Steam Stuff - What Has the Digital Distribution Giant Done Lately?

That’s a lot of games!

Almost as many as you!

How many games were published in 1990 for example versus 2018? Be interesting to see if digital platforms had a huge impact on the number published.

LK I may ask a favor of Far Cry 5…

Valve is hard at work on Half life 3

Oh, a huge impact.

7,672 games were released on Steam in 2017.
4,207 games were released on Steam in 2016
2,964 games that were released in 2015
1,772 that were released in 2014
Only 565 games were released in 2013.

Cross-posting from the Epic Store thread:

Valve giving a public reminder of what that extra 18% is getting devs. This kind of signals to me that they won’t be lowering their take in the near future.

We continued to work on our disaster recovery plan so Steam doesn’t go under if our main data center is hit by a meteorite.

This alone has to cost 18%! Wonder what EPIC store’s plan is for such a disaster?

:D

Wow 15.39 exabytes of bandwidth in 2018.

To pay Amazon to worry about that.

Yeah I posted in the Epic thread but Valves statement there is a very long note describing everything they do except the bit developers care about. Marketing and UA dollars.

They did say they’re “working on” a new recommendation engine, which I think is the most valuable thing for discovery. I’m not going to hold my breath, but it’s at least recognition of the problem.

Interesting. As far as I can tell Valve offer by far the most feature-packed, comprehensive service on the market. I suppose there is nothing they could do to deserve that 25/30% in the eyes of those 94% of devs.

So all that remains is waiting for Epic to match Steam’s quality and quantity of service (surely coming sometime before 2030) and hoping Valve lowers the cut in response. Oh and denying customers best service by doing epic exclusives in the meantime.

And yet:

Of the developers who sold their games on Steam, 55% reported that Valve’s storefront accounted for 75% or more of their sales.

If they don’t think Valve earns the money, go somewhere else, but we know most of them won’t because… 75%.

I don’t think saying that Steam is still the best (or perhaps least bad) option and that it isn’t earning its 30% are mutually exclusive options.

Valve earnt their 30% cut by creating steam and managing to overwhelmingly grow and dominate the market. The devs are paying for access more than anything else.

This can’t (or at least shouldn’t) last forever. Epic are smart by leveraging the popularity of Fornite to try and get a foothold in the market. It’s clearly a case of a company artificially lowering their price, if they are able to establish themselves and get a chunk of the market share I bet their fees will go up as well to at least 15% if not 20%+.

Yeah, Valve completely earned their cut over the last decade by building an incredibly robust storefront, features for multiplayer and otherwise which save developers a ton of time, and so many other features.

But that was “earned”, and is not necessarily “continuing to earn”. It’ll be for sure interesting to see if they react to Epic’s and Discord’s moves any time soon.

Being the default place PC gamers go to get their games, I believe Valve could probably get away with charging 40% or even 50%.

But if Valve suddenly raised their fees to say 40%, how many devs and publishers would continue to use them? I mean, if I were getting 75% of my sales from Steam, I’d probably continue to pay it, because to abandon that ship would be almost certain suicide.

But Valve is smart enough to know that they’ve found a number that, for them at least, is a good balance.

One thing people might not realize is that Valve makes most of their money from a tiny number of their biggest sellers, and that the long tail of indie games and lower-selling AAA games don’t actually contribute that much:

The top ~0.5% of games contribute over 50% of revenue, at least for outright purchases (SteamSpy has never been able to track DLC / microtransactions)

So all it takes is a few more big hitters like Ubisoft (Division 2), Rockstar (whenever Red Dead 2 comes out), and Activision (Call of Duty) and they’ll be seriously hurting.