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Comment by knome | Hacker News Reader

>and preventing them from offering lower prices on other platforms

I think this is the crux of the matter, rather than the 30%.

As much as I enjoy steam and don't care in the slightest that they charge a 30% fee for all they offer, I can't see any general benefit for any of the game companies to be able to dictate how game makers price their goods on other platforms or for direct sales.

If Valve is making access contingent on competitor pricing, I could understand it being seen as anti-competitive behavior. It should be banned across all of the marketplaces if it somehow doesn't fall afoul of some consumer protection law already.

edit:

HideousKojima says below that the pricing only applies if they're selling steam keys. If that's the case, I can't see how this has merit. If you're selling Valve's support of your game to users, pay them what they ask. If you're selling elsewhere and Valve is uninvolved, then there would be an issue.

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I thought about that and realized they have a good reason. If they didn't do that, people would use Steam as a storefront to find games and then buy them on a different platform.

So if this wasn't in place, Steam would be unable to make money.

That being said, the indie developers could just set the game price to the same everywhere when they want to make a discount (which is what most do)

Valve dont actually demand of developers to run the same discounts everywhere at the same time. You can still for instance sell game cheaper on other store, but eventually you have to run the same discount on Steam.

> people would use Steam as a storefront to find games and then buy them on a different platform

FWIW I do that anyway whenever I can find a platform that lets me buy and own the game outright, rather than depending on Valve having then good graces to continue allow me to log into Steam.

I would do that (I was doing that with GoG), but the Steam Deck bought me back

I also have a Steam Deck and still prefer buying games from GOG, when possible. Heroic Launcher is a nice GUI that let's you easily install GOG+Epic store games, sets up the proton stuff and gives you the option to add the games to Steam as non-Steam games.

I tried, but it doesn't seem be anywhere near the simplicity of buying games on Steam.

Not to mention, it needs double the size of the game when patching (with baldur's gate that's like 180 GB)

Why is this comment being downvoted? It's reasonably interesting point, and a fair off-the-cuff stab at a spot of second order thinking.

Thank you!

How do you know it’s being downvoted? I thought scores for comments were not visible

Comment gets grayed out?

People would still buy on Steam to have it all in one place, and for the features that steam provides, like achievements and multiplayer with your steam friends.

That only really applies if the other platforms are as good as/better than Steam, which they aren't for most people.

that is not a lot considering they get a 30% cut off of every sale.

> use [store] as a storefront to find [products] and then buy them [elsewhere]

Like every brick and mortar store had to contend with due to the rise of internet shopping? Did any of them have market position to prevent manufacturers from doing it?

It is a serious problem for them too and I have no answer to that. I understand their position too. It sucks, and it sucks for steam store.

I have no idea why people would have physical store in modern days, unless it's one of those spots that shower you with money due to foot traffic.

Does Steam provide anything as a storefront? I thought it only shows that a game exists and not more.

Reviews, discovery queues, search, crowdsourced tagging, minitrailers, events, splash ads, wishlist, an entire overlay to support controller configuration (and any controller) for any videogame that's accessed through steam (even non-steam games). Discussions, mods, leaderboards, market. I suspect I can continue. You could argue some of this features are not necessary "storefront", but the line is blurry. The point is when I want to discover new games, I go to Steam.

I'm not sure what else I could ask for as a storefront.

>If they didn't do that, people would use Steam as a storefront to find games and then buy them on a different platform.

sounds good to me. If people want those advantageousfeatures or to stay in Valve's garden, they will pay more for that even if a cheaper pricing appears. Especially with so many complaining about non-steam releases and even claiming they will pay more just to say "fuck you" to EGS.

People who don't care (like me. I still have my game exe's on my desktop like a boomer) will research and find a better price, if possible. As is, Steam seems to discourage this.

>That being said, the indie developers could just set the game price to the same everywhere when they want to make a discount (which is what most do)

yes...because pricing parity. I'm assuming you can't just have a game on eternal sale on an alternative storefront as a loophole. I don't know the details of the sales period, but if GOG or Itch ever wanted their own fest, devs may be afraid due to risk of de-listing on Steam.

The most dangerous thing is that a lot of Valve is fast and loose behind the scenes. They are generally good enough to know when something is bad PR and let it slide. But there's plenty of old school Nintendo-style blurry lines when it comes to submitting.

If you selling Steam keys you paying Valve nothing for these sales.

Keys are free and 100% profit going to you.

And if you abuse it they take it away. Steam already had to stomp down on it.

So it's clearly not the way out devs want.

I am co-founder of game studio and I have lots of friends in gamedev too. I know people who sold under 100 copies of their game on Steam and got 10,000 keys for sales elsewhere no problem.

I never gonna to defend Valve 30% cut since it is terrible for anyone in game development, but honestly so far Valve itself have superb reputation as business partner and they never abused their market power.

My bet only trading card generator games ware affected when Valve cracked down on giving out umlimited number of keys.

My bet is that, like many things for Steam, it's inconsistent. Some will get a warning. Others slip through the cracks. Some may even slip but get rejected after that. But relatively few legit are companies want to take a risk to their merchant profile to begin with.

Wolfire isnt large by any means, but is definitely large enough where it couldn't get away with such obvious abuse. They could be lying, but I can believe with their general company ethos that they do/did legitimately just want an option to self-distribute, but pass on the 30% fee to the customer on Steam.

Personally I totally agree that Steam fee should be way below 30% because gamedev is tough enough to the point where actual indie studio get only 20-30% of gross revenue. Especially now when Steam dont provide any value of "organic" marketing.

What I dont agree with is Wolfire case when they want to distribute through Steam, but still give Steam customers worse deal than for Steam keys they directly sell.

It's just doesn't sounds right to me and it's certainly wont make life any easier for other indie developers without dedicated fan base. Only developers who already successful can really benefit from it.

>What I dont agree with is Wolfire case when they want to distribute through Steam, but still give Steam customers worse deal than for Steam keys they directly sell.

as far as I hear, the threat (they claim) comes from Steam delisting their game even if they don't use steam keys or DRM at all. Which I feel is fair enough.

Ultimately it's their game to distribute and I a dev should have an option to pass the cut on to the customer if it's really that drastic. That way, if customers feel slighted you can point back to steam and they can put pressure on to lower the cut.

In the far future I was thinking of doing a similar thing where I have a build on Itch.io that is cheaper than Steam. Nothing drastic: probably something like $5 for itch (itch's default cut is 10%, but I'd probably bump it to 15% personally. So I take home $4.25) and $6 on steam (where my take home would be $4.20), so I hope I don't run into such difficulty. There's been so many stories with opaque Steam support for devs that I simply want some extra control of the situation (especially since the nature of the work I want to do means I was to make the codebase open source). I don't want to put all my eggs in Valve's basket but also want to balance out any potential cuts where possible.

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