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Gabe Newell on Steam monopoly accusations: Gamers have 'enormous choice' about where to buy games (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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[+] -7 points 4 months ago (9 children)

What is their fault is using their monopoly status to charge 30% of sales for an online storefront. For many games, Steam's cut is the single largest expense.

If you're a developer of a game being sold on Steam, Gabe Newell's personal cut on the game that wasn't produced, published, or marketed by him or any company he owns is more than yours because he charges an unconscionable toll for the storefront.

If Steam charged 5% instead of 30% they'd still be making a killing, but since they have an an effective monopoly it doesn't matter.

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  • [–] 8 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    30% is the standard cut for game sales across the industry. Epic has a smaller cut, but customers don't want to use it. As someone offering a product, you have to sell where your customers are. Steam COULD abuse their position by taking a higher than standard cut, but they choose not to. Steam isn't a bad guy here. They made a good platform that customers prefer, and have made no attempts to stop competitors from competing and despite having the market position to abuse it, still only charge the industry standard for selling on their platform. If anybody would bother actually trying to compete with them, then you might see the cut come down, but all their competition seems content to just whine instead of actually making a platform worth using.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    It's the industry standard for online PC game sales because of them. They established that number when they were the first major player to the market. They don't get to blame the industry for a pricing scheme they invented.

    This is the company that didn't offer refunds until they had to. They're the company that used to make indie developers get permission to launch games through them with exclusivity agreements (Steam Greenlight program). They cry foul when devs put in loot boxes, gacha mechanics, and other live service bullshit when they don't get a 30% cut.

    They've been exactly as shitty as they can get away with. The only things that have allowed them to be less shitty are that they were first to the game and that they're privately-owned l, meaning they do what's in Gabe's long-term interest instead of having to drive the stock price up every quarter until they collapse or allergens with someone else.

    When Steam launched, gamers were very upset because they didn't want to have to log into an online marketplace to play Half-Life 2. And now people get pissy when the games they want dont require you to give data and money to a billionaire who long ago stopped giving a fuck about gamers as anything other than a means to buy more yachts.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Industry standard for ALL game sales, not just PC. Steam did not invent this. PlayStation charges this. Xbox charges this. Retail in general charged this before Steam even existed.

    But you're clearly unwilling to see anything but "Steam bad! RAH RAH RAH!" So I'm just gonna block your dumbass self now.

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  • [–] -1 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Xbox and Playstation developed the platforms the games are on and sold the consoles at a loss.

    Retailers have physical overhead that gar exceeds Steam's cost per sale.

    Steam doesn't have those reasons. They just wanted a bigger cut without incurring the expenses.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago*

    Steam maintains:

    • Server costs for the storefront, fast game file distribution and the variety of other services they offer to developers (eg the friends system, game invites, the Workshop, the marketplace, cloud saves, etc...).
    • Steam handles payments for you, worldwide. This alone is already a pretty huge undertaking that many underestimate.
    • Steam does a ton of analytics for devs.
    • DRM.
    • Support staff for handling customer complaints, refund requests, etc...
    • Sets up seasonal sales and handles promotion for devs willing to participate.
    • Steam allows you to resell Steam keys on other platforms, which forgoes the 30% cut entirely (creating new keys is free), as long as you won't resell the keys cheaper than the game's price on the Steam storefront itself.
    • At high enough sales, Steam cuts back on the part they take.

    All of this stuff is free and bonus for devs. You pay a one-time fee to set up, which you get back if your game sells enough copies (it's a really low bar, unless the game is total gunk you're going to reach that threshold). Not to mention the costs involved in bringing your game to other devices it wasn't originally built for, allowing you to gain access to a larger share of the market (again, for free. It's even available to users using a competitor).

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago

    Steam provides not only a storefront with lots of features that devs can use, they also provide servers, backend support through different APIs and not to mention the insane amount of data users need each day. (Around 275 PETABYTES a day, or 100 exabytes a year) That kind of infrastructure is not cheap, and seeing as that was the industry standard (it's still what Google and apple get from their storefronts) I'd say that's pretty reasonable.

    Also the 30% cut goes down to 25% after the first $10 million in revenue, then down to 20% after you reach $50 million. I do think they should put in a lower cut for independent developers who are releasing small games, until a certain revenue threshold is reached, but overall I would say it seems reasonable to me.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago

    That is also something that would allow a competitor to come in to outseat their dominance. In fact, charging 5% instead of 30% would make it much more difficult for competition to develop because it would be next to impossible for somebody to penetrate into the market by offering a lower rate that's only viable with huge volumes of sales. Usually, offering unsustainable prices is a way that a dominant player achieves a monopoly. If they have big cash reserves, they can run at a loss until their competition dies out.

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