[Zelmor]

Valve's cuts are fine. I remember the times when developers were glad if they got 20-30% of the profits in general, with publisher deals starting at 70% cuts for IP-first game releases, and way higher if it was your first game. This after you pitched the game with a tech demo running, of course.

Steam is a blessing on digital distribution, and the most competent platform to date, albeit it has its problems.

[qasdf]

A friend of mine released a game that sold around a million copies in the late 90s or early 2000s sometime and had a deal like that. Except the publisher claimed that after all the distribution and physical costs the profit of the game was 0 and so he never got any money from his profit sharing agreement. Steam and online distribution in general is a godsend.

[maxxxxx]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

[wmf]

publisher deals starting at 70% cuts

But didn't those publishers pay development costs? I've seen a lot of people comparing publishers and retailers (which is what app stores are) without understanding the differences.

[kevingadd]

publishers funded development, did advertising, provided QA and often localization services, and manufactured physical products.

Valve runs a CDN and forces you to have a forum for your game that you moderate yourself, and runs a support service that issues no-questions-asked refunds of your title after players played it for upwards of 2 hours, which come out of your profits.

They do offer some useful APIs like Steamworks but those break randomly and have no devrel or customer service because Valve hates developers. So in practice, you're not getting much useful for your 30% - CDN, launcher, updater, payment processing, achievements. everything else they offer is buggy or actively unwanted.

Valve clearly recognizes at this point that developers don't like the service they offer for the 30% and that more importantly, big publishers can easily just go their own way. When that Valve cut is millions of dollars it's very easy to justify running your own storefront even if you sell fewer copies, because those Steam units sold come with huge negative effects - forums toxicity, buggy platform APIs, no-questions-asked refunds, review brigading, etc.

Context: Shipped a couple titles on Steam, one 500k+ sales. In one case we did extensive Steamworks integration (weeks of dev time) and actively regretted it. If I had a solution for the exposure problem (Steam still gives you way more potential sales even though it sucks now) I would go my own way in a heartbeat. Steam isn't worth 30%.