People look at companies too cynically here. While obviously Valve wants to make money, they also have a culture and values that don’t always align with a Homo Economicus perspective. Not all of Valve’s actions can be trivially explained as the fastest route to dollars.

Unlike most companies we discuss here, Valve is not publicly held, and doesn’t seem particularly interested in being so. That, combined with their dominance of the PC gaming market, means their culture is more free to let them target things orthogonal to making money, when the whim strikes them.

Yeah, I think we really should see difference sometimes between public and private companies. And on extension companies that aim to be public or sold like most VC backed startups.

The public aim to make as much money as possible or at least increase valuation. The private however can be content with making enough of it. Which can really change the long term plans.

Also being public company and not increase enough valuation always runs the risk of being acquired and someone else doing it.

They worry less about money because they have so much of it. Steam’s 30% cut of all game revenue is a lot. It’s different at companies that have to worry about making money.

Speaking of which, there’s a lot of negative sentiment around these parts for Apple and Google taking 30% of their stores (“rent seeking”), but not so much around Valve for doing the same. Possibly because HN skews more towards app developers who pay fees to the former and less towards game developers.

I think Steam gets a pass on that more than Apple/Google because Steam is just one of many avenues for selling a game on the PC whereas Apple has a monopoly on it and Google have an effective monopoly.

Exactly, game developers publish on Steam because they want to be on Steam while the App Store is the only way to publish for iOS and the Play Store is also heavily favored by the Android OS to make other avenues for publishing apps unrealistic. That said, a large value of Steam is the network effect (users wanting to have everything in the same store/launcher, friends on Steam for multiplayer) rather than platform features that others could directly compete with so I don't think the cut Valve takes is beyond criticism.

Steam allows you to generate keys that you then sell (or give away) on other stores. With no cut for them (purely third-party information, I have no personal insight), but the same UX as if someone had bought it on Steam.

That alone makes a huge difference and is nothing that either Apple or Google offer.

This. There are some limitations on how many keys you can request, but it's purely to stop abuse. E.g you can't ask for million keys for title that sold 10 copies, but it's super easy to get tens and hundred thousands of keys if your title is modestly popular.

At the end of the day though, those keys are only redeemable on the Steam platform and serve Valve's interest in keeping users within the Valve eco-system.

As an existing Steam user though, this is great for me! It means one less third party DRM platform I need installed.

Well, the comment I replied to, was about the 30% cut, though ;)

And regarding DRM: People often forget that the use of DRM with Steam is in the hands of the Devs/Publisher. There are DRM-free games on steam. Now, how convenient it is to back up those games is another thing, but it’s often possible.

As others have alluded to, I think the situation is different exactly because there is at least a real potential for competition. Epic seems to take a good swing at this. Sure, a huge market share _favors_ Valve in this case, but that's nothing compared to the technical infeasibility of the same approach say on iOS.

The PC remains an open platform, even MacOS to a degree (albeit apparently less so as of late...) and Valve have aggressively campaigned for it to stay that way. Competition there is possible.

I remember the debates from ~10 years ago around Microsoft's moves towards a more AppStore-like experience on Windows, where Valve really led the charge against it. The move towards SteamOS and Steam Machines seemed to be part of their reaction at the time. And it seems to pay off big-time now, not just for them but also for users, Linux users especially of course. :)

Also, some of the bigger devs/publishers just use their own platform and seem to do fine, like Riot and Blizzard.

Steam takes 30% under 10 million in sales, 25% under 50 million, 20% after that, and there's also internal agreements to lower that cut.

That said, negative sentiment about Steam has been a heavy subject in years past. There's a reason Epic came in swinging with super low fees.

Part of it is that Steam seems to have a lot more features than those app stores, especially user facing features. If you’ve ever browsed around Steam’s UI and store, there’s a LOT of stuff going on.

The other part is that you have many actually useful alternative avenues to selling PC games. Yes, Steam is far and away #1, but lots of devs go direct to consumer themselves, and some use alternate stores like Epic, GOG, or Itch.

With Steam, you get your money's worth. A user forum, a friends list and invitation system, Steam Workshop, extensive controller support, etc. The lack of any features other than the ability to deploy on the platform at all is what makes the App Store's cut rent seeking.

Good linux support and promoting linux for gaming is also one of their hedges against Microsoft pulling an Apple and making installing software from the Microsoft store the only convenient way in the future. Along with a 30% cut.

Having a mature linux support helps with that.

In the case of SteamDeck the lack of Microsoft tax also helps the price.

Yes, but many of their efforts don’t make much sense that way. The Index and Alyx made them some money, but were they the best use of Valve resources in terms of profit, even without the benefit of hindsight? Nah. It was immediately obvious that it was closer to a passion project for them. It’s something they believed in and wanted to try, not something that was gonna make them richer anytime soon.

On the other hand, Valve has been on the forefront of adding microtransactions and lootboxes to their games, including paid games. They are not beyond optimizing for maximum profit even if it that mindset does not infect all of their projects.

Valve's principal line of business right now is utterly eradicating Epic Game Store from existence.

Its tool for doing that is consumer sentiment.

This all plays into Valve's business strategy. They're fighting to justify ye ole 30% cut.

Hey, if Apple released repair videos, device schematics, commit their translation tech and kernel development to upstream, maintained CI/CD pipelines for all major operating systems, built platform-agnostic hardware APIs for third-party vendors and built safe inroads for the modding/enthusiast community, I think their 30% wouldn't be so hard to swallow. All we got were some lame whitepapers instead.

The prescience of doing SteamOS/Steam Machines/Steam Controllers years before EGS seems to have paid off for them. (Eventually, and probably by accident, time will tell but the device seems to be pretty badass so far).

> Its tool for doing that is consumer sentiment.

That is the tool for basically doing anything productive as a business... it isn't as if they've done some about face at the emergence of genuine competition - they've always been unusually well liked (especially considering the industry).

In contrast, a prominent thread about Adobe currently sits on the front page.

Valve already decreased it cut for highest-grossing titles to 25% (after $10 million in sales) or 20% (after $50 million in sales).

And fortunately for Valve even 3 years after release Epic Games Store don't even have half of Steam features. Also Epic is so consumer-hostile (or as they call it pro-developer) that they won't ever implement player-reviews into their system.

So it's not that hard for Valve for keep their mindshare. Far larger danger for them is Microsoft with it's Xbox game subscription model and unlimited amount of money.

That seems backwards. The vast majority of games aren't making $10mm, definitely not $50mm. Why take more money from the small indie developer?

Because they can. Where are these small developers going to go? Itch.io, GOG, Epic, Humble? These are all options but it’s suicide to not list on the Steam store. Too many PC gamers use Steam exclusively.

Meanwhile the large developers, the ones who are making $50M+, those developers have enough pull to make the user install a custom client like Origin. That’s why Valve cuts them a better deal.

Because they can and there are is no real competition. Epic Game Store so far is laughtable attempt at pumping money into user-hostile service that missing tons of features. For now the only good reason to release on EGS is Epic giving your company money.

Disclosure: I work at small indie PC gamedev studio.

I just point out how Valve changed rules for big companies back in 2018. So they have different revenue share compared to both Apple / Google and consoles.

The fixed cost of hosting a game is relatively fixed (providing a storefront, first level customer support, license management), and the part of the cost that scales but is still cheap (bandwidth is larger for bigger titles).

However, there are many times more small indie titles than there are big successes, and it's the big titles that draw users to your platform and bring in the money.

If Valve flipped their model, those indie titles would be even more of a net drain on their profitability, while there would be more incentive for the big titles to release on their own platforms.