What’s UA an acronym for? User Acquisition? User Activity?
User Acquisition yeah. Marketing dollars in other words. The deal usually is “We give you X free marketing dollars and we take 30% for it.”
Even large and sometimes dev hostile platforms like Apple go out of their way to at least try and give the impression of adding value here. So they will really try and feature as many games as they can for example. Valve went from a hard guarantee to nothing or pointing at algorithms, and they did it without telling anyone either. Which kinda lost some folks trust.
No, because you do not have the customer base on itch. You can put a game anywhere you want but it will not make a difference if people cannot find it. If someone expects any service to market their game for them, then I think they are in for a rude awakening. No one will do so effectively until they have a known vested interest in doing so. Known is the key word in that sentence too because it may be in the interest of Epic, itch or anywhere to market your product so they can get their 12%, 25% or 30% but frankly there is no guarantee of payback that their marketing efforts will pay off and the payback is usually not worth the effort unless there is a high likelihood for making a return. Of course, there are exceptions for launches of services and large, known games that already have high demand - those that have had marketing to create the demand.
Exactly my point.
If its not going to be seen on Steam anyway, it may as well be on a platform where you get a bigger cut per sale.
Because Itch has no UA either and you have to drive each new customer to the page. Now you need to do that on Steam then all other things equal you take the partner who gives treats you better which is obviously Itch.
Now its not absolute, of course Steam still does give views but its gotten pretty bad.
Isn’t the root issue that there’s just too many people making too many games? If Steam makes a strong marketing push or the 10,000 games to be released this year, how does that change anything?
Or are you just saying that since there’s too many games, you might as well just migrate to whatever offers you to best revenue split and be done with it?
You may have missed my point. At least it has hope of being seen by many customers on Steam. It has no hope of being seen by anywhere near that many customers elsewhere.
The days of sticking it on Steam and raking in the dough are long gone. It once was that if you got on to Steam then it was almost a guarantee of success. That has not happened for many years. Developers complained about not being able to break into Steam. Now they are complaining that too many people have.
I genuinely dont think there are too many games but maybe lets dodge that rabbit hole for now?
But for sure yes if you are offered two services which give similar support and one offers you a better cut and is more friendly to you and your business then you take the better cut is my thinking. I could be wrong of course :)
If it’s not too much of a tangent, what do you feel like Steam could do to increase UA?
Well we are saying the same thing with a different judgement value :) I think we both agree if developers dont like what Steam is giving them then they should go elsewhere?
I dont work for Valve, this is their problem to solve! :) But my guess is a multi tier track might be good.
Track A (State of Steam past with the full cut)
Full UA and attend to delivering X million impressions per game and per update just like they did not so many months ago. 30% rev share
Track B (What Steam currently offers with a reduced cut)
No UA support. 15% rev share for the basic Steam services of hosting billing etc. Includes long tail discoverability via ques & reviews etc.
Track C (State of Itch made available on steam with a reduced cut)
Current no UA. 10% rev share. No Steam “social”: services. A simple white box store front to sell your games. No discoverability, no forums, no user reviews just hosting, Steamworks , sales and refunds.
Something like that might help everyone maybe?
Unlikely. Everyone will opt in for the 30%, since the value of discoverability is much higher than the cut, and you’re stuck in the same place.
The premise of the blog post is that they don’t offer similar support, and I find Valve’s argument fairly compelling. While they don’t directly address your concern (though do touch on it with discoverability being the #1 feature on their roadmap), you can read between the lines a bit. The new 2018 features in my mind fall into two buckets - making it easier for developers to implement features, and making the end user experience better (which arguably is a superset of the former; more features are better for the customers!). They also touch on some of the growing pains that they’ve already worked through that could be a hassle on other stores, and highlighted how easy it is to spend money with all the regions available for pricing and different payment processors they’ve already worked out agreements with.
To me, it follows that all of the end user improvements are playing the long game. Retaining users because they run into less cheaters, or have additional community provided content (and incentivizing the creation of that content), or providing better networking leads to better word of mouth, which is easier to spread thanks to reviews and content curators. And from there, the algorithms will raise games with positive user interactions and increased sales (thanks in part to how easy it is to buy a game) to the top.
All you have to do is make a good game that everyone loves :)
I think Steam needs to bring back the flash sales. They took them away because of the changed refund policy, but it needs to just be acknowledged as a known risk. The flash sales were a way to get everyone’s eyeballs on a select group of games. Whatever else they do: queues, curators etc - as good as they are - won’t work for the masses.
Other than that, from my experience, the thing that separates successful games from unsuccessful ones is marketing, and Steam can’t help with that either. Getting people to stream the game; making a game that automatically captures people’s imagination; making a game that looks and feels good… these are all factors.
What has changed in the market is the default state. It used to be that the default state was moderate success for a good game, and good marketing + good gameplay led to major success. The default for a good game is now somewhere between failure and minor success, with good marketing and community growth being a requirement for a major success. This is a function of the dynamics of the market, and has little to do with Steam itself, and no new storefront is going to fundamentally change that.
From the Steam Year in Review, looks like full steamworks multiplayer support across all platforms is forthcoming
Flash sales returning would be good I agree. I liked them because they were like little “events” as well you know? I like coming here and getting excited by a flash sale someone shared. It as fun.
Hell I wouldnt even mind if Steam automated them. I think because they were done by hand is one reason they were cut.
Also RE: UA - Epic isn’t going to have a solution for this if/when they expand in the future either. No one truly does.
Well they do. Their answer has been cash and a better deal to make up for it. Steams answer has been other ecosystem features which they believe will help long term.
I prefer Epic’s approach obviously but I respect Steam’s and happy to see where it goes.
I was looking for this! This is their assault against Epic’s offer to make their infrastructure free to everyone. Steam has to counter this with making their own infrastructure an industry standard first, or they’ll lose big-time. This is the most important move Epic made, and Steam’s counter-move was predictable.
Microsoft does something like this in Windows Store, except it’s dynamic. If you buy a game by following a deep link from somewhere else (e.g. search engine, the publisher’s web site, etc) they charge a 5% cut. Otherwise it’s 30%.
But… They only do it for productivity apps, not for games.
Good idea… At EA for 3rd party games we had a chinese menu. You just select things you wanted EA to provide and the % EA cut went up the more things you wanted.
It worked pretty well for a while there.