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The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread
- Thread starter Wirdschowerdn
- Start date
LESS T_T
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2012
- Messages
- 13,582
Did Pathfinder made the king last week? No, guanxi all the way:
#10 - Middle-earth: Shadow of War
#9 - Battlerite Royale
#8 - Assassin's Creed Odyssey
#7 - FACEIT 2018 London CS:GO Major Championship Mega Bundle
#6 - Shadow of the Tomb Raider
#5 - NieR:Automata
#4 - MONSTER HUNTER: WORLD
#3 - Pathfinder: Kingmaker
#2 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS
#1 - 太吾绘卷 (The Scroll of Taiwu)
Apparently that Scroll of Taiwu has sold over 300K copies in a week: https://steamcommunity.com/games/838350/announcements/detail/3369147113796237400
Makes me wonder, Low Magic Age would have been popular like that if it was a Wuxia themed RPG?
We might need a forum just for porn games.
Baron Dupek
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 23, 2013
- Messages
- 1,870,826
karoliner
Arcane
Isn't it interspecies?
LESS T_T
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2012
- Messages
- 13,582
A Chinese Odyssey is pretty fun movie series, you know?
#10 - Pathfinder: Kingmaker
#9 - Grand Theft Auto V
#8 - 中国式家长 / Chinese Parents
#7 - Assassin's Creed Odyssey
#6 - 太吾绘卷 The Scroll Of Taiwu
#5 - MONSTER HUNTER: WORLD
#4 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS
#3 - Assassin's Creed Odyssey
#2 - Assassin's Creed Odyssey
#1 - Assassin's Creed Odyssey
Also Pathfinder is going down.
LESS T_T
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2012
- Messages
- 13,582
https://store.steampowered.com/news/44791/
I think they should show the selection anyway, in case user wants to choose the original language over localization.
I think they should show the selection anyway, in case user wants to choose the original language over localization.
rusty_shackleford
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 14, 2018
- Messages
- 50,754
The only language it should support is American.
LESS T_T
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2012
- Messages
- 13,582
A Chinese Odyssey continues:
#10 - XCOM 2: War of the Chosen & Tactical Legacy Pack
#9 - Frostpunk
#8 - Assassin's Creed Odyssey
#7 - 太吾绘卷 The Scroll Of Taiwu
#6 - 中国式家长 / Chinese Parents
#5 - Grand Theft Auto V
#4 - Assassin's Creed Odyssey
#3 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS
#2 - MONSTER HUNTER: WORLD
#1 - Assassin's Creed Odyssey
LESS T_T
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 5, 2012
- Messages
- 13,582
Another week, another Steam weekly top sellers by revenue. There are new games! Or sequels of old games!
Also PUBG under five.
#10 - Fallout 4: Game of the Year Edition
#9 - RimWorld
#8 - WARRIORS OROCHI 4 with bonus
#7 - PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS
#6 - Shadow of the Tomb Raider
#5 - World War 3
#4 - Football Manager 2019
#3 - SOULCALIBUR VI
#2 - SOULCALIBUR VI
#1 - Assassin's Creed® Odyssey
What happened to Monster Hunter World? Looks like it's the effect of 20% discount ended 2 weeks ago, it consumed the purchases that could happen last week.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 97,437
Vault Dweller MRY https://www.polygon.com/2018/10/19/17959138/steam-valve-developer-support-pricing-reviews
Steam developers speak: Maximum profits for Valve, minimum responsibilities
Valve likes to take a cut of sales, but it doesn’t like to be responsible for the store
There was a time, not so long ago, when every PC developer wanted to be on Steam. Getting your game on Steam — if you could manage to somehow contact Valve and impress the company with your wares — was a golden ticket to sales and success.
Those days are over, according to the 20 developers I spoke with for this story. While selling a game on Steam has never been easier, only a “chosen few” are reportedly lucky enough to have Valve’s mysterious algorithm favor them with some promotional screen real estate, or popular enough to get a Valve representative to help them with a support ticket. The rest often feel like they’re on their own.
For many Steam developers, this two-tiered and algorithmically curated culture of “one Steam for the popular, and one Steam for the rest” is leading to dissatisfaction, resentment and confusion.
HOW THIS STORY BEGAN
I started receiving emails from developers who wanted to air their concerns about Steam after I wrote an article about the cold, corporate illusion behind the “Good Guy Valve” reputation. I’ve spent the last few months following up on these concerns, speaking to 20 different developers, from small-scale operations up to well-known “AAA indie” developers, to get a feel for what it is that has made so many of these once-eager Steam evangelists so cautious and bitter.
Very few of those developers were willing to put their names to their criticisms, with one even saying that they were “pissing themselves in fear” about the idea of an off-the-record Discord voice call. Much like the Steam Workshop creator community, which lives in terror at the knowledge that Valve could cut off their income at any time, Steam developers know who holds all the power in the relationship.
Here’s what those developers had to say.
THE STRUGGLE WITH STEAM REVIEWS
It has been nearly five years since Steam introduced the review system. Since that time, there have been millions of reviews left on countless Steam pages, an entirely new genre of gaming journalism invented, and a radical overhaul made just to handle the backlash from angry PewDiePie fans.
Steam users enjoyed having an easy and convenient way to share their thoughts and opinions, while Valve enjoyed successfully implementing a system that encouraged users to invest more unpaid time and effort toward supporting the Steam ecosystem. Valve never pays for anything it can get users to do for free. Remember, Valve is a company that Gabe Newell himself described as “more profitable on a per-employee basis than Google and Apple.”
For some developers, however, the last five years of Steam reviews have been a nightmare.
”The whole way Steam handles reviews is so brutal and backbreaking to developers,” one developer with more than 500 reviews on their latest title told me. “I’m almost scared to talk about this because I’m scared of gamers knowing how much more power they have than they think.”
Steam’s automated system will change the font color on the store page from a pleasant blue (“Positive”) to an unpleasant brown (“Mixed”) if you get too many negative reviews. I had assumed, before writing this article, that the threshold for moving from “Positive” to “Mixed” would have been square in the middle, at 50 percent.
It turns out that you need to hold a surprisingly high minimum of 70 percent recommended reviews to get the positive rating. This makes it very easy for just a handful of negative reviews (“just three, four, maybe five” in the case of smaller games, some developers allege) to push you from blue into brown. That change comes with an almost instant drop in the number of sales, according to the developers I spoke with.
Players have a lot of power, but that wouldn’t be a bad thing if they were using the review system just for reviewing games. However, the system is being used for something else entirely, and the result is a huge headache for developers who have to play along with Valve’s flawed setup.
REVIEWS ARE THE NEW TECH SUPPORT
Steam’s review system often works as a support line, where players ask for help with everything from computer compatibility to lost passwords. This creates huge issues with the legitimacy of “reviews,” as developers are given few tools to handle things in a more effective way.
”If a gamer expresses any kind of problem on the forums, I have zero support tools to handle it other than answering on a public forum,” one developer told me. “That’s not a good way to provide support. I can’t find out anything about their account, their computer, nothing. So what they end up doing, is they end up using the review system as a way to get support. I can’t tell you how many reviews I’ve got for issues which have nothing to do with the quality of the game. Forgot my password? Negative review. [Blue screen of death]? Negative review. These are things that are clearly support issues.”
Asked to describe what support tools are available to them, a different developer brought up the same issue.
“Well the tools are just the review system,” they said. “There’s no ticket management or way to allocate tasks. Or if there is I don’t know where it is. We try to push people to our Freshdesk support so we can manage there, but that’s tough. I’ve also tried to [private-message] people to fix issues and delve in deeper and that’s just potluck they check them and respond.”
Other developers are finding themselves using the forum as a launchpad to push users into Discord, or other third-party channels where they can provide meaningful support. Steam is, oddly enough, often the worst way to interact with players.
“I opened a channel for [bug reports] on the public forum, but I don’t get notifications for that, so I constantly have to be checking the thing,” Yitz, developer of hand-drawn RPG Nepenthe, told me over email.
“I tend to be super-engaged with my players, since my fanbase is still small enough to strike up friendships,” Yitz added. “Most people figure that out pretty quickly, and I often work out bugs on chat in Discord. Steam provides very little support for all of this.”
IT’S NOT ALL BAD NEWS
“There are occasional [uses] of the review system to request support, but mostly we’ve found reviews have been genuine,” said Paul Turbett of Black Lab Games, which most recently launched the extremely positively received Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock.
“We have seen some themes emerge in reviews about things that [players] do and don’t like about our game,” Turbett explained. “The things they do like are great validation, and the things they don’t like are useful to help us make decisions for updates we make to the game.”
Morgan Jaffit of Defiant Development, which has successfully launched and supported Hand of Fate and Hand of Fate 2, was also happy to put his name to the record when defending Steam.
“I wish [the review system] had a popup that said ‘if this is a bug report, please send it to the developer first’ because that would make it harder to lose them,” Jaffit told me. “But that’s because I like to fix our users’ problems, not because I have issues with people leaving negative reviews. The reviews are fair as a way of aggregating ‘how happy are people with their purchase, by comparison to other games on Steam?’ which is all anyone should be using the review score indicator for.”
Even the developers who had positive things to say about the system admitted that they had to dispute the odd review here and there for slurs or outright trolling.
So what happens when a developer wants to contest a review? Would you believe that there isn’t a clear system in place for doing so?
STEAM PUSHES BACK
While it is possible for a developer to try and have a negative review removed, the process often feels like a mystery, with no clear guidelines given to developers or publishers.
“[Valve] won’t do anything about the negative reviews that are obviously just support questions,” one developer told me in a resigned voice over Discord. “[Valve] doesn’t give even the users any kind of tools! So the users know the negative review will get attention, because they know devs don’t want a negative review. [Valve will] also do nothing about trolls, even when it’s obvious. [...] I’ve flagged negative reviews where someone was saying they wouldn’t recommend the game because our online service had its own EULA.”
This is a serious point of contention for some developers.
“I flag them. The ticket gets rejected,” they told me. “Then I mail my Steam rep with a list. The rep says ‘it’s your responsibility to maintain open communication and properly set expectations, and you won’t have a problem with negative reviews.’ Seriously? That’s the answer? This guy gave me a negative review because I wouldn’t let him have the word ‘FUCK’ in his name. How is this a failure of expectation management?”
Steam reps allegedly often tell developers that “many of the top 10 games on Steam have negative reviews” as a way of placating upset developers — a perspective that developers I spoke to found laughable.
“Those are the games with the budgets to advertise on prime-time TV,” one developer responded when I put the question to them. “They’re driving users with sources that have nothing to do with Steam whatsoever. They’re not even in my universe.”
FORCED DISCOUNTS, OR “REGIONAL PRICING”
Anyone who sells their game on Steam can expect that it will be available for purchase in markets all around the world; the platform’s reach is global. Steam boasts to developers that it will handle local currencies for them in a seamless manner, allowing them to get back to the business of game development.
However, there’s a catch. What many developers don’t know is that Steam is discounting their games for them in these other markets — selling their game at a rate in euros, rubles, won and so on that works out to be anywhere from 30 percent to 60 percent off the original U.S. dollar price. That’s an enormous discount, and it’s one that many developers may not even be aware is happening.
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Valve wants you to price your games a certain way.
Valve
If you’re a developer, you can check this out right now in the “Store Packages, Pricing & Release Dates” section by clicking on the dollar/pound sign icon on the right, next to your package. From there, you can compare the numbers that Valve is using to the current currency exchange rates, and see the difference.
This policy of deep discounting is spelled out in the Steam documentation. Valve writes that it will “recommend pricing strategies based on our experience and we may suggest prices based on currency conversions and other factors.”
Of all the developers I spoke with while researching this article, only Defiant’s Jaffit was aware that it was Valve’s practice to “recommend pricing strategies” in this manner, and was able to refer me to the correct place in the documentation that discussed it.
“It’s not like Steam invented regional pricing,” Jaffit explained. “Our experience is that it results in more sales. With 10,000 games on Steam, there’s no clear ‘one true way,’ and while I think the defaults are appropriate starting places for most devs, they all should at least know what they are so, they’ve got room to make specific changes that work for their title.”
AN IMPOSSIBLE CHOICE
Many other developers were less keen on the system — once they were informed that it was actually happening.
“I had no idea it was this low,” said one developer, who has had experience dealing with similar regional pricing practices across stores run by Apple, Google, Nintendo and others. “They could have easily flagged this and emailed us as devs.”
Essentially, Valve offers developers an almost unworkable choice, and then tells them they have the freedom to do whatever they like. If they don’t want their games to be massively discounted in other territories, they do technically have the freedom to spend hours of their time every week checking 40 different exchange rates and manually adjusting 40 different prices. Or they can leave it alone, trust Valve to handle it for them and deal with the consequences.
The consequences are worse for some developers than others. One developer told me that they actually lost out on a local distribution deal in South America as a result of the discount that Steam had applied without their knowledge.
“All the negotiations were going really well,” said the developer. “It was really far along, very promising. Then [our local partner] told us that as the final part of the deal we would need to raise the price in [the local currency] on Steam, as we were selling at such a deep discount that they couldn’t possibly compete with it.”
This sent the team scrambling.
“I remember stopping the conversation and saying, ‘Wait, we’re not selling at a discount. What are you talking about?’ That’s when they showed me the local price. I was shocked. It was less than half of what I thought it would be.”
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Valve lays out its pricing strategy, if you know where to look on Steam.
Valve
In some ways, although Steam allows a greater level of pricing control across different regions than other providers do, that control comes at the cost of your constant attention. There’s no way of telling Steam that you want your game to be sold at a flat one-to-one currency conversion, or that you want to sell at 60 percent of one currency and 80 percent of another. There’s no API that you can use to manage it. It’s Valve’s way, or the highway.
For example, if you decide your $14.99 game is worth a direct one-to-one exchange of 945 Russian rubles and you manually set it at that price, then you better hope that the dollar/ruble exchange rate doesn’t fluctuate too much. Steam won’t notify you if it does, and you won’t know why your sales have dropped off in that region until you log back in and check the currency settings.
One developer who is currently selling their game for $14.99 allowed me to log into their Steam account so that I could confirm what I had been told about the discounted regional pricing model.
We stood there together and ran through the various local prices that Steam had set, and compared them to the exchange rates of the day. Almost without exception, all of them were heavily discounted from the one-to-one dollar conversion.
“Bloody hell,” they said, after a few minutes of scrolling. “I didn’t know.”
DEVELOPERS WANT VALVE TO TAKE A STRONGER HAND
Although you might expect that it would be otherwise, I discovered that Valve’s new completely-hands-off approach hasn’t won any friends among the developer community. Steam users have already complained about having to deal with dozens of asset flips, Trojan scares and literal cryptocurrency mining scams, but even the developers who can now publish whatever they want, whenever they want, say that they feel a heavier hand is needed.
“There are people making quality titles that are getting the same level of support as troll games that were made in three days,” Michael Hicks, developer of Pillar, Path of Motus and other indie titles told me. “Then Valve takes a 30 percent cut for doing next to nothing. That’s my main issue with their whole system.”
Others are worried about the market’s legitimacy.
“It’s dangerous,” said another developer. “There should be some minimum level of checking to make sure junk (and I mean actual junk that doesn’t work) is on the store. Walmart wouldn’t let anyone put stuff on their shelves, so why should Valve?”
Valve defended its Steam Direct decision by saying that “the games we allow onto the Store will not be a reflection of Valve’s values,” a defense that was criticized at the time as tantamount to giving up and walking away. Developers were quick to echo these sentiments when questioned.
”I’m a huge free speech guy,” said one developer. “Commercial products are a form of expression, I believe that, but it’s not the same. This bullshit defense of ‘just because we sell a game doesn’t mean we endorse it...’ what! You have to accept that you implicitly endorse anything you sell and you take a cut of.”
IS STEAM’S 30 PERCENT CUT WORTH IT?
Nearly all the developers interviewed for this piece, when asked if Steam’s 30 percent cut of revenue was worth it, answered with a resounding “no.” Many spoke fondly of the good old days, when Valve “actually did something” to earn their money. Now, many of these developers allege, those days are over.
“There used to be other companies you could use to do what Steam did, manage updates and transactions, companies like BMT Micro,” another developer said. “Most of those companies would take 4 percent or 5 percent from each sale. What Steam was supposed to provide for the additional 25 percent was ‘all those customers,’ but now they’re not providing that, and they’re actually [sending] you toxic customers who leave you negative reviews who make things worse for you.”
Hicks said that for him, the major difference between Valve’s 30 percent and Microsoft or Sony’s 30 percent was in the level of personal support and care the companies provided.
“Sony and Microsoft both provided me with personal contacts that I can pitch ideas to. They also provide contacts to pitch things regarding marketing [...] so if I have an idea for a cool promotion I can at least talk to someone about it,” Hicks explained. “Additionally, they do everything they can to provide each game with a nice chunk of store visibility at launch.”
Steam does not offer the same level of care.
“Valve has none of this,” Hicks continued. “They stopped giving everyone a personal contact, the amount of banner support you get at launch is based off title popularity so nothing is guaranteed, and I have no one to pitch marketing ideas to. If they’re going to be completely hands-off and redirect smaller developers to a message board for any type of support issues ... yeah, that’s not worth 30 percent to me. Honestly, they do as much as itch.io does and itch takes 10 percent for a default percentage!”
Many developers also spoke negatively about what they perceived as the ongoing and essentially unbreakable monopoly that Steam holds over the PC gaming market.
“I don’t think any digital store that takes 30 percent to host a download and take a payment can justify that split, but it’s a wider problem than just Valve/Steam,” Paul Turbett told me. “Unfortunately, it’s an industry standard now, and unlikely to change — especially given that most platforms have a single dominant store or a monopoly, and therefore no incentive to give developers a better deal.”
Jaffit took the opposite tack, and praised the 30 percent cut as good value, especially compared with the alternatives.
“Steam gives a massive amount of free marketing to some titles, and not others,” he said. “They [choose] the titles that get front page featuring algorithmically these days, which means they’re attempting to show their users games they’ll buy. If you’re in that list, then Valve for their 30 percent provides you with a truly massive amount of free marketing.”
Love it or hate it, the 30 percent cut is now standard, and will be hard to shake.
“Given how [metric-driven] web marketing is, it’s easy to put a price on that — and in general, that price is similar to the 30 percent cut Steam takes,” Jaffit continued. “In other words, if you had to buy your marketing from Facebook and Google, you’d end up paying more (and you’d probably sell less, because people are less trustworthy landing directly on your page than ending up on Steam).”
ONE STEAM FOR THE SUCCESSFUL, ANOTHER FOR THE REST
As I spoke to more and more developers about their issues with Valve, a tale of two Steams began to emerge.
For developers with lots of sales and lots of positive reviews, Steam was good value for money, reasonable to deal with and pleasingly transparent, and could be relied upon to answer support queries and tickets in a timely fashion.
Meanwhile, other developers who were struggling to make sales, or dealing with online services that required additional support, found themselves frustrated at a marketing algorithm that was “almost impossible to understand,” waiting for days without an answer to any ticket lodged, and screaming in frustration when Valve delivered another stock response asking them to “better manage customer expectations.”
Valve allegedly stopped giving developers personal contacts around the time the service opened up to anyone willing to pay the fee.
“I definitely don’t feel valued as a developer on their platform; I just feel like another statistic that’s going through their automated process,” Hicks said.
When developers do take their issues with Steam directly to Valve, the company often disregards their concerns. Developers who were selected for the Indie Megabooth at PAX have reportedly compiled two separate comprehensive surveys about their experiences, and mailed the results to Valve. The company did not even bother to respond, these Indie Megabooth developers told me, and absolutely nothing has changed. Many have since given up on communicating with the company.
Even in their anger, developers are quick to point out that they believe it’s Valve’s famously cliquey “high-school-like” management, not the on-the-ground Valve employees, who are at fault. If anything, they say, their hearts go out to the employees and the workload they are under.
“The people at Valve I have dealt with [...] I have never had any problems,” one developer told me. “I feel like they work their ass off. In fact I feel like they work their ass off too much. I feel like they have about 4,000 jobs each. It’s shocking. Valve management has this corporate culture where they refuse to hire anybody. They want an automated or algorithmic solution for everything. I think the employees are too overworked and they’re not permitted to do the things they would like to do.”
EVEN IF DEVELOPERS LOSE, VALVE WINS
As Valve has done with marketing, community content, localization and so many other things, it seems that when it comes to developers, Valve has once again positioned itself perfectly in a place to maximize profits and minimize responsibility.
The way that Steam is engineered ensures that Valve itself remains as invisible as possible, cultivating a “connecting platform” relationship where the developer is always the one at fault, always the one to blame, always the one to suffer — what one developer called a “cultish belief.”
As big titles and “AAA indies” are pushed more and more ahead by what smaller developers perceive as an incomprehensible algorithm, the future of Steam seems bleak for those who haven’t been able to break through the noise.
“I think that the way Steam is heading now will result in small developers moving on to places like itch.io,” one developer told me. “Steam is no longer the golden ticket it once was. It hasn’t been that way for many years now, but I think at the smaller indie end of town, it is getting worse.”
None of this likely matters much to Valve, however — the company gets paid either way.
“It seems like Valve are hoping the less popular games will just fail out of existence,” a developer told me. ”But they don’t mind collecting their share of those small profits as they fail.”
We reached out to Valve for comment on these matters, and have yet to receive a response.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
tl;dr
However, of the part I skimmed:
(1) "I had assumed, before writing this article, that the threshold for moving from “Positive” to “Mixed” would have been square in the middle, at 50 percent." This is utterly ridiculous. I can't tell if the author is writing in bad faith or is just weird, but outside of batting averages and gambling odds, I don't know anywhere that >50% is considered positive. Certainly not by Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, or any grading system in the world. Beyond that, though, because the review percentages are so inflated overall, a 70% average puts you in like the bottom 30% of games on Steam. Treating that as "mixed" is, if anything, generous. Obviously some reviews are trolling and some games are simply polarizing, not bad, but a 70% average is a way of saying a game is one of the very worst on Steam from the standpoint of players. For instance, The Long Journey Home has a user rating of 66%, which puts it in the bottom 25% of games on Steam. With a 53%, you get to the bottom 13% of games. Presumably at 50%, you're in the bottom 10%. It would simply be a lie to suggest to players that this was a "positive" state of affairs. Even in Lake Woebegone, they wouldn't call that positive.
(2) For someone deeply impressed by Rawls as a collegian, every year drives home to me more that no one gives a damn about process, it is only about outcomes. Primordia got obliterated by the gamejournpros crowd and was beloved by Steam reviewers, hence I think that indie journalist cabals are bad and gamer plebiscites are good. I'd like to think I'm a man of principle, but I bet if Primordia had gotten a glowing review on Kotaku and then got mobbed on Steam, I'd think the opposite -- if only gamers weren't allowed to express how they felt about games, more people would be swayed by professional reviewers, and Primordia would sell like hotcakes!
(3) The tech support via reviews thing is real and is honestly annoying, though ultimately it's not necessarily a bad state of affairs.. On the one hand, a game should work, and if it doesn't work, a player is well within his rights to leave a bad review. On the other hand, many of these bad reviews are literally posed as questions, not as bad reviews, and yet even when promptly replied to, the player misses the notification or has moved on to other things. But seriously, if someone leaves a bad review of a restaurant when a cockroach runs across their food, it's no answer that most people don't have roaches in their food, or that roaches are almost impossible to thwart, or that the waiter promptly brought them new food. A person who has a bad experience has a right to leave a bad review.
(4) "Steam doesn't do anything" is so amazingly dumb I don't know where to start. Whether 30% is the right cut or not, I don't know. It's true that there are huge network / first mover effects at work here that make competition tough. But BMT Micro was not a storefront, it was a credit card processing service. A better comparison is probably Humble, which I think takes a 10% cut. (But maybe a 30% cut on bundles?) If you think Humble is just as good as Steam, sell your games there and not on Steam. Good luck with that!
(5) The overall thrust of this is the same crap as always. I'm reminded of an epiphany I had once. People often point out that skilled electricians make a bunch of money, have good quality of life and job security, etc. "If only more people went to trade schools rather than worthless colleges, they'd actually be better off!" Colleges may be worthless, but if you had a fivefold increase in electricians, the industry would get more competitive, the pay would drop, job security and quality of life would plummet, etc. "If everyone bought Amazon stock when it was cheap, we'd all be rich!" kind of logic. In the same way, what none of these articles understand is that there is no universe in which every dumb indie games (and I include my dumb indie games in this bunch) will make a bunch of money except for the universe where there are not many dumb indie games.
My bottom line is that being an indie game developer, like playing in a garage band or acting in an improv troupe or publishing a ska music zine or writing fan fiction, is a wonderful way to pursue and develop a passion. I've loved it. But if you only love it on the condition that other people establish a system that makes sure your game turns a hefty profit, you should do something else. Game development is not a great career path. And hobbies shouldn't be pursued for profit; find a hobby that isn't corrupted by money if the prospect of money has corrupted game development for you. Hike. Learn salsa dancing. Read the classics. Play pick-up basketball or quality RPGs. Post on the Codex. Etc.
--EDIT--
And yet there's more!
Also, let me note that if Steam isn't delivering you customers
If customers aren't buying your game, what does the 30% cut matter?
However, of the part I skimmed:
(1) "I had assumed, before writing this article, that the threshold for moving from “Positive” to “Mixed” would have been square in the middle, at 50 percent." This is utterly ridiculous. I can't tell if the author is writing in bad faith or is just weird, but outside of batting averages and gambling odds, I don't know anywhere that >50% is considered positive. Certainly not by Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, or any grading system in the world. Beyond that, though, because the review percentages are so inflated overall, a 70% average puts you in like the bottom 30% of games on Steam. Treating that as "mixed" is, if anything, generous. Obviously some reviews are trolling and some games are simply polarizing, not bad, but a 70% average is a way of saying a game is one of the very worst on Steam from the standpoint of players. For instance, The Long Journey Home has a user rating of 66%, which puts it in the bottom 25% of games on Steam. With a 53%, you get to the bottom 13% of games. Presumably at 50%, you're in the bottom 10%. It would simply be a lie to suggest to players that this was a "positive" state of affairs. Even in Lake Woebegone, they wouldn't call that positive.
(2) For someone deeply impressed by Rawls as a collegian, every year drives home to me more that no one gives a damn about process, it is only about outcomes. Primordia got obliterated by the gamejournpros crowd and was beloved by Steam reviewers, hence I think that indie journalist cabals are bad and gamer plebiscites are good. I'd like to think I'm a man of principle, but I bet if Primordia had gotten a glowing review on Kotaku and then got mobbed on Steam, I'd think the opposite -- if only gamers weren't allowed to express how they felt about games, more people would be swayed by professional reviewers, and Primordia would sell like hotcakes!
(3) The tech support via reviews thing is real and is honestly annoying, though ultimately it's not necessarily a bad state of affairs.. On the one hand, a game should work, and if it doesn't work, a player is well within his rights to leave a bad review. On the other hand, many of these bad reviews are literally posed as questions, not as bad reviews, and yet even when promptly replied to, the player misses the notification or has moved on to other things. But seriously, if someone leaves a bad review of a restaurant when a cockroach runs across their food, it's no answer that most people don't have roaches in their food, or that roaches are almost impossible to thwart, or that the waiter promptly brought them new food. A person who has a bad experience has a right to leave a bad review.
(4) "Steam doesn't do anything" is so amazingly dumb I don't know where to start. Whether 30% is the right cut or not, I don't know. It's true that there are huge network / first mover effects at work here that make competition tough. But BMT Micro was not a storefront, it was a credit card processing service. A better comparison is probably Humble, which I think takes a 10% cut. (But maybe a 30% cut on bundles?) If you think Humble is just as good as Steam, sell your games there and not on Steam. Good luck with that!
(5) The overall thrust of this is the same crap as always. I'm reminded of an epiphany I had once. People often point out that skilled electricians make a bunch of money, have good quality of life and job security, etc. "If only more people went to trade schools rather than worthless colleges, they'd actually be better off!" Colleges may be worthless, but if you had a fivefold increase in electricians, the industry would get more competitive, the pay would drop, job security and quality of life would plummet, etc. "If everyone bought Amazon stock when it was cheap, we'd all be rich!" kind of logic. In the same way, what none of these articles understand is that there is no universe in which every dumb indie games (and I include my dumb indie games in this bunch) will make a bunch of money except for the universe where there are not many dumb indie games.
^- He is selling junk.
My bottom line is that being an indie game developer, like playing in a garage band or acting in an improv troupe or publishing a ska music zine or writing fan fiction, is a wonderful way to pursue and develop a passion. I've loved it. But if you only love it on the condition that other people establish a system that makes sure your game turns a hefty profit, you should do something else. Game development is not a great career path. And hobbies shouldn't be pursued for profit; find a hobby that isn't corrupted by money if the prospect of money has corrupted game development for you. Hike. Learn salsa dancing. Read the classics. Play pick-up basketball or quality RPGs. Post on the Codex. Etc.
--EDIT--
And yet there's more!
The tagline of Path of the Motus is: "Will you let other people stop you from pursuing your dreams?" Physician, thyself, etc.
Also, let me note that if Steam isn't delivering you customers
If customers aren't buying your game, what does the 30% cut matter?
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Indie developers are in the same boat as lots of modern authors, where the publisher is doing marketing for only a tiny minority of authors and the rest of them have to build an audience themselves or do marketing themselves. Its just the state of doing business, and either you can do something else, do the hard work, or maybe complain in a Polygon article
The thing that really gets me about Steam recently how lots of people are complaining that there's not enough curation, and nobody can find the real good games among all the junk, with most of those saying it believing that their game isn't junk. I've seen enough of GOGs approach to curation that I rather prefer the Steam approach. Curation means too many good games will slip through and have no chance, and depending on whether your taste meshes with the taste of whoever is curating the platform, means the platform gets less and less useful. A few years ago I was totally gung-ho for GOG, these days, much less so
The thing that really gets me about Steam recently how lots of people are complaining that there's not enough curation, and nobody can find the real good games among all the junk, with most of those saying it believing that their game isn't junk. I've seen enough of GOGs approach to curation that I rather prefer the Steam approach. Curation means too many good games will slip through and have no chance, and depending on whether your taste meshes with the taste of whoever is curating the platform, means the platform gets less and less useful. A few years ago I was totally gung-ho for GOG, these days, much less so
Vault Dweller
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Latelistener
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This is an article from Polygon. I don't know what I expected.
If Arkham Knight had one of the positive ratings on the release (with negative reviews regarding technical side moved elsewhere), would WB removed it from the store for further examination and patching? Here is your answer.
The dude needs to learn some math. If the threshold for moving from "Positive" to "Mixed" would have been at 50%, "Mixed" wouldn't be in the middle. Right now I assume the thresholds are 30% and 70%, exactly where they are suppose to be. Less than 30% is "Negative", and above 70% is "Positive".
I'm not saying they shouldn't make a separate system for bug reporting, but let's be honest here: 90% of developers don't give a shit and the only way to make them do so is to write a negative review. Otherwise they don't even read forums and don't communicate with their audiences in any way.
If Arkham Knight had one of the positive ratings on the release (with negative reviews regarding technical side moved elsewhere), would WB removed it from the store for further examination and patching? Here is your answer.
If developers don't know that different currencies have different value, maybe they shouldn't be selling games at all. Valve allows you to put any price you want, but that's why the regional pricing was implemented: to adjust a price for a specific region. It doesn't matter how cheap a game is compared to U.S. price, because if you put it 1:1 - almost no one will buy it. If you don't want to waste your time on this, they give you a list with recommended prices. Where is the problem?
These changes don't happen overnight. Checking it once in a quarter is enough. I haven't seen anyone raising (or dropping) prices because of small fluctuations though.
This has been discussed many times. If Valve will take a "stronger hand" they will start promoting only commercially successful games, and these Polygon "masterpieces" will be in an even worse position.
This is also getting old. I'm fairly sure GOG takes 30% too. I don't know about about Sony and MS, but I have no reason to think they take less. For some reason, they only blame Valve.
Good riddance I say. More space for better games.
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Vault Dweller
Commissar, Red Star Studio
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I assume the type of people who frequent this place or other game-centric sites are more in the know, but do we even care about your game rating threshold unless said game is an absolute broken mess going by forum comments and impressions? You can just look up raw gameplay and ignore so called "review bombing". Funny how few people who actually made good games and didn't get shat on had no problems effectively speaking in Steam's favor versus the anonymous remainder wouldn't even say what they created. You could argue 30% is arbitrarily large in Valve's favor, but that's business I can't really comment other than you're getting access to the largest digital store out there and presumably stuff like online support and such.
Would Vault Dweller be inclined to comment on the most egregious points made in the article, or any other dev we have on-board for that matter?
Would Vault Dweller be inclined to comment on the most egregious points made in the article, or any other dev we have on-board for that matter?
If I recall correctly, I don't think steam even gives you a positive to negative review ratio unless there has been at least 20 reviews or so.
Therefor if only a few of the early reviewers have a bad experience, it's not going to give you a 'mixed' ratio on the store page.
To me a lot of the whining seems to be about Valve committing what is a heresy in current year: giving the customer some modicum of power and control.
Therefor if only a few of the early reviewers have a bad experience, it's not going to give you a 'mixed' ratio on the store page.
To me a lot of the whining seems to be about Valve committing what is a heresy in current year: giving the customer some modicum of power and control.
Gerrard
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I think they should let them sell their garbage for 20€ in Russia by default, why not. The less money they get the better.
Vault Dweller
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1) The 30% thing. The truth is that Valve can increase the rate to 50% and developers would still make way more money than they would on their own. Why? Because what Valve brings to the table isn't some store but over 16 million paying customers and this is why everyone wants to be on Steam. Every business, big and small, routinely forks over 10-25% of their gross revenue to bring in new customers (aka marketing). Nobody likes it but most people understand why it's necessary. Those who don't understand go out of business.
Now let's take a look at the fee itself. Payment processing will cost you 10%. You can do it yourself for 8% (as your transactions volume will be very low) but that's an accounting nightmare as you'd have to handle the sales tax remittance, refunds, and chargebacks yourself. So essentially you pay 20% for access to over 16 mil customers as well as demo/game hosting and excellent tools. Early Access alone is a life saver as it gives you a revenue boost when you need it most (when most projects start running out of money). Would it be nice if all this stuff was free? Absolutely, but that's like wishing that everything in life were free. From a business and marketing perspective the fee is more than fair and I'm pretty sure everyone knows it (most developers sell their games in multiple digital stores so they know too well what percentage of sales the other stores bring).
2) The Algorithm. I assume the writer of the article has visited stores once or twice. I hope he noticed that goods that sell well get the best shelf space (aka exposure) and goods that don't sell well are somewhere in the back. Because Steam is a store it follows the same principles, which is hardly surprising. It's not rewarding the popular kids with candy and shunning the nerds. It's business as usual. Ever notice that movies that do well keep playing in the movie theaters and movies that bomb quickly disappear? Same principle. It's not Steam's job to ensure that every game sells well and gets the same amount of love. It's the developers' job to promote their games and generate interest. What your game sells on Steam reflects the effort you put into design and marketing. Simple as that.
3) Steam reviews - love 'em, great feature. Developers NEED to know what the players think about their games. It's a vital feedback mechanism. Sure, we get some negative reviews (19% to be exact), but that too is business as usual. While you can't please everyone at least it shows you what the issues are and what you need to do in order to do better. So in our case we can split the negative reviews into two categories: hated the core concept (nothing we can do about it) and liked the core concept but some issues got in the way. Some of these issues can be easily fixed in the next game (CSG) without changing the core. Without the reviews we wouldn't know what these issues are.
4)
”If a gamer expresses any kind of problem on the forums, I have zero support tools to handle it other than answering on a public forum,” one developer told me. “That’s not a good way to provide support. I can’t find out anything about their account, their computer, nothing. So what they end up doing, is they end up using the review system as a way to get support. I can’t tell you how many reviews I’ve got for issues which have nothing to do with the quality of the game. Forgot my password? Negative review. [Blue screen of death]? Negative review. These are things that are clearly support issues.”
This is just bullshit. The forums are an excellent way to provide support IF the developer is paying attention. We check the Steam forums daily so when someone says they have a problem, we respond the same day. Nick solved hundreds of issues, often uploading test builds within 24 hours. Oscar and I handle gameplay issues (we ask people to send us their save games and console reports), so we can quickly identify the problem and either point a solution the player overlooked or fix the problem and email the save back so that the player can continue. Naturally, people respond favorably to such a practice but it's something that every developer should be able to do. Players absolutely hate poor performance, game-breaking bugs, rushed releases, and slow support, but that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.
“I flag them. The ticket gets rejected,” they told me. “Then I mail my Steam rep with a list. The rep says ‘it’s your responsibility to maintain open communication and properly set expectations, and you won’t have a problem with negative reviews.’ Seriously? That’s the answer?
Yep. That's the answer. I'd say that as a developer the absolute worst fucking thing you can do is flag a negative review. We haven't done it once and any developer who wants a negative review erased clearly doesn't understand how the internet works and what kind of reaction it would provoke.
5)
Forced discounts, or “regional pricing”
Anyone who sells their game on Steam can expect that it will be available for purchase in markets all around the world; the platform’s reach is global. Steam boasts to developers that it will handle local currencies for them in a seamless manner, allowing them to get back to the business of game development.
Anyone who sells their game on Steam can expect that it will be available for purchase in markets all around the world; the platform’s reach is global. Steam boasts to developers that it will handle local currencies for them in a seamless manner, allowing them to get back to the business of game development.
First, Steam doesn't force developers to do anything at all. Don't like regional pricing? Think you know better how to sell your game in Cambodia? Set your own prices. See that edit button on the price matrix in the article? That's what it's there for. Second, Steam does know best because they have an enormous amount of data, so I would strongly suggest to follow their lead here.
Of all the developers I spoke with while researching this article, only Defiant’s Jaffit was aware that it was Valve’s practice to “recommend pricing strategies” in this manner, and was able to refer me to the correct place in the documentation that discussed it.
...
“I had no idea it was this low,” said one developer, who has had experience dealing with similar regional pricing practices across stores run by Apple, Google, Nintendo and others. “They could have easily flagged this and emailed us as devs.”
If a developer can't be arsed to read what it says right on the fucking screen, blaming Steam is hardly appropriate....
“I had no idea it was this low,” said one developer, who has had experience dealing with similar regional pricing practices across stores run by Apple, Google, Nintendo and others. “They could have easily flagged this and emailed us as devs.”
“I remember stopping the conversation and saying, ‘Wait, we’re not selling at a discount. What are you talking about?’ That’s when they showed me the local price. I was shocked. It was less than half of what I thought it would be.”
Valve lays out its pricing strategy, if you know where to look on Steam.
If you know where to look? It's right above the fucking price matrix, which is why it says "from the drop-down below". It's literally impossible to miss as you can't set up the prices without reading it first.
Valve lays out its pricing strategy, if you know where to look on Steam.
In some ways, although Steam allows a greater level of pricing control across different regions than other providers do, that control comes at the cost of your constant attention.
Well, we can't have that, can we?
“There are people making quality titles that are getting the same level of support as troll games that were made in three days,” Michael Hicks, developer of Pillar, Path of Motus and other indie titles told me. “Then Valve takes a 30 percent cut for doing next to nothing. That’s my main issue with their whole system.”
I wouldn't call payment processing and access to 16 million customers next to nothing, but maybe that's just me.
Nearly all the developers interviewed for this piece, when asked if Steam’s 30 percent cut of revenue was worth it, answered with a resounding “no.”
Then they should take their business elsewhere and see how well they'd fare on their own.
“I don’t think any digital store that takes 30 percent to host a download and take a payment can justify that split, but it’s a wider problem than just Valve/Steam,” Paul Turbett told me.
See, he doesn't even get that it's about the built-in 16 mil audience that Steam comes with. That's the main difference between Steam and any other portal. Anyone can launch a digital store but without a massive player base it will sell 'next to nothing'.
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Thank your for a great and informative answer, Vault Dweller.
I realize you probably can't talk exact figures, but how would you compare and contrast Steam with GOG while keeping these things in mind? Do customer demographics and interests vary to any significant degree due to GOG's more curated nature? What I'm trying to say is would these people complaining about Steam be happier dealing with GOG instead or are we just dealing with malcontents?
I realize you probably can't talk exact figures, but how would you compare and contrast Steam with GOG while keeping these things in mind? Do customer demographics and interests vary to any significant degree due to GOG's more curated nature? What I'm trying to say is would these people complaining about Steam be happier dealing with GOG instead or are we just dealing with malcontents?
Vault Dweller
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I don't think the demographics matter at all. The only thing that matters is the playerbase. One thing GOG did well, unlike other digital portals, is that it managed to build a unique playerbase that doesn't play games on Steam (most portals sell Steam keys thus strengthening Steam without offering anything interesting; not surprisingly these portals are in decline and bring in less than 1% of total sales). So like Steam, GOG offers access to that playerbase and takes the same cut, which is fair and reasonable. Similarly HumbleBundle offers the biggest userbase too which is what sets it apart from all the other bundle sites.
It seems (after reading the article) that people who complain about Steam do it for 2 reasons:
- they don't understand what they're paying 30% for and think it's too much
- they don't understand why they aren't doing well and blame Steam
I doubt that GOG would be able to fix these issues.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
I guess I do have a little sympathy here, which is:
(1) There was a short bubble for indie game developers during Greenlight. While anyone with a whit of reason can see that the preconditions of this bubble make it impossible for every indie developer to have benefited from it, humans are not ruled by reason, and so many people view that period as establishing a "normal" baseline for what indie developer success should look like. (Such get-rich-quick fantasias are true in all sorts of other walks of life -- investing, online poker, home ownership, etc.)
(2) There are hugely successful indie games in all sorts of weird genres. Many of those games look absurdly terrible along all sorts of different metrics. You can imagine why someone who looks at, but doesn't play (or plays but cannot appreciate), Hatoful Boyfriend, To the Moon, Undertale, West of Loathing, Factorio, Rimworld, 80 Days, Getting Over It, FTL, etc. would think that fickle gods decide who wins and who loses, and that there's no reason why Escape the Omnochronom doesn't make millions.
"The normal is that every indie developer makes a least a $100k on his game and now the game is rigged" is a non-crazy way to feel if you aren't willing to take a grimly detached view of things. It's not a healthy or productive way to feel, but I can get why people feel that way.
(1) There was a short bubble for indie game developers during Greenlight. While anyone with a whit of reason can see that the preconditions of this bubble make it impossible for every indie developer to have benefited from it, humans are not ruled by reason, and so many people view that period as establishing a "normal" baseline for what indie developer success should look like. (Such get-rich-quick fantasias are true in all sorts of other walks of life -- investing, online poker, home ownership, etc.)
(2) There are hugely successful indie games in all sorts of weird genres. Many of those games look absurdly terrible along all sorts of different metrics. You can imagine why someone who looks at, but doesn't play (or plays but cannot appreciate), Hatoful Boyfriend, To the Moon, Undertale, West of Loathing, Factorio, Rimworld, 80 Days, Getting Over It, FTL, etc. would think that fickle gods decide who wins and who loses, and that there's no reason why Escape the Omnochronom doesn't make millions.
"The normal is that every indie developer makes a least a $100k on his game and now the game is rigged" is a non-crazy way to feel if you aren't willing to take a grimly detached view of things. It's not a healthy or productive way to feel, but I can get why people feel that way.
Vault Dweller
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Expecting to make at least 100k (when most people have to work their asses off to make 30-40k a year) just because you're awesome is ALWAYS a crazy way to feel.
AoD sold 140k copies. I can take it for granted and expect the colony ship game to sell at least 250k but I won't. I will operate on the assumption that that it can easily fail (despite being a better game in my opinion) or sell half of what AoD sold because the market might be over-saturated (I don't think so but we have to be ready for it) and will work twice as hard to promote the game instead of expecting Steam to do it for me.
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