Valve Tries to Seduce Triple-A Games with Reduced Revenue Sharing

If you thought Valve would look at the negative reaction to Artifact’s monetization scheme and say “maybe now’s not the time to keep pissing people off,” then clearly you don’t know Valve very well. Because over the weekend the company announced that its digital marketplace Steam would be undergoing some pretty big changes to its revenue sharing model: one that uniformly and exclusively benefits triple-A developers.

Y’see, Valve currently takes a 33 percent cut of all the money a game makes in sales. That might seem like a lot, but it’s industry standard: Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo charge the same amount (and is likely a big reason there’s such a push for online sales). Valve, however, probably seeing how so many triple-A developers are moving away from their client to create their own, has decided that the more money a game makes, the smaller Valve’s cut will be.

Specifically, if a game makes over $10 million dollars in sales, Valve will reduce its cut to 25 percent. And if a game manages to reach fifty million dollars in sales, Valve will reduce its cut further to 20 percent. And when you’re looking at numbers that big, a 5 percent cut is nothing to sneeze at. Of course, this only applies to all sales made after the $10 or $50 million mark, as they don’t retroactively return anything.

This, obviously, is no good for smaller and indie developers, who would be lucky to make six-digits on their game, let alone $10 million. It also might be a bit too late for seducing the triple-A world, as this point Ubisoft, EA, and even Bethesda has their own clients that they’ll probably stick to. Still, it has irked many smaller developers, who not only feel ignored… but probably need the extra money more than EA does.

But, hey: that's capitalism for ya.