was announced. Then it turned out to be a garbage platform with the shady exclusivity deals that turned Steam into an ad platform for games that had been poached by Epic. Valve responded to it with the Steam Deck and Proton.
Leveraging dominant position to keep your monopoly is illegal even in the US.
At this point, their cut is just about mathematically fair, given how little value customers get from buying games most other places and how much value they get from Steam. Then that money got funneled back into decoupling PC gaming from Microsoft and making probably the only mass produced handheld gaming system that’s open enough to let you opt out of their ecosystem. I’d be really curious as to how many games on Steam even have ARM builds, because I’ll bet it’s a very low number, and that would likely make the juice not worth the squeeze.
Their cut is mathematically fair but the inputs for this formula are mostly pain tolerance levels of consumers and producers. I meant fair for having a monopoly. Either you’re a utility or need to be broken up so that actual competition can take place.
Steam Deck and Proton killed Linux gaming because nobody bothers to do native ports. While I don’t agree with that approach it kinda works but it’s not that Valve does this because they like Linux. They’re scared of losing their monopoly in case Windows changes too much.
There are ARM native games on Mac (Disco Elysium for example) and Steam has no issues with them. Not having ARM client though means that you’re running a dynamically recompiling web browser through a translation layer resulting in terrible performance.
Pain tolerance levels? The biggest pain points I have with Steam are that it’s not universally DRM-free (which is why I shop GOG first) and that their multiplayer servers go down for 15 minutes during maintenance windows once or twice per week. Native Linux ports were not going to become more common prior to Proton; they were on the fast track to becoming less common, especially given how many more games are now released every year, and Proton has the added benefit of adding Linux support to games where it was just never going to feasibly happen otherwise.
While I don’t agree with that approach it kinda works but it’s not that Valve does this because they like Linux. They’re scared of losing their monopoly in case Windows changes too much.
It’s both. That fear of losing their market position is exactly how a functioning market is supposed to work. Competition is supposed to come in and outdo Valve. EA looked like they were interested for a little while back when they launched Origin, but they changed their minds. Epic says they’re interested now, but they only want sellers and not customers. It’s not a monopoly, legally, when they attained their market position by just being better than everyone else.
There are ARM native games on Mac (Disco Elysium for example) and Steam has no issues with them.
And I wonder how many more there are out there. Because if that number is low enough, it may just not be worth it to bother. I’d imagine it’s a nightmare to have to support Apple through all of their standards that they dictate at their business partners. Valve went through the trouble of making a Vulkan->Metal translation layer, since Apple refused to support open standards, and then Apple retired x64 on their machines shortly afterward.
The only reason you don’t see the price as a pain point is that you refuse to see that about 50% of that goes to companies that make billions in profit while people like you and me can’t afford rent.
Valve is not your landlord. They made a good place to buy video games. And come on, now; it’s 30% at most to Valve (which is less than brick and mortar before it) and then some more to the government.
30% for Valve, another 10 to 20% for the publisher…
Guess where the billionaires work?
If this was true, games would cost 18% less on EGS because they only take 12%. Shockingly enough, they cost the same.
Because the same games sell for more elsewhere (also, funnily enough, we’re seeing tons of info on Valve because they’re getting sued for including a non compete clause in their contract to prevent games from being sold for less elsewhere), that’s an issue for the market as a whole and doesn’t apply to video games only. You’re paying too much for your food, for your gas, for your housing, for your clothes, for every fucking thing!
Profit shares for distributors will need to be regulated and wealth tax will need to be applied.
Pain tolerance to prices, how good the support is, how snappy the app is etc. Within the space of game marketplaces they’re average and that’s because every one of them kind of sucks. If Epic was first to monopolize PC game marketplaces people would be defending them like they defend Valve now because they want all of their games in one place.
Linux gaming was stable before Proton. It was never big but mainstream titles were getting released. These days there’s nothing. Titles could be broken at any moment by a developer and nobody will have any responsibility to fix it. I very much doubt that a for profit company does anything because they “like” something like Linux. They’re there to make money, period.
I’m not saying Valve should port their games to ARM or update them, it’s up to them and they don’t seem to be interested in developing games all that much these days. My point wad that plenty of games run via Rosetta2 fine. Steam doesn’t run fine because essentially it’s a web browser and that’s where you can say that 80 developers might not be enough to support this money printing machine.
If Epic was first to monopolize PC game marketplaces people would be defending them like they defend Valve now because they want all of their games in one place.
No, people accept Steam because of the proven track record, values of their leadership, their hardware and the work they do with Linux.
Linux gaming was stable before Proton.
Please.
EGS would have all this in that hypothetical scenario, why wouldn’t it?
Killed Linux gaming? I hard disagree with that. Yes developers may not do Native ports as often anymore but I would much rather have the ability to play games that are not considered a native Port because the ocean is so much vaster. If anything proton in the steam deck put Linux on the map, prior to the deck AAA titles you would never see running on Linux you barely saw AA titles on it. However with the introduction of the steam deck in proton we now have companies moving closer to at least making sure their game is compatible with the deck which is one step closer to allowing it to be Linux compatible. It allows you to take your windows games and for the most part just be able to play it without having to have the studio spend as much for it as they would with a native port, because that’s the number one thing that holds them back from making a native Port the lack of market share. I would not have switched off of Windows if this was not the case because that was basically the only thing that was holding me on Windows still was the lack of decent gaming support
Let’s take Elden Ring for example, it plays beautifully I haven’t had a single problem playing it. They weren’t going to release a Linux branch but they made sure it was steamdeck compatible, which meant that it was proton compatible which then allows me to play this amazing game on my Debian 12, a game that otherwise would not have worked because none of the other translation layers function with it. I notice zero difference in performance it plays flawlessly, but I would not have been able to play this game otherwise. It might as well be a native Port because I’ve had zero issues with functionality.
The Factorio development blog has a piece on developing Linux-native. Basically there’s ONE GUY who works on the LInux-native version, and it’s a lot more challenging than people think – from managing and linking dependencies, to working around GNOME’s monumentally stupid decision to expect client-side decorations from all apps. It’s simply more worthwhile to ensure that a game works well on WIne/Proton.
Failure of larger companies to make a competitive alternative to steam is not anticompetitive behavior on the part of Valve
Seems like a good example of how running a company for the shareholders doesn’t produce a a better product after all.
Precisely what the share holders don’t want people to know. They worship money and what the public to think more money = more good. If people realize these investor backed products are generally not anything better than someone can make in their garage they’ll stop buying overpriced junk. So here we are about to see how the sausage gets made.
The case seems like such a reach. At worst it’s an effective monopoly for devs, not consumers. Devs have a really hard time selling elsewhere.
That said, I love Steam and think it’s genuinely one of the best companies out there. And whilst it’s not great that they’re so big, they aren’t that big due to anti-competitive behaviour. It’s quite the opposite. You can add non-Steam games to your library and use Steam features. The fucking Steam deck isn’t locked down, and you can install non-Steam games. Just because Uplay wants to log me out every time I reboot doesn’t mean Steam should be sued.
There are so many other companies more deserving of the lawsuit
Nintendo for example
Yeah who TF are their lawyers? Anticompetitive behavior is just that—there have o be actions taken, at least in the United States. And Steam doesn’t have exclusivity agreements so IDK what they’re gonna argue.
The closest thing they can argue to any kind of “exclusivity” is that the free steam keys developers can generate for their games may not be resold for a lower amount than the game can be purchased for on steam outright. That says nothing about other means of distributing the game outside of steam, and nothing about alternative platforms the devs might want to use. It’s a tiny and far away straw to grasp at.
I genuinely can’t fathom why this number should be bigger. What am I supposed to take away from this knowledge? Far as I’m concerned, Valve is still a rare comparative good guy in the dense-packed field of bad guys in industry
Because we have been led to believe that the “titans” of industry are these super above average smart people. In reality it’s a bunch of nepo babies with no unique skills (other than, perhaps, a good education) which only copy each other.
After covid, all big IT companies started hiring like mad men… Then they all started firing people like crazy. They are driven more by speculation on their stock price and FOMO than any actual business strategy
These numbers keep getting smaller with every headline. Tomorrow it says that Steam runs off of Gabens private NAS.
Gaben isn’t actually one person. Gaben is a conglomerate.
Gaben is a state of mind
Of course there’s a fee. Do they not realize how expensive it is to fileserve useless videogame data, provide versioning for that, updater systems, workshop storage, curation, promotion etc etc. . . without help?
Is there not a fee for your competing storefront? How would it fund its daily operations?
The workshop alone is already a godsend (from Lord Gaben).
There are decade old games with hundreds of thousands of mods, who’s paying for all the hosting?
Has anyone tried Epic Store? It has nothing but the most barebone features to purchase a game, literally just a glorified launcher.
