[user5994461]

You realize that it takes a lot of work to make a website to accept payment from a hundred countries in dozens of currencies and handle customer support and chargeback and fight fraud?

You can try to run your own website, to save 10% fees on a minuscule userbase, it simply doesn't cover the costs.

[azhenley]

Serious question: isn’t this what services like PayPal are for? Along with customer service services. Certainly not trivial, but it seems doable.

[richardknop]

What about billing support? You need people on the phone to handle complaints and issues from customers, deal with chargebacks, refunds and thousands of various weird requests from people that will keep coming. Also you need a software engineer team to work on the payment processing system / website. It's not "build it once and leave on autopilot". These things need continuous maintenance, bug fixes and improvements. All of that costs a lot of money and you have to have a really large revenue to be able to handle this yourself.

[mschuster91]

Paypal only handles payment. You still gotta do customer support, CDN infra (with games running at over 60GB each, that's not easy!), fraud detection, client dev and technical support for over three platforms (Win with 3 major versions, OS X with probably the same, and a myriad of Linux distros/kernel versions/GPU drivers), social networking/messaging stuff and a whole lot of small-ish stuff to get at half the functionality Steam offers.

[notSupplied]

What handling refunds? Some are legit, some will be fraudulent. What a out dealing with foreign currency? What if your game becomes popular in a country where PayPal isn't prevalent?

[pnloyd]

Don't companies like stripe aim to make packaged solutions to problems like these?

[user5994461]

Definitely not. It's quite the opposite actually.

Stripe gives you a basic solution to accept payments in some locations and under some circumstances. Once a company reaches in the tens of millions in yearly turnaround or expand internationally, it has to move on and run multiple payment providers.

[scarejunba]

Minecraft did it when it was tiny and it scaled all the way up.

[yellowapple]

Just because one game managed to pull it off a decade or so ago doesn't mean that sort of success is the norm.

[scarejunba]

I just mean it’s possible.

[michaelmrose]

I would be interested in data but logically wouldn't most of revenue at present come from 12-18 countries?

[user5994461]

That's the point. Doing internationalization and payments for 12-18 countries is a pain.

Steam helps you with that. You could try to do better yourself but the effort is not worth saving a few percent of fees (on a lot less sales).

[michaelmrose]

You are making assumptions. 30% is not a few percent. You are also assuming that merely being on steam and having users encounter your game while browsing will be the primary method people encounter your game and decide to buy it thus the "on a lot less sales" People encounter games via many means. If you only sell it via steam or steam is merely the most convenient means of acquisition then the fact that the buyer bought it on steam isn't proof that they found it via steam or further that they wont buy again if you aren't available via steam.

[user5994461]

It is a few percents. All online marketplaces, steam, apple store, airbnb, booking are 20 to 30% commission.

It takes at least 10% commission to be able to run a company of this type. It's possible to run with as low as 5% in some niches, given a very lean operation and a billion dollar scale to amortize fixed costs. Eventually most of the company will be devoted to customer support and billing related tasks.

There is really not that much that can be shaved off. Small studios could never make a platform any efficient. A small group could spend all their time working on distribution and billing, never shipping an actual game. It's a really good deal to just use steam instead.

For AAA games it's annoying to pay 30% and they're rather make their own platform, that's why steam is dropping commission to 20% for top selling hits.

[MattRix]

You say this, but there are already services like itch.io and humble that charge ~10%.

[kbwt]

Steam certainly won't internationalize your game for you.

[user5994461]

Steam is translated and comes with support for many languages. It takes all currency and it has region settings for pricing, currency and release dates. For the anecdote, it's maybe the only US service that sells well in Russia.

It certainly won't translate the game for you, not that translating a bunch of text files is the hardest part, but it will help with everything else.

Ask international users what they think of other platforms. Like the one they couldn't use because it didn't accept their names with an accent or couldn't enter a billing address without a state.

[michaelmrose]

How will that give your game an international user base? Woudn't the first step being making the game actually playable by users in a given language before worrying about being able to sell to them.

[mango7283]

Not necessarily, assuming the game is in English, the payment barrier is higher than the language barrier.

OTOH if the game is in Japanese and only sold on a Japanese internet platform then you have two barriers - language and payment

[kbwt]

Can't something like Stripe + Braintree provide the same at a fraction of the cost?

[user5994461]

Not at all. For starter Stripe is only usable if you are a small US company selling to a US user base. It also restricts your audience to customers with a card and willing to enter it on your website.

It's better than nothing but it's in no way comparable to what steam offers.

[gomox]

That's a dramatic misrepresentation. Source: operated startup selling to LATAM customers, used Stripe.

[rblatz]

Lyft uses stripe, I wouldn’t consider them small.