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Comment by mediumdeviation | Hacker News Reader

I understand his argument about gatekeepers, but Steam is a poor example. Steam itself provides so much more than a simple storefront as he describes it. By selling on Steam you also get

Steam API, which gives you

- Achievements

- Leaderboards

- Cloud save

- Steam Workshop - user generated mods and content

- Multiplayer infrastructure

Steam community, which gives you

- Forum

- Social network - user generated content such as screenshots, game guides and fanart

- Reviews - endorsements from several thousand actual players sells games far better than a flashy trailer

Whether these features are worth the 30% cut is arguable, but these services are far more valuable to independent developers, who don't have the time or ability to implement these, than to developers under large publishers, who may share these infrastructure within the games they publish.

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"Market makers" are a very important economic function. Just because it's hard to put your finger on a tangible product, the fact that they were able to create a unified framework for selling games to customers is worth quite a lot of money. A lot of people had tried (and failed) to do similar things in the past. Those things you mentioned are almost irrelevant. The actual value they're delivering is being able to easily and economically distribute your game to a wide audience and, as a consumer, connect me with a large number of games. It's like trying to say the value of a road is the stopsigns and traffic lights on them, not the fact that it's connecting two cities.

Disagree. The 'market' is far less important when the good you're selling takes up no tangible shelf space - people have been buying games just fine without Steam for decades before Steam, and still are.

Steam itself, by dint of being another layer between gamers and their games, have to justify its existence and value to them, and generally does through a variety of features as well as its legendary sales. But being a marketplace and distribution network alone does not get you anywhere, not when the cost of setting up shop on the Internet is so low these days.

I don't think you would say any of this if you were an indie dev.

Actually I don't think anyone has said it yet, but the truth is 90% of the value of Steam is in marketing. Steam gives you millions upon millions of impressions from people actively looking to buy a game right now.

Steam also does a lot to reduce piracy by providing a seamless way to patch your game. This allows you to release tons of patches which make it very hard to torrent the current version of your game.

Steam certainly used to provide valuable marketing to indie devs, but these days it's so stuffed full of shovelware and Early Access games that might never be finished that it's not so great anymore. They don't even feel they need to obey consumer rights laws on stuff like false advertising, refunds, deceptive pricing, etc.

So do you make your living from Steam? I do and you just are wrong about whether or not the marketing is valuable.

>people have been buying games just fine without Steam for decades before Steam, and still are

The problem is the "just fine" part. For indie game shops it has been far from "just fine".

A bit of a late reply, but would you say banks are not important to the economy? Or capital markets? Those aren't tangible either. As a sillier example, consider online dating where theres not even an underlying product or service at all (well, no legal ones anyway). Actual tangible objects make up such a small portion of the economy these days. The labor required to grow corn or manufacture furniture or whatever is miniscule in comparison to the number of people those products serve.

Undertale doesn't have achievements, leaderboards, modding, or multiplayer. I think it has cloud save, but it's like a 6-hour game so that's not a particularly alluring feature here.

More importantly, a platform with tens of millions of active users. A platform that actively puts new content in front of its users for the express purpose of getting them to buy it no less.

Is access to tens of millions of active users worth 30%? Fuck yes it is. And if you don't agree then sell your game direct and on your own. It is a free market after all.

For everything except multiplayer infrastructure, you could shove that on a $20/month server. Maybe the multiplayer servers too. Whether it's worth 30% is not arguable. It's flatly not worth it. Steam's value outside of just existing in front of people (aka network effects) is almost entirely in being a reliable payment transmitter and CDN. It's not in the bonus things you listed.

And that $20/month server also requires a $4000/month devop to maintain it.

And adds to development time. And doesn't scale beyond ~1000 users online at a given time.

I managed to get steam achievements working in an hour of developing and zero servers. There's no way I could get that in two weeks of development time on a server.

If you actually try making the sorta thing steam provides (all those things are distributed/scale, managed by other people, backed by support, etc) you'll find your costs instantly go higher than most indie games will make in their lifetime.

And, well, the discovery bit is something you just can't replicate. However slick your site is, you won't reach steam users unless you're on steam, and steam has wholly won in this area.

Okay, $4000 of devops spread across how many games? And so many purchasers will never look at the forums, or the content stores, or the...

These are nice little bonus features but they're nothing more than bonus features. If you offered me a tiny discount to not get them, I'd take it just about every time. It's not in the same ballpark as 30%.

The discovery is critical but also way off in left field, because it's a network effect that causes itself. Steam could in theory have those network effects without actually providing direct services.

It hardly matters how many games really because 90+% of indie games aren't ever going to make more than $10k.

However, those numbers were for one indie game with light usage. If you want your poor little server to support multiple games, you'll need a a few hundred $/mo more in servers, possibly a second devop, and massively more development time.

Whether that stuff is worth it or not can very well be gauged by the fact that people pay for it.

If it weren't worth it, people would sell on alternate platforms like their own website or what have you.

You're stating your opinion as fact, but the numbers don't agree with you.

Talking about linear scaling does not change the percentages. I'm not saying you could replace steam with a $20 server, I'm saying that you can run some forums and leaderboards for $20 per game.

But that was just a number I threw out. How about looking at 5% of steam's 30% across roughly a billion sales, that is way way more than it would take to run some forums and leaderboards and cloud saves etc.

More importantly, I don't think you're following what my core point is.

I'm not saying that steam is a bad deal.

I'm saying that all those things mediumdeviation listed are pennies on the dollar of the value steam actually provides. If steam only gave that, everyone would go elsewhere rather than pay 30%.

Steam's value is in people finding your game, paying for your game, and downloading your game. Very little else matters.

So when Eevee says they charge 30% to be a gatekeeper? Yeah, that's a valid point. They have a minor feature list a mile long but it's nothing compared to the core feature of being a gatekeeper store.

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