You may have missed it, since Nov. 30 was a big news day (the G20 economic summit in Buenos Aires, the passing of an ex-president, an earthquake in Anchorage, etc.), but the big news in the world of video games came from Valve. The company’s Steam platform detailed several changes that are being…
You may have missed it, since Nov. 30 was a big news day (the G20 economic summit in Buenos Aires, the passing of an ex-president, an earthquake in Anchorage, etc.), but the big news in the world of video games came from Valve. The company’s Steam platform detailed several changes that are being made to the digital storefront for video games. The most notable of these is that, going forward, titles that earn big money on Steam will eventually graduate to new tiers in their revenue sharing model.
By default, as per the old rules, Steam takes 30 percent off the top of any revenue that a given title generates on the storefront. In the new system, once a game earns $10 million in sales, Steam will adjust its share to 25 percent. If a game proceeds to hit the $50 million mark, Steam’s share further declines to 20 percent. The total revenue includes any and all income sources for a given game, such as package deals, add-on packs, in-game transactions, and fees applied to trading on the Steam Community Marketplace.
According to Steam’s post on the subject, “Our hope is this change will reward the positive network effects generated by developers of big games, further aligning their interests with Steam and the community.”
In other words, this is meant to encourage big developers not to take their games elsewhere by rewarding them with a bigger slice of the income. $10 million may sound high, but at a $60 price point, that’s around 167,000 sales.
