Steam vs Devs

OP next time do a bit of research before posting.

how is it possible to have this much fucking contempt for your audience

They're British "indie devs", they're all Sean Murray-tier.

Valve pretty much prints money, yet Gabe can't loose a single fucking pound. Guy probably eats half the money Valve is making daily.

No shit retard, that's how retailers work.

Oh, I thought this was the developers of that shit grinding game Punch Club, whose game had half its pre-orders canceled when they fucked with their customers delaying the release so they could pull a viral marketing Twitch Plays Pokemon rip-off, and who then tried to spin that into something positive for them.

I'm starting to think Valve hates us and they are just using all their paid content to stay afloat.

What was the last great thing valve did for the community? The TF2 updates used to be fun, but now they are just a dump of community items so valve can take a percentage of the new things.

There isn't even a "Star Server" in TF2.

I'm starting to believe we are just cattle to Valve because they think they don't need to do anything and we'll stay loyal.

Yeah, that's how it is with normalfags.

I don't blame them, Steam sure sounds like a pleasure to work with.

Valve are mega jews and have been since their inception. They were first with paid mods with Counter Strike and Day of Defeat.

This is probably an early access game. But even so extra features being cut due to steam is pretty shit.

Well they're just shit then, but the bit about Valve dictating prices and sales is scary.

It might be better to just set up a donation box if things are that bad, at least you won't be feeding the beast.

Using steam when they can make their own website. They deserve to get scammed. Any self respecting person wouldn't use steam and accept steam virus in his pc.

This really goes against the philosophy that Gaben tries to use as an excuse for paid content created by modders/mappers.

Gaben reads his e-mail, maybe it's time to flood his inbox and ask him why they're being such cunts to developers.

How is this a bad thing?

Shut up ruskie.

Because not every developer is phil fish.

I'm sick of this concept of "I made this therefore people WILL buy this".

The guy that wrote that whining post is a cunt no better than Fish.

99% of indie developers fall in one of three categories. Cunts, leftists, greedy kikes. Most of them hit all three at the same time. I don't pity them nor give a shit about any of them. 10+ years and the only worthwhile indie games that have come out of it have been Mount and Blade and Cave Story, and I don't hear either developers of those two whining because guess what, their games are good and fucking sell.

Oh, and they aren't complete cunts to their costumers.

Are you talking about the developer of MAV?

Most of them are just run-of-the-mill narcissists. They think that because they made something, they are entitled to success. They can't even fathom that what they made is crap no one wants, so when things go to shit, they blame everyone but themselves, because confronting the truth is too painful.

Punch Club, maybe I misread.

Then again, I distantly remember hearing about MAV and then it swiftly dropping off my radar. I watched a few videos of it and it looks completely underwhelming and clunky as fuck. There is no reason why a spiritual successor to MechWarrior wouldn't be selling unless it's shit.

Like another user has said, it's not Steam's fault your game isn't selling.

Pretty much.

Maybe if you'd actually bothered to read the OP you'd understand. From his business standpoint, using Steam to sell his game was not worth it one bit. For how much Valve PRs paid mods and such shit with "content creators need to eat too!", the apparent poor support this developer got is unexpected.

First he complains about Steam taking a cut, but this is something you need to accept if you're using a middle man. But then,

I've officially been convinced to never post any of my games on Steam.

He's just retarded.

And greedy.

And whiny.

Seems to me he's just blaming Steam because he's not making as many shekels as he thinks he ought.

Don't worry user, no one will buy your game anyway ;^)

SIDF pls leave and don't come back.

...

Sure thing kike.

The MAV developer has to be one of the dumbest fuckers out there.

More than 2 years later and the game was still in Early Access when it was removed.

>bombdogstudios.com/blog/important-announcement-steam-support-ending/
Let me translate "I'm mentally challenged and can't understand the differences between a publisher and a storefront". How the fuck could he think that Valve would help him sell his game? There are over 10,000 games on Steam, you don't get special treatment.

MAV is a game in a niche market, he was expecting AAA level sales once he got onto Steam. If you saw the video that was on the store page it was fucking terrible, he must run his game on a potato since the video looks like the game drops below 20 FPS for at least a quarter of the video.

MAV was released in Early Access which according to Steamspy is essentially their release date, the main focal point for sales and advertising gets fuck over because no one wants to buy an Early Access game.

This is so fucking retarded. Every part of retail takes a cut, if he sold MAV on GOG, Humble Bundle, Gamersgate, etc they would still take their 30% cut. Even Gamestop and other retailers that sell physical games take their cut.

You know the real reasons why MAV failed on Steam?
It stayed in Early Access for more than two years with little signs of improvement
The store page was so poorly set up with the laggy video, ugly textured mechs and shitty description

And the biggest reason:
Around 50,000 or so copies were given away for free on Alienware Arena

Before the giveaway there were around 6,000 or so owners on Steam. So an influx of 9x the userbase shitting on the game because it was unfinished, unpolished and ugly, took the score from very positive to mixed. Dev got assmad and removed the game from Steam while deactivating all keys.

MAV is the best example of a developer who has no skills outside making their game. He couldn't market or properly handle the sales part of MAV.

Nobody will ever buy your shit game anyway.

Sounds like every other indie dev whiner that can't but place the blame on everyone but himself.

He's basically bitching Steam won't let him price the game at $20, instead it being at $19.99. Then he whines that Steam does things one way, and he in another, and it's Steam's fault he has to redo things Steam's way if he wants to sell games on their platform.

All of this points to Valve behaving as they have almost since the inception of Steam. They have worked tirelessly over the last 13 years to reduce their role to maintaining a glorified web browser and getting a hefty slice of every transaction completed through it. Their support has always been inadequate by 1-2 orders of magnitude, from the very day Steam launched and no one could play Counter-Strike (the #1 multiplayer PC game at the time). Their systems to drive community engagement are as much about reducing costs as they are about generating revenue via trading. Why pay someone to do what the community will do for free?

Valve lacking support shouldn't surprise anyone, ever, and this developer exposes how ill-informed he is by whining about it in relation to his incredibly niche and unimportant title.

You get access to an API and complete documentation of said API as well as a complete repo system to distribute your game globally, they assume you're competent at being a game dev for that to be enough, they're not your publisher they don't have to deal with anything more than that.

You don't have to support any of the steam features at all, whiner on the steam forums can get fucked, and it's not like he considers them a valuable part of his games community to begin with, hell you can even totally lock the forums and force users to use your own forums if you want.

That part is straight up bullshit, you don't have to go through any human being to apply discounts and price changes
The only sure public proof of this I can bring of being able to do whatever the fuck you want with your game price is this game
store.steampowered.com/app/329480
For a while it got changed to 100 bucks because the main devs had issues with his bank
steamcommunity.com/app/329480/discussions/0/541906989416115232/
If some random fag with one shitty greenlight "game" on steam can change his price to something ridiculous with his own incompetence as a justification I have doubts that the MAV dev couldn't also do it.

Seems to me he dislike steam which I can agree with but tries to make excuses to drop the support.

Well that explains a whole lot

And narcissistic enough to think his Early Access turd is destined for things so great it will propel Steam into a new golden age of shekel hoarding.

You're right, he is clinically retarded.

Doesn't understand how Google works.

Now, call me uninformed, but I was under the impression that the developers themselves were in charge of what content they put on their Steam page, right?

I've looked up the newest video, the game still runs like shit, and somehow manages to look worse than MechWarrior 3. It feels so incredibly sluggish to play even.

I don't think he had skills for that either, otherwise it wouldn't have languished in EA for years with next to no improvement.

Why do you think Valve stopped making games? Gabe the Jew makes money on every transaction that goes on in the Steam client.
He's getting paid to do nothing but keep the servers on.

And considering gamers love their precious videogame Facebook Valve is set for life.

Nah, I'm pretty sure pic related is correct.

The point is that Valve isn't obfuscating what kind of deal you get when you release your game on Steam. Nobody puts a gun to the developer's head and tells them to have the game on Steam.

The simple maxim is that good games sell regardless. Mount and Blade is the best example. A niche title with ugly graphics and clunky interface, made by a no name studio consisting of a husband and wife, from Turkey, released in what we now know as Early Access, before the indie bubble became a thing, and it sold well enough to propel TW to stardom and make them enough money to finance a studio of 80+ people to make a sequel.

Or what about Age of Decadence? Even more niche audience than M&B, made by an autistic idea guy from the Codex that brokered no compromise in the kind of game he wanted, and it sold well enough to justify his wish to make a new game, and use the pre-production phase to release a combat focused spinoff of AoD as well.

Anyone that fails to sell their game in this day and age only has themselves to blame, but expecting self-awareness and adult behavior from the indie scene is expecting too much.

Selling PC games digitally was the dumbest idea ever.

The Steam store is waste dump filled with shovelware. The developer just noticed, that your game sells better by not putting it in there.

Oh Valve does nothing illegal. In fact I'm jealous.

But it's kinda sad for devs that the only way to get noticed these days is through one store. That is going to cost you money.

Everything works as long as someone isn't trying to fuck someone else over. I really wouldn't be surprised if valves recent actions of late is in response to bandwidth costs. A recent trend is larger download sizes, I wouldn't be surprised if certain games would reach a tipping point of actually costing valve money.

Every store takes a cut, even selling on your own site and distributing on your own isn't free of charges.

If this is true we can finally play Epsiode 3 soon because Valve needs income.

This developer in particular is a massive fuckwit. See . It's not Steam's fault he is too moronic to understand how to market and present his game properly.

If shit like Underrail and AoD can sell well enough, so could he, he just needs to make a game that isn't shit. I know I'd pay for a spiritual successor to MechWarrior, with SP and MP. He basically has no other competition, mech sims on PC are a dead genre, yet there is a dedicated community of autists that would throw money at him.

And give you access to a bigger userbase.

Yeah but competition would bring down that cut.

The team is literally no longer there and the current valve nufags and feminists aren't interested in developing a single player game staring a cis white male.

I haven't got any clue as to why he spent so long on Steam integration when he could've chosen not to include any of it and just use his own back end systems.

Yeah they choose the videos, logos, icons, screenshots and text that appear on the store page, the MAV dev just chose poorly.

store.steampowered.com/app/266470/
This was released a few months after MAV but looks substantially better, although it's more mechwarrior than chromehounds.

...

Everything costs money. Development costs money, publishing costs money, bandwidth costs money, marketing costs money, retail costs money. Doing any of those things yourself doesn't make them free, it just keeps you from what you'd rather be doing or would be more productive doing. And even so, it's cheaper than it ever has been to create and release a game. In 1995 you would have to pull off a small miracle to get a boxed product on a store's shelves without a publisher. That is what Steam is analogous to. The problem is that it's the virtual size of 100 Walmart Supercenters stuck together and it's filled with tens of thousands of games just like yours, all struggling the same to get noticed. Discoverability is not a new problem. That's one of the reasons that prominent names and brands rarely die in this industry.

what a fag

Not by much. It still feels just as off as MAV. How fucking hard is it to make a mech sim that isn't shit?

It's been 16 fucking years since MW4 came out. Sixteen. Fucking. Years.

Maybe it's because he's working on it by himself on his spare time. Putting down people who are this passionate about making video games that they like is some classic cuckchan shit.

It's pretty irrelevant what you think of the developer and his game.
I don't fucking care.
The developer simply explained why he pulled his product from the Steam store: Because he loses money to Valve by supporting Steam instead of gaining some. That's all what this is about.

Of course, if you can buy food & shelter for $1 per day, you can even survive from Steam Greenlight.

VD worked on AoD in his spare time as well, you don't hear him crying bitch tears people are mean on the internet. You don't get shit for merely trying.

It was his decision to release the game to the public and ask money for it, everyone has the right to criticize his game.

If you want a hugbox fuck off to reddit. The game is shit, he behaves like a woman on her period and I could care less if he's passionate or not. Furries are passionate about their degenerate fetish too.

So, you're the faggot?

Your game is shit, kill yourself.

You can live in a third-world nation on like 200 bucks a year, though.

How do you know his game is shit? Did you play it?

Maybe, you'd need a pretty fucking solid storefront and policy to even think about rivaling steam, but a barebones sell your own stuff without restrictions store already exists in the form of itch.io and Desura (they're still not really dead last I checked)

Interesting blog.

I'm old school. I actually WANT to pay full price for a good game.

Bad news: I only play JRPGs and VNs these days. Atlus, KT Gust, Bandai, Tri Ace. Those are the ones who get my 40-60 euro. Not indie devs on Steam.

Watch any of the videos.

Now here's mech game that doesn't look like ass.

Passion alone doesnt make a piece of work great (neither pure skill, you need a combination of both).

It's a niche market with the majority of the games industry wanting to "play it safe", no one wants to gamble. Well except for PG who pushed out MWO and fucked it up by making it F2P and P2W since they are mega jews who shut down fan projects.

Why the fuck did he release his buggy, unpolished and unfinished game onto a storefront before it was ready? He wanted 20 dollarydoos for a shit game, not only that but wanted to increase the price as development continues. He must have thought "if DayZ could do it so can I". Cave Story wasn't released in the first year of the five year old development cycle for $20. If he actually fucking finished the game before selling it, there wouldn't be an issue you Early Access apologist. I recommend going back to reddit or at least kill yourself.

You wouldn't want to give egomaniacs who made shit game your money, either.

That's no excuse. I've already cited several examples of other games, even more niche and uncompromising, that sold.

If only being greedy kikes was the only problem MWO had.

Do clean your glasses. It's also animu shit mechs. Go play with your katana.

That's true. I've never ever seen a Japanese dev insult their audience. I'm a loyal customer because I'm treated with respect.

Anyway every game I own I've actually played and finished. Buying games on a Steam sale for a few dollars and never even downloading them is very weird for me. But that's how it is nowadays. Games are disposable products bought for a few cents.

That's because the Japanese public will make it known if you displease them.

That's because most gamers today aren't even gamers, they just hoard games because pretending to be a nerd is the current fad. You go to one of those accounts that has over a thousand games in their library and you'll note that they only ever play TF2, CS, Skyrim or any other shit meme game, the rest of their games pretty much untouched.

Reminds me of the fashion market.

It's a real race to the bottom. And people dare to complain about how shit games are when they bought them for a dollar.

Smough?

Bullshit, Valve made enough money off of the sales of CSGO alone to fund Destiny, what that post is implying is that Valve would have to lose more than $100,000,000 running steam annually, and Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 and sales of their back catalog would break even every single year, ignoring the costs of running Steam.

...

To be fair, Steam should be paid for selling others people work on their platform. You'd have to be retarded if you'd sell other people's stuff and make zero money off it, you'd also be broke.

Though I do think steam takes too much of a cut. 30% is a little over the top, especially considering they don't seem to help devs at all like that post was talking about.

...

Compared to Nintendo who takes 70%, Microsoft who takes 40%, or Sony who takes 45%?

Steam is still the best deal for a platform, Origin takes the lion share as well. Steam takes a 30% cut, which sounds like a lot, but consider that your 30% is going toward infrastructure, bandwidth usage til the end of life, etc.

Steam doesn't charge people for patches either, whereas console licensers charge you a (typically $5000) fee to submit a patch that they then have to do extensive testing on and if they reject your patch, you have no choice but to suck up that $5000, make some changes and try again.

Releasing a game self-publish is expensive for a number of reasons, one of which is that unlike Steam there is no advertisements for your game going down, so now you have to pay for ads on the web (which means that ad blockers will prevent you from seeing it). Steam's cut goes toward more than just "we sold your game, gieb money now."

Steam takes 30%.

Payment processors take between 3-6%. If Steam is not driving your sales, and you are driving close to 90% of your game's sales, it's insane to just GIVE that money to Valve. I'm a dev with games on Steam. I look at my Google Analytics traffic. While I can't tell conversion rates, I can tell traffic. Most of the traffic to the Steam pages for my games comes from my own site. Game discovery is fucked on Steam. No one seems to use their systems, they are a failure. I'm strongly considering not publishing on Steam with future games, and widely publicizing this so people don't hold out to "only buy it on Steam!" I may even remove my games from Steam. A few years ago the Steam sales were a big deal. Coupons on Steam used to be a big deal. Now sales are all under-performing. I think I'd rather host my own game sales instead of being in the clusterfuck on Steam. My games are all overwhelmingly positive with several thousand reviews+. I do already sell direct too, and I make about as much selling direct as I do on Steam.

I can pay for my own server, and bandwidth, thanks. It's ridiculously cheap. I already have auto-updates built into my games. We're DRM free too. You enter a key from your purchase to enable auto-updates on that copy or not as you run the game, and there's no pseudo-spyware constantly running from us either. My severs cost $50 a month, and bandwidth is rarely above $100 a month serving hundreds of thousands of users a month. Again, this shit is cheap these days and getting less and less expensive, and not worth 30%. For the record, we've offered a 100% satisfaction refund policy for years, long before Valve did.

Don't compare Steam to consoles. Steam is a PC distribution platform. I can publish direct on PC, but I have no choice to on consoles.

Like I said in my previous post this doesn't actually happen even with well reviewed games. Most of the traffic to my game pages come from my own sites, and not via Steam's internal pages. Valve allows use to embed our own google analytics on our sales pages so we can know facts like this.

Not really. Valve is complacent. Notch was right to not use Steam for Minecraft. Popular games are giving money to Valve for no good reason.

hope to see you in the share thread friend

I still think 30% is still too much. Just because other companies are even worse doesn't mean steam is good. I feel something like 15% would be better. If Steam actually seemed to help smaller devs maybe the 30% would be good, but for just hosting and promoting just doesn't seem enough.

Jesus Christ why would any 3rd party dev ever waste time even porting a game to a Nintendo console.
Does Origin even have non-EA games on their service?

Do you know how much GOG takes from devs?

What games have you made user?

Games for true gamers is all I will say about them.

I don't like them too much either. There's just flat out too much stuff on Steam with a very dwindling percentage of it worth playing, much less buying directly from Steam. I have nearly 5,000 games on Steam from various indie bundles and sales. I have formally completed 25 of them, a few Lego games, hidden object games, and old AAA FPS. My Never Install category has 100 games that were either broken, irritating to play games, and games I don't like for other aesthetic reasons (Arachnophobia). That leaves a good 4,850 games to fiddle with with not that much enthusiasm to try them.

...

Would you actually include any of that shit if you were making a game?

Nope.

All of that shit is going on on their platform so why is this a surprise?
There's a fuckton of legit reasons to bash valve, like the recent PAY2SPRAY in csgo but for some reason there's always that guy who goes for the dumbest shit.

I've always heard that steam is extremely accommodating for game devs, if occasional unresponsive for tiny indie guys.

One thing they DO have though, is a fuck load of data about pricing and sales, which they share with the devs. If steam says 'You should price your game at x', it's because all their data says it'll generate maximum revenue at that price point. Same for sales, if steam suggests you put a game on sale for x%, it's because they feel it'll generate maximum revenue. They have the data to make this type of calculations, so if I was a dev, I'd generally trust them.

I've also heard nothing but good things about how steam tries to make it as easy as possible to put games on their platform. To suddenly have a guy say he spent 6 months of dev time on steam features makes me very dubious on his claims.

Steam has a lot of fuckery going on right now, but I don't think this is one of them.

...

I wanna hug that spider

Sad to hear something bad happen to MAV. I was monitoring that game.

lmao skyrim couldn't even make big scary spiders right

That would technically be frottage considering a male spider's genitalia are in one of its little "arms" at the front.

...

Source?
Wasn't that steep cut for only for the LP fags?

I remember the Alienware Arena giveaway since I got a copy there, while they do give away free games, they're early access games. Another problem is that for what you were given, the game was clunky, awful looking, and overall poor with very little improvement. Maybe he should have busted his ass and did more on it, because if he's spending 6 hours to change the video on the Steam page him being able to develop a game is hopeless.

Every other relevant distribution system (consoles) take more. Depending on the deal offered, it could get up to 70%, sony was floating somewhere around 50 for indie shit, I think Xbone was a bit cheaper than that with the indie shit program they run.
Steam is one of the cheapest with a big user base. Don't get me wrong, it is jewish as fuck, I really don't think they need to take 30% in order to keep up the servers going and getting some revenue, they are probably making loadsamoney, but the issue isn't steam, it is the industry.

...

OP you are fucking retarded and don't even know what you are supporting.

citation needed. I can't believe anyone would publish games on a Nintendo platform if Nintendo takes a 70% for each game sold.

because its guaranteed to sell? and get loads of shekels.

Doesn't Steam's cut also include payment processors?

Game discovery on Steam went to shit in 2013 with the introduction of greenlight, not only that but the game quality needed to get published directly severely dropped. There are just too many games on Steam for it to be a discovery/curation tool. People are spoiled for choice and unless a game goes viral (tumblrtale, Starjew Valley) or has a preexisting fanbase (EDF 4.1, the Sakura games) it's doomed to be stuck in the 2-6k sale range. Even if it was 99 cents no one would buy it because no one knows about it.

Can you sell a game on your site for say $10 but on Steam for $30? Or does it need to be the same price for both?

What games of yours are on Steam?

In their defense on those, the games (plus ricochet) were mechanically different. If anything, it's basically same engine, different game.

Paid sprays are megajewing. Paid mod store with cuts is jewery.

If a user wants to make a paid mod, sure why not. But the system was bad