We are excited to announce that Arch Linux is entering into a direct collaboration with Valve. Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on our distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave. By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.
This opportunity allows us to address some of the biggest outstanding challenges we have been facing for a while. The collaboration will speed-up the progress that would otherwise take much longer for us to achieve, and will ultimately unblock us from finally pursuing some of our planned endeavors. We are incredibly grateful for Valve to make this possible and for their explicit commitment to help and support Arch Linux.
These projects will follow our usual development and consensus-building workflows. [RFCs] will be created for any wide-ranging changes. Discussions on this mailing list as well as issue, milestone and epic planning in our GitLab will provide transparency and insight into the work. We believe this collaboration will greatly benefit Arch Linux, and are looking forward to share further development on this mailing list as work progresses.
I said Valve is taking 15% more that they don’t have to, they said who cares if a landlord drops Starbucks rent 15%, the consumer won’t save. I pointed out that that means that not just Starbucks is being gouged but also independent stores and places that might actually drop their prices, or not increase them as quickly in the future.
There is literally no way to defend rent seeking. It makes everything more expensive for everyone.
We hate rent seeking. We’ll hate Steam if they raise the profit margin. We’re not talking about rent gouging. Piv’s point is that large publishers dominate the landscape and won’t bulge their prices. This is compounded by Steam’s anticompetitive clause against having a lower price on other platforms. That part is bad. However, the washing machine is well oiled and speedy. Epic’s is the clunky one, unfortunately. The only Steam alternative I’ll happily use is GOG and itch.io, where indies can still publish.
Thank you. You get it: the whole system is just broken.
Trying to shift that 15% away from Valve is effectively putting it into the pockets of publishers, as the overwhelming majority of video game sales are either developed by large publishers like Activision, or stuck with a third-party publisher that isn’t just going to voluntarily pass the savings on to the consumers or developers.
If I buy a game on Steam, I know that 30% of my money is going to end up in someone other than the developer’s hands. Support the devs by buying the game directly from them or on a lower-fee platform like Itch* wherever possible. Or, if it’s only available on Steam and my money it going to go into some corporation’s pockets, Valve is at least not legally incentivized to milk its consumers for the sake of shareholders.
*But never Epic. For as much as they preach about monopolies, their hypocritical actions demonstrate a clear desire to become one.
I’m not defending landlords or rent gouging. I’m pointing out that when production or operating costs become lower in a for-profit entity, they increase their profit margin instead of passing their savings down to the consumer. Welcome to capitalism.
If you can’t see how that connects with the hypothetical scenario of having Valve to take a 15% cut instead of 30%, let me do it for you:
Ubisoft makes a new Assassin’s Creed game. They publish it on Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox. All of them currently take a 30% cut, so they sell the game for $70. Now, suppose your petition to Valve works, and they lower their cut to 15%. Ubisoft is still going to charge $70 to buy the game on Steam, and the only thing changing is that they now make an extra $10.50 from Steam purchases compared to the others.
But, that’s Ubisoft. What about an indie dev? Absolutely nothing different. Microsoft and Sony’s distribution agreements make it a contract violation to have a lower MSRP on a competing platform.
In our current reality, that 15% more-than-necessry fee will never go into the hands of the consumer. You are not being a champion for the consumer by rallying against 30% platform fees, you’re literally arguing to change the ratio of money going between two corporations.
I agree, but could you elaborate on the indie dev part? Why would they have distribution on PlayStation/Xbox?
I used the term “indie” a bit loosely. I had games like Stardew Valley in mind, where it started as a solo project but became popular enough to warrant porting to other platforms.
Well, not all indie games become that popular.
Yes you are defending rent seeking behaviour, which is what rent gouging landlords do.
Its not arguing about shifting money between two arbitrary corporations, it’s about shifting money to the people actually creating something, not the people who own the store that sells it to you.
Every dollar Valve gets, is one less that a game developer had to spend on staff and creatives to make a better game.
Valve is the city. Indie devs can easily use itch.io or GOG instead.
You’re just not getting it. That hypothetical money isn’t going anywhere but the pockets of the people a level above the actual developers.
Are the developers a studio owned by a large publisher like Microsoft? Microsoft is funding the entire project and studio operating costs, and all the revenue is going back to them. They set the budget, and anything above the projected sales figures a nice bonus for Microsoft execs and shareholders.
But hey, maybe it’s not Microsoft—maybe it’s a couple friends in a garage who went with a publisher to help fund development and set up distribution for all the major platforms. In exchange for their services and marketing, the publisher will take 60% of the sale price. Valve or whoever takes their 30% cut from them before it hits the publisher’s bank account. The guys in the garage still only get the remaining 40%, even if the sale came from EGS with its lower fees.
Your premise of lowering platform fees leading to better games is only ever going to happen for early-access indie games where the devs quit their day job. Those devs are a tiny minority of gross PC game sales, and while it would be nice for them to be paid a bit more, it’s not going to change anything for the average Joe Gamer consumer.
My point still stands: you’re proposing something that doesn’t actually benefit the typical consumer, but merely shifts the profit ratio between two profit-driven corporations.
Literally just objectively false.
If I self publish my game on steam, I get every dollar from it except for the ones that valve takes.
Yeah bro, some developers are not owned by Microsoft, what’s a twist!
No dumbass, it’s just fundamentally more efficient. Your premise of giving Gabe Newell 15% of every game sale and then deep throating him while you thank him for the opportunity, for literally no benefit or reason, is just asinine.
No. It doesn’t. Your position is that you want to waste 15% of every gaming purchase on enriching Gabe Newell instead of the developers who actually made the game. Congratulations, that makes you a dumbass who likes wasting money on hero worship.
Congratulations, you poked a hole in my argument by agreeing with me that indie devs are the only possible people who would benefit from lower fees! Do you want a medal, or do you want to actually finish reading before trying to pull off a “GOTCHA!” moment?
The other twist I absolutely, totally, did not expect today was no comment about my paragraph on third-party publishers taking that juicy 15% from devs. Shocking!
Have you never ever heard the phrase “the devil you know is better than the one you don’t”? If my $10 isn’t going back into my own pocket, but into the bank account of one of two corporations, which do you think it will be:
A private company that doesn’t have a track record of fucking me as a consumer, or a corporation legally obligated to inflate its own share price that sees the consumer as a means to an end?
Don’t worry, take your time. It’s a tough question.
I’m going to assume you read my previous comment and are willing to acknowledge that self-published indie devs would be the only demographic of developers who would actually get that 15% instead of the game’s publishers.
Do you know how many self-published games I purchased through Steam in 2024? Exactly one: Hades 2. And that’s only because my only legal options available were through Steam or Epic Games, and Epic Games is a wannabe monopoly employing anticompetitive practices with an egotistical and hypocritical manchild as its CEO. Everything else indie gets purchased directly or through Itch, then saved to a NAS for permanent ownership.
But hey, between enriching Valve and enriching some other company whose business model is also to profit off of developers, but does nothing for you as a consumer, go ahead and support the one that has zero incentive to treat you as anything more than a one-time sales figure.
Sarcasm aside:
At the end of the day, what I’m trying to explain and that you keep stubbornly refusing to hear, is that: way the way industry is currently, someone other than the developer is going to get that hypothetical 15% when it comes to 99% of total sales revenue.
It’s better for us as consumers to have that 15% go towards the company which does the modern-day equivalent of “bread and circuses” and hasn’t yet screwed its users. The most likely alternative to giving them the money is giving the money to yet another corporation, but one with zero reason to give a shit about the consumer other than as a way to make the line go up.
For that 1% of indies and self-published developers, you don’t have to accept that they lose 15% of the sales price. If you care that much (and you should), buy the game directly and give them 96.5% of MSRP. Or, if you can’t, buy it on Itch. Or if that’s not an option and they only sell on Steam, send an email and ask them how to donate an extra $10. Shit, buy the game twice (preferably on another platform) if you must.
Just don’t expect that reducing Valve’s profits by 15% is going to make life better for everyone and not mostly just investors and executives. In the best realistic case, nothing improves except the bonus that some C-suite gets at the end of the next quarter. In the worst case, Valve chooses to compensate for that lost revenue by cutting down on their FOSS contributions or experimental hardware projects.
BECAUSE THATS HORESHIT.
Jesus fucking christ. It’s literally objectively false. You are just saying that to blindly defend Valve because gamers dick ride Valve like dumbass fucking lemmings.
A game developer has a revenue sharing deal with their publisher meaning that the publisher will get X% of whatever their revenue is. If their revenue is lower because Valve takes more, then they both get less. If their revenue is higher because Valve takes less, then they both get more.
It’s not fucking rocket science. Stop making up hand wavy bullshit like the money will just dissappear into the ether so let’s keep making Gabe Newel richer.
Thing is, I hardly see indie devs without footing eat up the $100 Direct fee and publish on steam (unless they’re making low-quality porn). Most of the indie games I’ve purchased garnered a following on Itch first.
Ever heard of royalties? You know, that type of agreement where the creator earns X% of gross sales.
Or considered that publishing agreements can be made to include publishing costs (aka platform fees) as part of the publisher’s fixed cut? I’ll let you in on an obvious secret: if Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all take 30%, the publisher is going to use 30% as the deduction for platform fees regardless of where the sale comes from.
I stand by my opinion that the most likely outcome of lowering platform fees on Steam is the publisher finding a way to vacuum an extra 15% into their own bank account.
That being said: Please tell me what drugs you’re on, because I would love to also live in kumbaya la-la land where unchecked late-stage capitalism isn’t a problem and corporations don’t exist to enrich the 1% by infinitely increasing growth through screwing everyone below them.