Publishers of successful games have to relinquish less Steam revenue

Games that bring publishers more than $10 million through Steam will now get more sales from Valve. From that amount, publishers only have to relinquish 25 percent of the turnover, instead of the usual 30 percent.

Valve has reviewed and updated Steam’s distribution agreement, the company said on December 1 via its Steam blog. The reason for changing the agreement is the traffic brought to the platform by successful games.

“It has always been clear that successful games and the large audience they attract have an impact on the network. Ensuring that Steam recognizes this can continue to be an attractive platform for everyone involved,” said Erik P. van the Steam Team. In recent years, more and more publishers have been hosting their own clients, such as Blizzard’s Battle.net and EA’s Origin. In addition, Discord opened the beta version of its digital storefront in October.

In addition to the 30 percent that each publisher gives to Valve and the 25 percent for games with a turnover of more than ten million dollars, there is a third scale. When a game through Steam brings the publisher more than fifty million dollars in sales, the publisher only has to give 20 percent of that to Valve.

However, smaller developers are concerned about the change. Greg Lobanov, the developer of music game Wandersong, expresses his critique via a Twitter thread and against GeekWire. “If Valve asks less from smaller developers, it gives tens of thousands of developers more opportunities to expand and make more games. That broadens its range and therefore the audience on Steam. The impact on Valve’s profit will then be negligible for the time being, maybe even smaller. than the change it just made.”