Valve announces New Revenue Share Tiers for developers - Sensationalist Headlines

Steam Community With that in mind, we’ve created new revenue share tiers for games that hit certain revenue levels. Starting from October 1, 2018 (i.e. revenues prior to that date are not included), when a game makes over $10 million on Steam, the revenue share for that application will adjust to 75%/25% on earnings beyond $10M. At $50 million, the revenue share will adjust to 80%/20% on earnings beyond $50M. Revenue includes game packages, DLC, in-game sales, and Community Marketplace game fees. Our hope is this change will reward the positive network effects generated by developers of big games, further aligning their interests with Steam and the community.

that's still a pretty fucking huge cut considering they aren't doing anything besides hosting it. No wonder valve makes a killing.

(conspiracy alert, obvious /s) They waited to announce this after FO76 launched because they knew FO76 would be a clusterfuck if bethesducks put it on steam.

It's also standard. Last I checked, most marketplaces take about 30%.

apple taking a 30% cut on everything on the app store is the sole reason they are a trillion dollar company

They're concerned at the games not releasing on Steam like Cod Blops 4

Honestly it's still drastically too high IMO. Albeit it's a completely different market, the stuff I sell online gets a rate of 88/12 and honestly it's a fantastic number. Given the fucking HUGE amount of games on Steam & Valve's rediculous money hoarding games, it might be a wise incentive to drop it even that low.

I dont understand how other cods werent released on battlenet sooner, seeing how activision owns it.

You gotta keep in mind valve hosts the game on their servers, so distribution and bandwith concerns are almost nonexistent when you have something on steam.

I understand when they were a smaller end company and steam was in its early days but now they're literally literally a privately owned Apple they should be able to drop the rev split in some way. Maybe something for indie devs like up to the first 100k or something? It just seems like they take a stupid percentage for just hosting it, when 99% of the physical work goes into making the game from the devs, only for 30% to be swarmed by Valve seems wonky to me.

bandwidth, services, scaling infrastructure, and contracts (especially relevant with merchant fees) are not cheap. You're completely ignoring everything that Steamworks provides that's free for any developer on Steam to use, as well.

Valve doing this probably coincides with more and more big publishers making their own launchers to exclusively host their PC content. These changes are nice, but it's still not gonna be enough to stop big publishers from finding their own exclusive avenues. Publishers see Fortnite making millions without having to take any sort of cut on PC, and they want in on it badly. Fortnite has shown them that your game doesn't live or die in terms of profits depending on if it's on Steam or not. If it's a big enough IP, and/or there's enough interest in it, people will gladly install another launcher to play the game. Especially if that launcher has already been around and established in the past. Activision is extremely lucky in this, because Battle.net was already a household name for PC gamers. A lot probably already have it installed because of WoW or Overwatch, so putting titles like Destiny 2 or Black Ops 4 on it made full sense. The audience is already established enough to make the switch. Bethesda's went less swimmingly, but you can bet people would have no issue installing their launcher if DOOM Eternal, Starfield, and TES VI were made exclusive to it. People would moan and whine sure, but if it's a game they really want to play, they're going to do it.

you should really see the UI and process for getting your game uploaded to steam... it hasn't improved in 10 years. you have to type your password in plain-text into an extremely shitty console app that you download and it uploads via a custom format config file (not json, not yaml, not xml) which totally breaks if you have 2 factor login enabled. it's tech straight out of the early 2000's. you can't just upload a zip file to a website like itch. there isn't even documentation for any of the errors you'll get.

So wait, small time developers get fucked out of funds but if you're a big studio who already makes a ton, be our guest.

They found out letting the flood of shovelware porn games in wasn't making enough so they need to try to get AAA publishers back.

Said it before but the worst of Steam's problems started to develop after competition appeared. When EA broke off to do Origin and Amazon made a stronger push to sell PC games, Steam started changing up a lot of their policies and that was when they stopped bothering with quality control. Basically, they were financially secure when they had a monopoly so they used it to take whatever risks they wanted. Once they had competition they had to worry about more and so their practices had to change, including getting in more games on the market.

Nothing changes for small time developers. Big sellers get to negotiate better deals, that's generally how these things work in retailer/supplier relationships.

To me, it's not really solely good or solely bad. It's definitely nice to shake up Steam's supposed monopoly as it puts fire under their ass which gives them motivation to improve things. Competition is always good, and Steam definitely needs some improvements. However, it's also annoying in some ways as well. I, as well as many others, appreciate nearly everything being on Steam because it's just one application for every one of our games. There's none of the awkwardness of having to create a new account for every new launcher or storefront, and having to find all our friends again on those new launchers, and having to have multiple of them running in the background potentially eating up resources. Not to mention that Steam provides social and networking features for developers to use in their games, so they don't have to make their own friends system or their own invite system, etc. Steam's ace in the hole is its convenience combined with its large and ever expanding library. There's no doubt that the main reason PC gaming has really caught back on in recent years is because of Steam's convenience. The more people abandon Steam, the more fragmented things become, and the more frustrated people may become with PC gaming, because instead of just installing one application and you're done, you'll have to many to play many different games. It'll cease being as easy as just popping in a disc or downloading a game from one location on your console, so people will naturally gravitate back towards consoles.

There's always the option of releasing on itch and getting 100% of the revenue

100% of the big fat zero :v

And yet those big studios will still make their games have a 60$ pricetag, microtransactions (cosmetic or P2W), dozens of 5$ DLCs, season passes, spread sheets of different special editions, early access special editions, lootboxes, preorder bonuses etc. etc., because they will still claim that they are not making enough money.

actually I'm willing to believe them on this, the industry is more competitive than it's ever been and studios are visibly straddling the line between ethics and bankruptcy more than ever, you've got studios going under left and right https://i.redd.it/o6h0bf0wjvz11.png https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlgLxSLsYWQ the whole video is quite good, basically the industry is an awkward spot where everything is hella expensive (and gets 25% more expensive every year despite pricetags staying at $60) because every extra shiny pixel is still made with the same human blood and tears as ever, but this is (hopefully) about to change as menial tasks get taken over by AI "but what about 50% of the budget going to ads???" well that's a symptom of the competitive nature of the industry as well, oversaturation affects the AAA industry as well and they need every bit of promotion they get to stay relevant not that I'm advocating for unethical practices, but just saying there might be a bit more desperation behind these decisions than you might think, and in fact I'm slightly worried there might be another big videogame crash soon if the AI transition doesn't arrive soon/doesn't go smoothly

A barrel model costs $940?! I'll make you a barrel for a taco bell gift card.

tbh don't take that picture too literally, for example almost all the buildings in The Division are made up of an array of components that can be automatically placed and morphed. Another example is GR: Wildlands, where most work on the 20x20km map was done procedurally (terrain, vegetation, roads, rivers, building placement etc.), level design artists pretty much just handled clutter and unique stuff. One has to optimize their workflows when making huge open world games.

this is how sales commissions are structured... the more you make the higher % you keep

I'm not going to say you're wrong, but I will point out that the big companies have been making yearly profit records for over a decade. Ubisoft, Activision, and EA all made over 1 billion dollars in profit last year. Forgive me for not being very sympathetic to them increasing their production cost entirely of their own volition. Some of the best selling games of all time look like dog shit, so don't tell me they have to spend as much on graphics as they do

comparatively, bandwidth and hosting infrastructure of large businesses like valve and blizzard are insanely cheap for the revenue they're bringing in compared to traditional operating costs, they're laughing all the way to the bank

That's enough to make 5-6 games, so while they're not exactly cutting it close it's still not as much as it seems.

Enough to make 5-6 games with their ridiculously inflated budgets. Games don't need to cost 150 million dollars to make (in fact most don't come anywhere near that), pouring money into game production is the best example of the law of diminishing returns.

We're already in that ballpark though. By 2020, the average AAA game will cost 200m to make. Gamasutra