this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Piracy is a service problem.
Valve is a terrible company and Steam is an awful platform but their stance on piracy is why they deserve a lot of the success they get. In a day and age where everyone was trying as hard as possible to punish their userbase as much as possible for their crappy distribution model, here came a company that actually understood why people pirate in the first place and made a vast majority of the gaming population willingly download DRM then go through it to spend billions on games they will never play.
Lol the valve fanboys found this, yikes. They downvote bombed this like a game which slightly annoyed them.
Care to explain why "Valve is a terrible company" and "Steam is an awful platform"? Surely, it has tons of porn games (that you can hide), or shitty games (that is hard to sort through), or CS:GO item gambling problems (don't really care). But I kind of fail to see how the company or the client could be fundamentally bad.
The 30% cut Steam takes is quite a bit. Considering the near-monopoly it has on game distribution, that could easily mean the difference between turning a profit and not for an indie developer.
Personally their efforts towards things I support (PC handhelds, Linux gaming) and the convenience of the platform outweigh the things I dislike, but being frustrated by its problems is understandable when people don't really have another choice.
Yes, I agree that 30% is a lot. But let's look from another perspective: If a developer, for ease of calculation, sells a game for 30$ on Steam, he receives 20$. If he sells it on a competitive platform with 5% cut (that's 6x less than Steam) he gets 27$.
However, Steam is way bigger, and if a developer can sell the same game more times on Steam (33% more times to be exact), he breaks even.
More people to buy = more people to play = bigger player base => more people buy it. It is a poaitive feedback loop.
I am not arguing that 30% is good, all I am saying is I understand that Steam has to take a big cut to pay for the features it provides for "free" alongside the usual game content (cloud saves, community, workshop, utems, etc.).
Do you think any indie developer has the means to achieve a lower cost to distribution and promotion if they try to sell and support the game themselves?
Valve solves many problems for developers and these problems aren't imaginary and free to resolve.
Not saying 30% is justified for all games, but if you want a quality title it's going to cost more than just development. Since the Unity debacle we've seen some developers even say openly that costs of promotion and support dwarf costs of development.