Who sets the price of games and determines sales? Valve or developer / publisher?

[✪ Jim Lahey]

Sorry if this should be in off-topic, not sure.

But yeah how does that work? Do they decide together somehow? What's the process? And who determines when and how much a game goes on sale for? Does Valve initiate a suggested sale and the devs can decline or vice versa? Or does Valve just have full authority over prices or do the devs? hmm

[Spawn of Totoro]

Originally posted by Ishraqiyun:

I don't believe for a second that Valve has no say. It's so deeply in their (Steam's) interest to influence pricing that no responsible board of directors would allow only third-parties to dictate the revenue stream.

Does iTunes set its own prices?
Does Google Play set its own prices?

Also, imagine is EA released their multiplayer games on Steam for dirt-cheap, then let Steam carry the server traffic, the multiplayer functionality etc, all while selling in-game content that Steam takes nothing of.

This situation alone tells me that Steam sets at least limits to pricing, if not absolute prices. Anyone who argues against this must explain why Steam acts against its own interests.

Valve has no board of directors.

iTunes and Google Play do not set their own prices either. That is still up to the developer. The only place they control prices on is Music and Movies as that is a diffrent type of license.

EA could do that if they wanted to actualy, though if it created that much traffic, Valve would still make money as they get 30% from every sale.

It is Valve's best intrest to give developers control of their products, othewise the developers would pull out of Steam leaving Valve with nothing to sell.

The only limit they have ever set was a minimal price for items and that was recently. Developers were complaining of a loss when items were being sold for less then 50 cents each, due to the cost to transfer money and taxes they had to pay. Now there is a minimal of .49 cents per a game in a package.

Originally posted by Ishraqiyun:

Originally posted by kamk:

Obv. the provider of services.

You mean Steam?

Yes, Valve (Steam is a service, not a company or person) set a 30% fee per a sale. That has been the industry standard before Valve ever started Steam or selling 3rd party games on here.

[cinedine]

Originally posted by Ishraqiyun:

Also, imagine is EA released their multiplayer games on Steam for dirt-cheap, then let Steam carry the server traffic, the multiplayer functionality etc, all while selling in-game content that Steam takes nothing of.

If they are going to use Steam's matchmaking and servers, they would have to pay license fees for them. So that's covered.
Steam also takes a cut on in-app purchases AFAIK and one of the reasons of the fallout between EA and Valve was that they were not allowed to have games on here with additional content that is not also available on Steam.

[Satoru]

Lets be very clear

Publishers/Developers set prices

If you see a price on Steam, the publisher/developer set that.

The only 'exception' which isn't really one, is that for indie devs Staem will do an 'auto conversion' for regional currencies. The way this works is that the pub/dev will set a price in a region they are familiar with (USD/Euro/etc). Steam then has an internal conversion mechanism that will price that game appropriately in the currencies it supports. This is NOT a straight currency conversion. This allows devs to price their game appropriately in each region, without having to guess how many Indian Rupees a $14.99 USD game should be. But again even in this situation, the publisher/dev sets the indexed price first, after which Steam does the price conversion.

Note that pub/devs dont even have to use this auto conversion feature. DayZ basically manually edits their own prices globally to be as close to the USD price as possible

https://steamdb.info/app/221100/

AAA devs also price their games different for different regions which generally depends on their publishing agreements in those regions with physical retailers.

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2012/12/green-man-gaming-blames-australian-price-hikes-on-publishers-and-local-retail-feedback/

Devs Have Control Over Sale Prices

Devs control the sale price of their games

http://www.pcgamer.com/terraria-devs-explain-steam-sale-price-hike/

As noted here, Steam INCORRECTLY set the sale price of Terraria at 75% at one point. The dev then asked them to change it back to 50% which was the agreed upon sale price. If Steam could unilaterally set discounts this scenario would never have happend.

Steam sales fall into 2 broad categories

1) Self Administered Sales

These are basically "Weekly Deals" or "Custom Discounts". Devs can basically schedule their game to be part of a weekly deal ahead of time, clikc "Submit" and it shows up on the weekly deals on Monday. Alternatively a dev can set a sale to occur on an arbitrary time, like say a 1 year anniversary of the game's release or such. Again this basically is just "What is the discount, when does it start, how long does it run" which they just input into a form, click Submit and it happens.

The only control Steam exerts over these is that Steam has an internal check that a dev cannot discount a game too often. Steam won't let you discount your game if your previous discount was less than 4-6 weeks ago, though this restriction can be bypassed for large sales like Winter/Summer Sales

2) Curated Sales

These sales are curated by Steam. These would be mid-week, weekend, free weekend and major event sales like Summer/Winter/etc. In this situation again devs set the sale price and submit their prices for curation through Steam. Steam then curates what will or will not be on sale. As noted in the Terraria example above which occurred in the Summer sale, devs still control the % discount.

Steam charges an industry standard of 30%, just like EVERYONE else like GMG/Humble/etc

The 30% margin on digital game sales was chosen by Apple back in the day. It was in effect the 'margin' that already in place if you took into account the entire down stream distribution cost of doing retail distribution of a cd. From a content creator perspective Apple charging 30% was basically identical to selling a cd in BestBuy which is why Apple went with that %.

As such 30% basically this is the industry standard for digital purchases.

Oh and do you want to know wonderful publishing in retail was?

http://forums.galciv3.com/449009/page/8/#3410039

Unless you enjoy having your gonads stomped on by Walmart everything about retail distribution absolutely sucks.

Also note that places like GMG giving discounts doesn't change the fact that the MARGIN is still 30%. From a publisher/dev standpoint, them giving out a coupon is meaningless because they get paid the exact same amount of money no matter if you paid full retail, or applied one of their 20% coupons.

the only exceptions to this is using the Humble WIDGET on a dev's external page to buy the game. If you go through the dev's website using that WIDGET the % margin is something like 10%. Note if you go through the Humble STORE, the margin is 30%. yes 15% of that goes to 'charity' but as a dev I don't care where the money goes. It could be spent on drugs and gimp suits, vs building a school for disabled orphans. At the end of the day a $10 game nets me $7. Where that $3 goes isn't relevant since I don't ever see it.

The other exception is itch.io which has a dev selectable revenue sharing model. The default is 10% but dev can set this as high or as low (even 0%) as they want.

[Burnator]

I have heard discount cupons were taken out of steams profit for selling the game, but haven't seen those for a while. That is usually 30% of the games price.

I'm guessing official sales are coordinated with the developer, as several developers promise lowest price on multiple platforms, meaning they are price locked.

[Anonymous Helper]

Originally posted by Burnator:

I have heard discount cupons were taken out of steams profit for selling the game, but haven't seen those for a while.

Depends on discount coupons you talk about. There were couple sales where you could get 5€/$ discount coupon using points from purchases. Those points would expire at the end of the sale so they had to be used during the sale. It was abused like usual and did not create the traction Valve wanted so they scrapped the point system and introduced current one. But yes, Valve paid those discounts out of their own pocket similarly to what Epic is doing with their discount coupons.

There is also the discount coupons you can get creating badges between sales. Only bottom of the barrel devs participate in that program and those are just normal discounts and cost nothing to Valve.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Originally posted by Burnator:

I have heard discount cupons were taken out of steams profit for selling the game, but haven't seen those for a while. That is usually 30% of the games price.

I'm guessing official sales are coordinated with the developer, as several developers promise lowest price on multiple platforms, meaning they are price locked.

The coupon system is opt in only for game devs/pubs.