this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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Tim Sweeney emailed Gabe Newell calling Valve 'you assholes' over Steam policies, to which Valve's COO replied internally 'you mad bro?' (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 44 points 7 months ago (1 children)

It's the other overheads too, publishing cuts, marketing cuts, QA etc before you get down to the money made for wages etc.

Valve are absolutely in a position to take less, but the service they provide is like no other.
I don't give a fuck about EA/Ubisoft etc getting a smaller cut, but independent developers could absolutely benefit from some sort of program.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Plus the income lets them take care of their employees, and to the best of my understanding it is a pretty good working environment.

[–] NOT_RICK 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Many studios are in a real pinch right now. I don’t know what valve’s overhead costs are but I’d imagine they could afford to kick back some more to devs.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Many studios are in a real pinch because the executives are fucking awful and the first people they punish are the people who would also never get raises because Valve took 12% instead of 20%.

The real difference is for games that don't sell a lot of copies, that don't reach that 20% at $50 million in sales and 25% at $10 million in sales. We're talking about really small games at this point. Even games like Factorio should be around this $50 million in sales point with 3.5 million sales although idk how much for each sale with regional pricing.

We'd honestly be pretty hard-pressed to come up with a game small enough to be in the 30% cut tier but also a game where the cut is what makes or breaks the game instead of market saturation. I agree that Steam should lower the cut they take but I do not believe in the crap Sweeny spits about caring for devs while also making the devs who work for him do so much overtime.

He doesn't mean "devs" he means "profits" that he will never share with devs, he just can't play with your emotions and make you care as the trickle down economics never come around again.