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. As a glance at SteamSpy can tell you, that’s nothing special for a mainstream PC game. Conversely, even a successful indie game may not reach $10 million in revenue over the course of its entire operational lifetime. In practice, the terms of the new revenue system appear to mean that a big “triple-A” mainstream title is being rewarded with a more favorable income split by Steam simply for showing up on the market at all.
They lowered the cut for people who didn’t need it. Massive publishers selling tons of games. Arguably indie games that only sell a few copies need a larger cut than EA on their latest blockbuster.
There isn’t much in the way of scale here. Their bandwidth isn’t monitored on a per game basis, and if that was a factor in the cost they’d be basing the cut on the size of your game. Some 1 gb indie game pays the same cut or larger than a 100gb mammoth from EA. Valve is also way more strict with that indie game in getting itself published than they are with the EA game as well.
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Epic with a lower cut has the same game prices. Additionally Valve lowered their cut ahead of a launch of Epic Games Store
https://www.geekwire.com/2018/valves-new-steam-revenue-sharing-tiers-spur-controversy-among-indie-game-developers/
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This is just a description of a standard business model. Most percentage-based revenue or sales systems have lower prices for higher quantities.
It’s called the “bulk discount” for a reason.
They lowered the cut for people who didn’t need it. Massive publishers selling tons of games. Arguably indie games that only sell a few copies need a larger cut than EA on their latest blockbuster.
There isn’t much in the way of scale here. Their bandwidth isn’t monitored on a per game basis, and if that was a factor in the cost they’d be basing the cut on the size of your game. Some 1 gb indie game pays the same cut or larger than a 100gb mammoth from EA. Valve is also way more strict with that indie game in getting itself published than they are with the EA game as well.