SXX (u/SXX) - Readit News

SXX commented on Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012) cdn.akamai.steamstatic.co... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11

hamdingers · 14 hours ago

> I think Steam has been a net positive for the gaming community

This is probably true on balance, but needs to be tempered with the reality that they also pioneered or popularized many of the worst parts of modern gaming. Always-on DRM, paid DLC, loot boxes and exploitive monetization, esports gambling (indirectly, they were complicit until legal pressure forced them not to be), FOMO monetization, "early access" and launching incomplete games, etc. All exist in their modern forms at least in part due to Valve.

Disclaimer: I'm a valve fanboy who buys all their first party software and hardware. They still put out great products despite the ways they've changed gaming for the worse.

SXX · 11 hours ago

Valve did not do anything for Always-on DRM other than allowing it to exist on platform. On Steam itself DRM barely exists.

SXX commented on Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012) cdn.akamai.steamstatic.co... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11

Ekaros · 15 hours ago

On other hand how much developer time would have been spend on building own distribution, billing and related customer support. Time spend on doing it yourself would not be free either.

30% for this is high, but then there is also the discoverability. Which I think does beat google by long way. So they probably would not have sold as many copies without popular platform.

SXX · 11 hours ago

Nothing of what Steam provides costs 30%. Discoverability and free marketing only provided to games that are already successful and have hundreds of wishlists. That's only possible to achieve if you game already have it's own following and community.

12+ years ago if you released on Steam it was a big deal and platform provided traffic to everyone, but today it's flooded with games so basically you're on your own.

The only thing that allow Valve to charge this much is network effect. They are not vendor-locked platform like App Store, but they do have nearly monopoly on PC.

SXX commented on Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012) cdn.akamai.steamstatic.co... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11

ploxiln · 12 hours ago

This math is missing a step: $200k went to your publisher who already gave you the $200k, so really you got about $394k total (before your taxes).

And it's worth remembering that your publisher got $194k ... I'm not sure if this publishing arrangement makes sense for the publisher ($200k risk for not much more reward?) or for you (30% of your net income from the game, after valve's 30%) (I'm not in the industry so honestly I just don't know)

SXX · 12 hours ago

This step is certainly not missing. And yeah I somewhat simplified the agreement not to go into details. Usually publishers that invests money take 80-90% or even 100% before full recouperation of investments. This usually includes not only provided budget, but also whatever publisher spent on porting, QA, localization and LQA.

Then after recouperation is complete all income is split between 50/50 and 40/60 for either side. And yeah in gamedev ROI like x2.5 is a good deal for publishers even if 90% of games never recover development costs.

Everyone just hopes to make the next hit and make a bank.

PS: This is math for indie and AA games with budgets under $5,000,000.

SXX commented on Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012) cdn.akamai.steamstatic.co... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11

TheFreim · 15 hours ago

I would note that they do provide quite an immense amount of value to developers. Achievements, transferable inventory system, multi-player (steam networking), among other things. The 30% cut still feels high, especially since most games can't or won't take advantage of every single service Steam provides, but I do think they provide quite a bit of developer value that needs to be factored in.

SXX · 15 hours ago

You really missing my point here. Problem with platforms is that platform-holders are taking bigger cut from a small struggling companies than they take from likes of EA or Ubisoft. If you look at majority of small and mid-size game development studios Valve is basically taking half of their income unless your game earns more than $10,000,000.

It's totally okay to like Valve or Steam as gamer. As fellow gamers I totally agree with you.

Just next time when you wonder why you favorite studio went bankrupt or why you niche genre game never got a sequel this is why: because some monopoly took 50% of their profit.

SXX commented on Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012) cdn.akamai.steamstatic.co... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11

gdbsjjdn · 15 hours ago

Steam isn't the right place to sell a game that does 1M in total lifetime sales. Because like you said, it won't hit any recommendations and they'll take a huge cut.

This is like complaining that AMC won't screen your student film. You're playing in a very niche space and the key is to keep costs under control so you can actually make money.

SXX · 15 hours ago

If your game is not on Steam (or big consoles) it doesn't exist. Platforms like Itch are only useful for part-time solo developers who trying to earn their $100 or $10 for ramen. Can be good marketing for solo developers too, but you only make money when release on "real" platform.

Gamedev is a hit industry. Even of released games 90% never make back the investments. Then 1% hits make 90% of money.

And situation is as bad for $3,000,000 game studio as it's for one like mine that makes $300,000 games.

SXX commented on Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012) cdn.akamai.steamstatic.co... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11

bob1029 · 18 hours ago

Valve gets a lot of heat for slowing down on first party gaming content, but I think Steam has been a net positive for the gaming community. There are certainly some cases where the accessibility has created "noise" and other trouble, but overall I think this is a good thing. Their 30% cut is absolutely justified once you start looking into everything they do for you as a developer and the market that you have access to. It is a lot easier to pay that kind of fee when you don't feel like your technology partners actively hate the fact that you merely exist.

Steam is still like what Netflix used to be. You have pretty much everything you care about in one place. Even big monster AAA developers like EA have given up and put their content on the platform. If I had to pick between having HL3 and a coherent gaming ecosystem, I'd pick the latter.

SXX · 16 hours ago

As consumer I very much agree with you, but as game developer 30% is abysmal amount of money. Imagine you're indie developer or owner of a small 3-10 people studio that finally released reasonably successful game:

  1 - Let's say you invested $100,000 of your own money for vertical slice and managed to find a publisher to give you $200,000 to complete the game.
  2 - Ignore that you had some failed games before, but this time you let's say sold 100,000 copies for $10 each average. 100k sold is a big success really.

But here is the math:

  1 - Valve got $1,000,000 as gross revenue for 100,000 sales.
  2 - Usually 16% is VAT and immenient refunds. So now $840,000 left.
  3 - Now Valve took their 30% cut. $588,000 left.
  4 - Now your publisher took $200,000 to recoup invested money. $388,000 left.
  5 - Now publisher split remaining $388,000 by honest 50/50.

Now your company sold 100,000 copies of a game, but only get $194,000 gross income as royalties. And if you will make any profit you'll likely pay at least 20% corporate or divident taxes so yeah at best your profit gonna be $155,000.

So you did all the work, somehow managed to fund it, worked on game for a year and got $155,000 while Valve made $252,000 for payment processing and CDN. Steam do not provide marketing - it only boost already successful products.

PS: This is best case scenario. Usually your publisher will also recoup whatever expenses they had on their end for marketing and whatever.

SXX commented on Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012) cdn.akamai.steamstatic.co... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11

piker · 18 hours ago

Surprising amount of discussion on work/life balance and kids/family for a game dev. Is Valve known for this or is it just relative?

SXX · 17 hours ago

Gamedev is just very poor industry. Think of your usual FAANG salary and divide it by 5. Or just any random software engineer job and devide salary by 2. There are companies like Epic Games that pay competetive salaries, but they are few.

Gamedev is also very stressful industy because both constant crunches and job instability. So you not only paid worse, but you'll work 2-3 times more that average SWE. And often fired when project is complete regardless of success.

So working at Valve is somewhat like a pipe dream for many people in the game industry. Especially because whole Valve is under 500 people which is like 10-20 times less people than work for Epic, Ubisoft or EA.

Source: I work in indie game company.

SXX commented on Valve Software handbook for new employees [pdf] (2012) cdn.akamai.steamstatic.co... · Posted by u/Michelangelo11

nvarsj · 18 hours ago

> spent the last decade going out of its way to recruit the most intelligent, innovative, talented people on Earth, telling them to sit at a desk and do what they’re told obliterates 99 percent of their value.

Well that hits close to home. I wonder why every other mega successful company thinks the opposite.

SXX · 17 hours ago

Mega successful companies dont think that way. They very often buy startups or just asquihire teams to kill competition before it become dangerous to them.

SXX commented on What makes Claude Code so damn good minusx.ai/blog/decoding-c... · Posted by u/samuelstros

tjr · a day ago

What do you work on, and what do LLMs do that helps?

(Not disagreeing, but most of these comments -- on both sides -- are pretty vague.)

SXX · a day ago

For once LLMs are good for building game prototypes. When all you care is to check whatever something is fun to play it really doesn'a matter how much of tech debt you generate in process.

And you start from the stratch all the time so you can generate all the documentation before you ever start to generate code. And when LLM slop become overwhelming you just drop it and go to check next idea.

SXX commented on What makes Claude Code so damn good minusx.ai/blog/decoding-c... · Posted by u/samuelstros

diego_sandoval · a day ago

It shocks me when people say that LLMs don't make them more productive, because my experience has been the complete opposite, especially with Claude Code.

Either I'm worse than then at programming, to the point that I find an LLM useful and they don't, or they don't know how to use LLMs for coding.

SXX · a day ago

This heavily depends on what project and stack you working on. LLMs are amazing for building MVPs or self-contained micro-services on modern, popular and well-defined stacks. Every single dependency, legacy or proprietary library and every extra MCP make it less usable. It get's much worse if codebase itself is legacy unless you can literally upload documentation for each used API into context.

A lot of programmers work on maintaining huge monolith codebases, built on top of 10-years old tech using obscure proprietary dependencies. Usually they dont have most of the code to begin with and APIs are often not well documented.