Steam 30% cut over games abused?

[jpm1]

i just learnt that Steam takes 30% cut over a game sold on its platform. in comparison the new Epic games store takes only 12%. Do you think there is abuse there. Your thoughts? 30% that's one third of the total

[MarshDanni]

IMO Epic Games is using the 12% gimmick to attract developers, if they were in the place of Steam they too would keep it higher. I wholeheartedly support Steam, I really don't remember the last time I heard that Steam tried to buy out the developers for exclusivity or shady crap the Launcher has on itself. 

 

I myself really hate the idea of multi-branching your library of games. We have Uplay, Origin, Steam, Epic Games, Battle.net, even GOG has it's launcher. However I don't really mind Uplay, Origin or Battle.net because basically they have THEIR OWN games as exclusives (Battlefield for example), while Epic games is trying to retake games which are already branched for itself.

 

Take Metro series for example. You have your first two games on Steam and guess what. If you want to finish your collection you can't! The third one is exclusive on Epic for a year. 

[D9fred95]

This post that I read elsewhere pretty much sums up my feelings towards discussions about this topic:

 

Quote

Someone who's pissing me off whenever he talks about it is ReviewTechUSA on Youtube going "hey, Steam, just lower your take to 12% and meet Epic" because I just don't think it is that simple. EGS doesn't need to take a big cut because they got all that Fortnite money overflowing their coffers at the moment and their store is in its infancy which means it is probably not too costly to run. But Steam? Steam is f*cking massive. Imagine how many employees work on it. I know some say that the costumer support is sh*t but it doesn't surprise me when they have to provide costumer support for tens of thousands of games, and that's excluding "crappy games" btw. Steam lowered their take from 30% to 25% from what I heard. Well, that's not even close to comparable to Epic, right? Well... Why? Why would Steam lower it a measly 5%? 

 

Well, here's just a theory and it ain't a game theory; What if Steam can't lower it because that'd affect their business platform in a very negative way? Hell, think about this, right. Screenshot galleries. Screenshots aren't that big but out of the millions of people who use Steam how many of them have screenshots uploaded to their galleries? I'm sure that that takes maintenance to care for as well as server space to hold. I dunno how much but I doubt it's nothing. Imagine all the workshop content that people can upload. The forums (discussions), the news pages (which sometimes also include pictures.) think of the vast sea of games on their platform that they have to allow people to download. Now think of the individual store pages and what they contain. User reviews, pictures and videos.

 

I don't know the details of all of this or how much it costs to maintain but if Steam is only able to lower it by 5% and then go radiosilent then there has to be a reason for it. And maybe that's because they can't lower it unless they're willing to trim some fat AND flesh off the bone. And coming out and saying it? That very well might drive others to EGS as Steam then pretty much confirms that "yes, you're not going to get a better cut with us, sorry."

 

I just don't think it is as simple as "come on bruh, just lower the % to meet Epic".

 

Now whether it is a good thing that steam has to have server space and make sure features work such as badges and trading cards is up for discussion. Maybe that's fat that should be trimmed. But I don't think they can come close to meeting Epic's 12% unless they're willing to sever some flesh along with the fat, and who knows what that might mean.
 

 

[MarshDanni]

Steam is sticking to their guns and I think they're winning the fight in the long run. Don't know if you guys heard about that sale fiasco where Gearbox took down their Borderlands 3 sale on Epic Games, because Epic thought they were sneaky. 

Edited June 6, 2019 by MarshDanni

[jpm1]

from a customer review there's no doubt that no one wants to have his library splitted all over. but from a dev point of view, imagine you're an indie dev working hard on your baby. and once it's done, i mean after probably years of hard work, sweat, and tears, a publisher comes around, and grab one third of the cake. wouldn't you be disgusted, honestly

[Jason]

I don't know the specifics but Steam's cut can go much lower than 30% depending on how many copies of your game you sell. I'd also imagine that big publishers will be getting a better deal from Steam, but I'm just speculating there.

 

It's also worth noting that the cut Steam takes covers everything, all the transaction fees, server fees, update delivery, free key generation, Steam community features (friends system, achievements, mod support, etc), advertising, even things like the card the wallet codes you can buy on stores are on. Also, Steam only takes their cut on copies sold on Steam. Those copies that are sold on third party sites using the free key generation Steam provides? 0% cut.

 

EGS on the other hand does things like add transaction fees that are passed onto the customer in certain cases because the 12% cut they take is not enough to cover it.

[MarshDanni]

1 hour ago, jpm1 said:

from a customer review there's no doubt that no one wants to have his library splitted all over. but from a dev point of view, imagine you're an indie dev working hard on your baby. and once it's done, i mean after probably years of hard work, sweat, and tears, a publisher comes around, and grab one third of the cake. wouldn't you be disgusted, honestly

Indie Developers are supported by Steam. As Jason said, the 30% cut goes out for the big titles, triple A games. Plus the fact you'll get better support, a lot more of recognition and a broader audience by being on Steam. Developers know what they're getting in to. There's professional analysts that take in the factor of the cut given to distributors. Companies would've have left Steam a long time ago if it wasn't in their best interest to be there.

[jpm1]

according to the articles i've just read, the scheme in Steam is quite simple. the game sells you take nice cash. you get plagued by trolls negative reviews that are too lazy to make few tweaks on their rig, you have no way to respond --> game dead, and burried. as simple as that. but according to an article i've just read, it seems that the majority of indie devs don't think 30% cut is justified nowadays. it seems they're slowly migrating to stuff like itchio.io.

however Ubi annouced they now will sell their games on EGS

that Steam 'fan-boy' shouting is actually full of good sense too

 

 

 

[Jason]

Epic's PR is that 30% is really bad and there's no reason for it, but then moan publicly (via Tim Sweeney) when they realise 12% doesn't cover all their costs. Console cuts are also not 12% last I heard and are more like 30% IIRC.

 

There's a whole more to it than what certain people want you to believe. Also, if Steam was all bad we wouldn't be seeing publishers and developers like Bethesda, Bungie and Microsoft supporting Steam, as well as smaller devs like Larian still supporting Steam.

 

A lot of is politics rather than Epic truly caring about devs and their cuts.

[jpm1]

15 hours ago, Jason said:

Epic's PR

Also, if Steam was all bad we wouldn't be seeing publishers and developers like Bethesda, Bungie and Microsoft supporting Steam, as well as smaller devs like Larian still supporting Steam.

A lot of is politics rather than Epic truly caring about devs and their cuts.

what is PR?

actually nowadays publishers can't ignore Steam. it's 125 millions customers across ther world

what do you mean by politics

 

personnally i don't care bout most Steam features. only features i praise, are online savegames, and automatic updates. but i use them quite rarely to be honest. 30% is really huge

having all his games into a same place is cool for sure. but you can get exactly the same result with Windows start menu, and iconify prog. i think a reasonable cut would be 20% max. 1/5 of the total revenues would be fair IMO. but one third man this is gigantic

[sivispacem]

6 minutes ago, jpm1 said:

30% is really huge

It's about the same margin that brick-and-mortar stores have on new games, which was what Steam benchmarked itself against in the first place.

I'd argue that Steam can justify a 30% cut far more than the likes of Epic because of the contributions of things like Workshop and Greenlight to the gaming marketplace.

Steam invest back through their platform into smaller/indie developers etc.

 

If you think a 30% cut is horrifying, you should see the kinds of cuts record labels take of artist sales.

[Jason]

4 minutes ago, jpm1 said:

what is PR?

what do you mean by politics

Epic are pushing a narrative that Steam's 30% cut is nonsensical and that there's no reason for it. They want to turn developers and customers against Steam. The problem though, like I said, isn't so black and white, there's a lot of reasons why Steam take what they do (and they don't always take 30%) and Epic execs have publicly talked about 12% not being enough to cover their own costs, and passing those costs onto customers.

 

Epic want to turn this story into them saving PC gaming but in reality they just want to topple Steam for no other reason than their own financial benefit. They've shown that they don't particularly care about developers, as seen by the sale they've been doing recently where they put brand new or even unreleased games on sale for a significant discount without contacting the publishers before hand meaning they had to pull their games from the sale when they realised their games were being sold for as little as $5 in some regions. They've also shown they don't care about the customers in all of this by, well, how long have we got? It's a long list.

 

8 minutes ago, jpm1 said:

actually nowadays publishers can't ignore Steam. it's 125 millions customers across ther world

Some publishers are ignoring steam. Take-Two and Ubisoft are no longer selling their new games on Steam (in Ubi's case it's full exclusivity). They've taken a risk because Epic are throwing Fortnite money at them to help negate the losses they'll get by not supporting Steam.

 

9 minutes ago, jpm1 said:

personnally i don't care bout most Steam features. only features i praise, are online savegames, and automatic updates. but i use them quite rarely to be honest. 30% is really huge

having all his games into a same place is cool for sure. but you can get exactly the same result with Windows start menu, and iconify prog. i think a reasonable cut would be 20% max. 1/5 of the total revenues would be fair IMO. but one third man this is gigantic

Steam isn't just a set of community based features it also has a large set of features for developers. Steam has well over a decade of support behind it, by choosing EGS over Steam you're sacrificing a lot for Epic's dollah dollah bills.

[jpm1]

On 6/7/2019 at 5:22 PM, Jason said:

Steam isn't just a set of community based features it also has a large set of features for developers

like what. i'm not saying you're wrong, i'm just curious

 

concerning Epic, i find you guys a bit sharped . don't forget EPIC has provided the world with the amazing Unreal engine. and takes only 5% from it. in my opinion (i could be wrong) developping such engine is much more money, and personel demanding than making a selling platform like actual Steam. i'm not talking of Steam useless features. i'm talking of the basics. selling, updates, chat, and support

[Jason]

16 minutes ago, jpm1 said:

like what. i'm not saying you're wrong, i'm just curious

https://partner.steamgames.com/

 

17 minutes ago, jpm1 said:

 in my opinion (i could be wrong) developping such engine is much more money, and personel demanding than making a selling platform like actual Steam. 

Yea.. no.

 

Also don't dismiss community features or anything like that as useless. They are standard features of a gaming platform in 2019, there's a reason every decent platform like XBL, PSN, Nintendo, Steam, Battle.Net, Origin, uPlay and GoG have them. Epic not having them is a bad look for them.

[jpm1]

steamworks are anecdotic IMO. i mean nothing vital for the game itself. just a bunch of optional tools, marketing oriented for the most. i mean we are far from UE game engine

 

what do you mean community features. forulms. these are not maintained by Steam. and personnally i don't care about these community things. i really don't give a f.. about these things

[Jason]

Just now, jpm1 said:

steamworks are anecdotic IMO. i mean nothing vital for the game itself. just a bunch of optional tools, marketing oriented for the most. i mean we are far from UE game engine

Okay so you have no idea what Steamworks actually is then, because it's a lot of very useful tools including things like a multiplayer platform (very useful to smaller studios), the ability to host mods through Steam and have Steam install them automatically for users and much more. Valve have been building Steam for well over a decade, it's got a ton of features for devs, if you don't see them as features then good for you but that doesn't mean they're not there.

 

2 minutes ago, jpm1 said:

what do you mean community features. forulms. these are not maintained by Steam. and personnally i don't care about these community things. i really don't give a f.. about these things

Once again you have little to no knowledge on Steam because Steam does host and maintain forums. Every game on Steam gets its own community page with a bunch of features including forums. These forums are used by devs a lot and funnily enough have been used recently by developers who've moved their game from Steam to Epic exclusively because the Epic Games Store offers no way for developers to communicate with their playerbase.

 

I also couldn't care less if you don't care about community features because millions upon millions of users do. They're important to any gaming platform, if you don't see them as important good for you but that doesn't mean everyone else shares your opinions.

 

Also constantly comparing Steam to Unreal Engine is f*cking bizarre frankly and I don't know why you're doing it. What Epic does with Unreal is completely unrelated to what they are doing with their store, it's not like Unreal usage is as widespread as it was last-gen, most major publishers have their own engines and independent developers have a lot more options. Also if you had any knowledge of Steam or Valve you'd know that they also develop the Source engine, which is not the most commonly used engine at all these days but it has been used recently by Apex Legends.

 

Really you're falling into the trap of making this a feature vs feature argument which is really only a small part of the issue of why people don't want to use the Epic Games Store.

[jpm1]

Steam forums aren't managed by Steam. i mean maybe they own the servers, but it's the devs who manage the games forums

however i don't think Unreal engine is off topic here. as lot of UE games are sold on Steam. as it's EPIC who does all the job, it would be logical if they grab the money instead of Steam. some love Steam, and i'd say fine. but personnally i think the 30% cut is heavy. and beside i'm a Steam customer since 2004 so i know what steam is about

the question is what does Steam do that justifies such a cut

 

- screenshots: who cares

- automatic updates. this justify a cut, but 30%?

- online savegames: 0 cost

- forums. this is not the most costly thing on earth. especially if the games devs do all the management work

- shop: unrelated

- streaming: not vital feature

- Steamworks: what is it? mods, Steam client compatibility tools. something vital, huh?

- mods: this is not vital. i mean you can have dedicated sites for that

 

did i forget something

only thing i see it's that Steam is great for a customer. this is unquestionable. but from a dev POV, it's a bit more debatable

[Jason]

You're right, when you dismiss every feature Steam offers as not really important or useful to developers then Steam doesn't have anything to offer over EGS, which has virtually none of those features.

 

If that's your argument then no one is going to convince you otherwise but it's not an opinion shared by many others.

 

Not that this is the sole reason why people have issues with EGS like has been said many times but ya'know.