Steam's Money making methods

[Medic Man Mute]

Hi guys, Not sure where to have posted this, if it is in the wrong place can a moderator move it to the correct place? Thanks. ANYWAY!

I'm conducting a lil three question survey for my college course in Games Development, The assignment is to find out the methods and legal and ethical ways Valve makes their money and then comparing this to another lesser well known company, I.E: An indie company of my choice, I wanted to conduct some Primary research into Steam and Valve services as it'd be nice to get some commuinity input on what you guys think Valve makes on a monthly basis as i know they have no shareholders and are well within their right to withhold their figures.

SURVEY: http://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/L1ICK/

It is a quick three question survey that i created, Please answer honestly and please no troll-ish comments, They will be left out of my research, Thankyou !

[Darren]

That is going to be inaccurate, why not concentrate on what you do know?

They make 100% of the price of any game that they develop, publish and distribute.
They make 30% of the price of any game that is sold on the store.
They make 10% of the price of any item sold on the market (minimum of 1c)
They make 5% of the price of any Valve game item sold on the market (unless this is going to someone else like a fan-made skin).

You can then use values like the cost of a new game (triple A, to Indie), and try to dig up sales figures of those games in order to get a ballpark estimate of Steams profit.

http://steamspy.com/ can help with digging up this information, additionally you can see the sale numbers for said Indie game company there as well, and get the 70% that they would have gotten from that.

For example you can see http://steamspy.com/app/413150 the price point at which various people bought Stardew Valley.

As an ex-Games Development Lecturer if you submitted the results of that survey to me when there were much more accurate answers you could have provided I'd fail you.

[Medic Man Mute]

Originally posted by Darren:

That is going to be inaccurate, why not concentrate on what you do know?

They make 100% of the price of any game that they develop, publish and distribute.
They make 30% of the price of any game that is sold on the store.
They make 10% of the price of any item sold on the market (minimum of 1c)
They make 5% of the price of any Valve game item sold on the market (unless this is going to someone else like a fan-made skin).

You can then use values like the cost of a new game (triple A, to Indie), and try to dig up sales figures of those games in order to get a ballpark estimate of Steams profit.

http://steamspy.com/ can help with digging up this information, additionally you can see the sale numbers for said Indie game company there as well, and get the 70% that they would have gotten from that.

For example you can see http://steamspy.com/app/413150 the price point at which various people bought Stardew Valley.

Thankyou! This is valuable to my research Darren! <3 I'll surely be nit picking at all i can get

[Satoru]

There's also one other metric

Steam makes 75% of any community created items that are sold on the CSGO/TF2/DOTA2 stores. The community creator of that item gets 25%

http://venturebeat.com/2014/01/17/dota-2-and-team-fortress-2-item-creators-get-10-2-million-payout-from-valve-in-2013/

Since Valve gives out numbers on total payouts to community, we know that since $57 million has been paid out, STeam has made $228 million from 2010-2015 selling just community created items.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/01/30/steam-workshop-57-million-dollars/

[Domius]

jgffj

[PiZzAz]

Shaming. If you play a game like CSGO, You know (basically) that everyone has a knife. When you join a lobby and get shamed for having all default skins, you buy skins. Pretty much %60 of the cash that you spend goes to Valve.

[Chance]

Free Steam games: http://getsteamgift.org 146538 people already got their gift cards!