Comment by Road_Warrior_10@lemmy.world on I make games and this literally happened to me this morning

Inspired by true events from this morning

For context: I make indie games and have released two so far and I’m currently working on the third one which is weird as fuck. So the way that Steam works is, they don’t send you money anytime you make a sale, but they send all of it at the end of every month. Now September is almost over and I got an e-mail titled “Steam Payment Notification” and I get all hyped up. I open it and read it that the Payment Notification is actually that there is no Payment since I didn’t make $100 in sales. Way to hype me up and bring me down, Steam.

Youtube and twitch work this same way. When I was starting there were months where I didnt make any money because I didn’t meet the minimum. Hoping next month meets the requirement for you boss 🙏

Does the balance at least accumulate until you do hit the threshold, or is the money just gone?

It accumulates, so there is no money lost. It does kinda suck though that as you start, even though you can make money and did make a bit you don’t get to see it yet

It does make sense from a payment processing standpoint. It doesn’t make sense to spend more money on creating the transaction than is actually being sent.

I used to pay a particular company by purchase order for this exact reason. CC takes 2-3% of the payment, but purchase order - they’ve got to get themselves into the company system, track the PO, invoice, track the payment…at the time, a common estimate was $50 to process a PO, and if you’re only buying $100 batches, that’s a big hit. Did not like that company, but they were the only place to get whatever it was I had to buy.

Sending a simple transaction like this costs a couple cents though, which they could in theory bill to the developer as well. Setting the threshold at 100 is probably more to accrue additional interest on Steams bank accounts.

I think in the US I’ve heard ETF/ACH transaction fees are usually around $2.50? It might be possible to have that apply across a batch, though, as in if you submit 10 payments to 10 different people as a single transaction it’s still just $2.50, or 25¢ per person. I’m only getting this from hearing accountants complain at companies I’ve worked with, so I don’t understand the details. But I’ve seen it pretty common with companies doing payouts to want to see a minimum amount before they actually send the payment, otherwise it’s not worth doing.

Absolutely. It’s got to be the way it is. Just kinda feels bad at first

Does Steam take a cut for distribution?

If not, while this emotionally sucks, they’ve a solid operational policy.

Yes, their cut is 30% which is a lot, but they are pretty much the only big platform out there. Epic games has been trying to get in the game but so far they are not close. Their cut is 15%.

I want to note that you’d need about $143 in gross sales to meet the threshold of $100 in net profit.

On the surface that sounds like a lot. But, they’re providing a service without any guarantee of any income. Epic can only compete because they’ve few users and are willing to operate at a near loss in attempt to garner market share.

This will be a difficult one for others to understand as a “good deal”. Gamers are usually correct when they pull out their pitchforks. This should not be one of those times.

While I’m no fan of Epic Games for bribing companies to keep games off of Steam for a year or more, Valve’s market dominance in PC game sales isn’t a good thing for developers or consumers.

Competition in capitalism is always better than a lack thereof. But, we’ve not busted monopolies in a significant way since Ma Bell. And, even if we were, at 75% of the global market share they’d not warrant any action yet.

There’s going to be a dominant organization because late stage capitalism sucks. And, I’d rather it be Valve than some alternative trying to fuck me over at every opportunity.

The thing is, steam’s market dominance is one of user choice rather than anticompetitive strategies or lack of alternatives. Steam doesn’t do exclusives, they don’t charge you for external sales, they don’t even prevent you from selling steam keys outside the platform, or users from launching non steam games in the client. The only real restriction is that access to steam services requires a license in the active steam account. Even valve-produced devices like the steam deck can install from other stores.

Sure, dominance is bad in an abstract theoretical way and it’d be nice if Gog, itch.io, etc were more competitive, but Steam is dominant because consumers actively choose it.

Yeah! Other publishers should open their own stores and compete!

…

Oh wait no fuck oh god oh what have we done

Epic can only compete because they’ve few users and are willing to operate at a near loss

Bullshit. Epic’s loses are in paying for exclusives and giving away games while ruining their PR.

Steam could operate at 15% if they wanted to. But… why would they do that?

Neither is publicly traded. Neither of us know the numbers.

Does Steam make money on hosting indie games?

How does one research such a question?

I don’t need answers. I had them before I made my second post above.

Good luck to you.

https://sell.amazon.com/pricing#referral-fees

I guess, according to you, it costs more to host files than it does to ship you a physical USB.

Maybe all these apps stores need to look into physical delivery in order to bring their costs down.

Isn’t it free up to a certain amount?

Also aren’t you able to create steam keys for free and resell them wherever you want and they won’t take a cut off those?

Steam only charges that for larger developers though iirc

I see you settled on a design for the toaster. Love the mustache.

Other games include “be a rock” and “pizza synthwave” and this is the weird one.

Wish listed.

Oooh, I remember seeing you post about the toaster

Since i’m a sucker for weird games and very bad at following simple rules i wishlisted your new game lol

Ayy I remember that toaster! This looks great! The sign with “Do not bite yourself to check whether you are a cake” got me smiling good

You raised my hopes, and dashed them quite expertly sir! Bravo!

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