https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/30/18120577/valve-steam-game-marketplace-revenue-split-new-rules-competition

Previously, Valve took an "App Store Tax"-like 30% flat rate cut of most sales.

Under the new rules, that portion goes down to 20% for games that generate over large amounts of revenue.

Obviously, this won't benefit indie developers. Most indies never get the enough popularity to make even $10 million required to see the first tier of decreased "app store tax", and even if they did, indie games are generally priced so cheap that this becomes doubly difficult.

Over the last 6-7 years, the big-budget megapublishers have been rolling out their own distribution services to save money and cut out the middleman. I remember it started with EA in 2010-2011 when they got into trouble with Valve over their DLC distribution schemes. In short, they would release the base game on Steam, and then sell DLC on a separate site to avoid giving Valve a 30% cut. Mass Effect 2 is the best example of this, where only the digital deluxe edition is available on Steam, then you need to register for a (probably defunct) Cerberus Network account to activate your DLCs. By now, if you want DLCs for Mass Effect 2 you might as well buy from EA's Origin store.

Valve didn't appreciate EA's DLC end-run. Soon after this, EA launched its competing Origin service and started making its new games Origin-exclusive.

Next megapublisher to do this was Ubisoft. Instead of officially declaring war and cutting Steam out, Ubisoft requires every new release for PC link into their uPlay platform. This provides a soft incentive against buying new Ubisoft products on Steam since you will have to go through 2 distribution frameworks (both Steam and uPlay) when you could simply buy straight from Ubisoft uPlay.

A few years later, Activision joined the trend. Even now they are continuing to switch distribution of flagship products over to the Activision Blizzard online store and the unified Battle.net launcher.

Bethesda seems to be following, launching their own Bethesda.net distribution service that increasingly looks like it will be mandatory for their games moving forward. Their recent Fallout 76 game appears to be exclusive to Bethesda.net. This also lets them collect a better cut from paid mods then they would ever get from Steam Workshop's disastrous experiment with paid mods.

Even more recently, Epic Games jumped on the build-your-own-bandwagon, launching their own independent storefront (see https://www.gog.com/forum/general/epic_games_is_opening_a_store_front)
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Likely too little too late. Steam has largely lost big-budget megapublishers in the West, who have made their own frameworks and have little incentive to release on Steam again.

Aside from having access to the largest distribution platform in existence?

I do wonder what the outcome of this "hold-out" game will be. I think it's a given that anybody not selling on Steam loses at least some sales (and I'd bet my last greenback on that number being rather significant), so it seems that large publishers are leveraging their wealth in an effort to undercut Steam while swallowing inevitable losses.

One way or another, gamers won't lose on it in the long term. In short term, though, personally I have no intention of bothering with multiple clients/accounts.

There are enough indie releases on GOG alone that will keep me too busy to bother, anyway.

You promised us you were done with these threads.

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/the_final_divisionbyzero_newsletter_im_done_helping_you_all

I feel so betrayed. :D

Arrogance over being the "largest company in the field" has never boded well.

IBM used to be the #1 global name in corporate and personal computing. They could have been right next to Microsoft, Google, and Apple right now if they wanted to. Instead, decades of bad decisions, blundering, and general mismanaging slowly sunk IBM into near-irrelevance. These days, regular tech consumers hardly hear of IBM.

In the 1990's, Yahoo was the dominant name in search and online services. Then Google came in and ate their lunch. Yahoo floundered with bad decision after bad decision and never recovered. Eventually, they sold out to Verizon (https://money.cnn.com/2016/07/25/technology/yahoo-verizon-deal-sale/index.html) and even this purchase was later devalued after news of a previous shockingly incompetent data breach at Yahoo (https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/21/verizon-knocks-350m-off-yahoo-sale-after-data-breaches-now-valued-at-4-48b/). How the mighty have fallen.

Earlier this year, Apple became the first U.S. company with a market value topping $1 trillion (https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-becomes-a-trillion-dollar-company/). Over the last month, investor fear over slowing iPhone sales shook their stock (http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-apple-20181102-story.html). Microsoft took over the title of "world's most valuable company" from Apple soon after (https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/26/18109784/microsoft-apple-market-cap-2018-valuable-company).

You left out the Microsoft Store, my personal favorite.

No, but if there is basis for the assumption of being the largest, particularly if your business is based on reaching as many potential customers as possible, that's still a very important variable to consider.

Neither of the companies you gave as an example are comparable. Steam has the advantage of not just being a dominating distribution platform, but having users tied to the goods it offers.

Somebody with hundreds of games in their library (and I certainly have seen people with thousands) are that less likely to switch their purchases to another platform. Sure, they may double-dip to get that one exclusive game they want elsewhere, but in general we are rather conservative creatures.

And while Steam has been steadily antagonizing more and more people with their various "innovations," they are still the definitive source of games for anybody not bothered by DRM.

Don't get me wrong - I have no love of Steam in particular, and market monopolies in general. What will happen will happen, and if it's the demise of Steam, I'm perfectly fine with it as long as there are decent alternatives for me to get my gaming fix.

I just don't think it will happen right now. What could go wrong with giving distributive market control to the maker of most popular operating system? /s

Maybe that'll get people to embrace the penguin. Though I doubt it given current circumstances.

If they force all games to be linked to that dumpster fire in future Windows versions, then yes I would be forced to move.

uplay is absolute dogshit. good thing Ubisoft games in 2018 are garbage not worth playing. also I have mass effect on pc and I think you still can sign it.

Heh, meanwhile, unless something major changes with how MS does business (and treats its customers), my Windows 7 machine is the last I'll have running their stuff.

Windows 10's telemetry crossed the line for me big time. Well, technically their forced telemetry patches for W7 (haven't bothered with updates since they started bundling everything together), but at least you can still run the OS at old revision prior to the whole data-mining dumbfuckery. Eh... kinda. ME1 requires some runaround to get the DLCs installed without using Origin (still possible, though). Haven't tried my physical disk installation in a long time now, but IIRC that also required online authentication. Doubt the servers are up for that, either.

ME2's "cerberus network" is long gone (learned it the hard way since it was about the last physical game I actually pre-ordered, and could only get the extras through online authentication as well).

Course, there's also charge-free alternatives to deal with either issue, heh.

Retarded situation, but DRM punishing legitimate customers as usual.

Windows XP was my favorite Windows ever (by design principles), but for modern hardware I favor Windows 7.

I will keep using Windows 7 even when it drops off support, simply because of how shoddy Windows 10 has proven to be.

The worst thing about Windows 10: Pushy updates, some of which have a good chance at bricking or seriously damaging the operation of the end-user's machine.

Recent article: bad update deletes peoples' files
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-update/windows-10-1809-update-deleted-all-files-from/ff608374-2686-4a08-a4c2-caa4caa6d4e1

ZDNet op-ed: Microsoft cramming too hard on features in Windows 10, quality suffering
https://www.zdnet.com/article/opinion-two-windows-10-feature-updates-a-year-is-too-many/

My sister recently bought a gaming laptop, obviously with Windows 10 pre-installed. A few weeks after that, the power adapter partially stopped recognizing it was plugged in. If plugged in before startup, it would charge properly. If you unplugged it and then plugged in again, it wouldn't charge until a restart. This was later found to be caused by a bad update that deleted the battery drivers.

Of course, make the argument about you, but the tioic aint about how you will be kept busy with your backlog. its about steam finally becoming obsolete and having comoetiuon. lets face it, the entire concept of steam was avantgarde on 2003, it aint now. Given their sheer size on the market, itll require a push from other publishing behemoths like EA, and such to topple their dominance, and yes, these behemoths will take losses from not being on steam, but theyre gigantic they have the resources to absorb those losses, and itll be worth it to finally dethrone the mighty steam monopoly. Also, "having the largest distribution blah blah blah..." thats like a PR soundbite from Valve. Like when they usuallu say " the game industrys a billion dollar business" to game design freshmen and new indies, to sucker them to the business, without adding that 99% of those billions will go to the 1% AAA publishers' suits. Really worth being on steam at all these days for an indie? Yes, they boast that they have 80 million users, but bet ya more than 50% of those only are there to play PUBG, qnd the rest are CSGO and DOTA 2 russian players, and a small % play the other games on the top sellers. these days indies should try going with the consoles like the switch, whrer thres like , efort to try to do things diferently.

20% of $10 million are still $2 million. With $2 million you can pay for a lot of employees and server bandwidth of your own. I can understand devs/publishers to want to cut out the middlemen.

If Valve was really feeling the pinch they would finally decide to make an announcement that they are looking into the possibility of the feasibility of starting base design for Half Life 3.......... or just have Gabe show off his knife collection again.

Somebody must have told him Linko is gone. lol