We’ve never really had much cause to question Valve’s distribution service until recent months. Its large catalogue of games, frequent sales and support for indie developers has made it an increasingly attractive place for game makers and players to call home. The influence of Steam could even be argued to have had an impact on the self-publishing platforms put in place for PS4 and Xbox One in the last 18 months. Valve has always been a trendsetter and an innovator, but with Steam it has become a powerhouse of publishing and as such it seems only right that we begin to scrutinise that power.
“When someone becomes very powerful in relation to the others in any market, it’s cause for caution,” Image & Form CEO Brjann Sigurgeirsson tells us. “I believe Steam is in a position now where they could rewrite the market rules entirely.” Certainly it’s big enough to be gaining the attention of the European Union, which will be looking to enforce a 14-day refund policy on Steam as of the start of 2015. It was reported last August that Australia might look to enforce a similar policy in the coming months. This has lead to concern that prices may be raised to compensate, but Sigurgeirsson thinks the upcoming changes could be even more drastic.
“Say that they, for example, decided to change their business model from their current one to a subscription-based one,” he suggests. “Depending on what algorithm they’d implement for reimbursing publishers, we’d see substantial changes in game development: if it were to reward the number of game sessions, we’d have a sharp increase in casual-type games on Steam. If it instead rewarded accumulated playtime, we’d see more grinding games. I think it would be detrimental to the gaming ecosystem, so I think they’re good where they are.”
There’s been no indication that this could be the case, of course, purely some informed speculation on the part of an experienced developer, but the picture it paints is of a company that can have a huge impact on the gaming landscape with every move it makes. The ripples of a change or decision on Steam stretch far and wide.
The darker side of this became apparent late last year as Hatred was launched on Steam’s popular and lauded Greenlight service, pulled by Valve and then reinstated with an apology from Gabe Newell himself. It was a confusing week that saw the admittedly controversial Hatred thrown from vilified example of the ills of game making to the champion of free expression standing up to corporate censorship. When Hatred was announced it certainly raised some eyebrows and some may even have felt that the decision to pull Steam support was the correct one for the image of the platform, but Newell’s statement to developer Destructive Creations has some worrying admissions for the transparency of approval decisions at Valve.
“Yesterday I heard that we were taking Hatred down from Greenlight,” Newell said in his apology, shared by Destructive Creations on its Facebook page. “Since I wasn’t up to speed, I asked around internally to find out why we had done that. It turns out that it wasn’t a good decision, and we’ll be putting Hatred back up. My apologies to you and your team. Steam is about creating tools for content creators and customers.” But doesn’t that suggest that the rules and criteria for assessing games on Steam are unclear?
“It used to be pretty simple,” Mike Maulbeck, developer of Paranautical Activity explains to us. “You’d email Valve your game and in a few days they’d either roll out the red carpet or they’d shoot you down and tell you why they didn’t want to distribute the game. Now you put your game on Greenlight, beg and hope for votes, and then wait to get greenlit. A process that is less democratic than it seems, as many games sit in the top 10 for months while some games are greenlit without even hitting the top 100. Not to mention games like Soda Drinker Pro, some sexually explicit games, and Hatred being taken down with no explanation regardless of having paid the hundred fucking dollar fee and receiving positive feedback.”
Maulbeck has very publicly had run-ins with Steam, Valve and Gabe Newell in the last year. In an episode in which Maulbeck admitted to us he had made “a fool of myself”, he tweeted a threat to kill Gabe Newell after a protracted and confusing process of publishing Code Avarice’s Paranautical Activity. It saw Valve pull the game from Steam entirely and refuse to work with Code Avarice again, and led to Maulbeck’s resignation (although he returned to the team in November with the support of the studio). As Maulbeck recounts the whole affair it’s clear he still feels a great deal of anger about what he sees as a confused and contradictory process.
“I put my game Paranautical Activity on Greenlight, a few months later Adult Swim offered to publish us, so we ignored the Greenlight campaign and started working with them,” Maulbeck begins telling us. “Adult Swim pitches the game to Valve, Valve says Adult Swim can’t publish Paranautical Activity onto Steam because they ‘don’t want to send the message that developers can use publishers to get around the Greenlight system’.” While that seems fairly reasonable, looking to protect the integrity of the service and the values of consumer-driven, meritorious publishing, it does appear to be punishing a developer for making a game that was attractive enough to garner publisher attention. The tale didn’t end there though.
“Eventually we get greenlit on our own and make it onto Steam Early Access,” Maulbeck continues. “In the first hour on Steam, we make more money than the previous six months being on every distribution platform we could find. Once we’re finally ready to release the full version, we find out Steam doesn’t allow us to release on nights or weekends, so we postponed our release date to compensate, and when the time finally comes they don’t properly mark the game as fully released”
It was at this point that the accumulated frustration came out in a torrent on Twitter from Maulbeck and led to his now infamous attack on the Valve chief. While the ultimate end of this episode cannot be justified, it’s clear to see from this story how some of Steam’s processes and policies might confuse and infuriate developers just trying to get their games out to the biggest audience possible. Failure on Steam can feel like a body blow and anything that stalls or hinders your chances of being seen by the Steam community can be catastrophic.
Steam is this incredibly perfect system where everything exists to reinforce its stranglehold on the PC market,” claims Maulbeck. “A downloadable client, which is required to install and play any of your games. A client that pushes crazy sales every few months to make sure that you have as many games as possible in your Steam library so cutting the cord is as hard and painful as possible. An integrated friends list, which is required to link up with your friends in many games, and hell, probably is the only contact you have for a lot of your online friends. You’re rewarded with cards by playing your games on Steam, which can be redeemed to get cash off games, or personalise your account and ‘level up’, both of which serve only to deepen your investment and dependency on Steam.
“They’re even forcing indie devs to drive traffic to Steam. A dev can’t just release onto Steam and promote whatever platform gives them the best revenue share, first they need to beg all their fans to go vote on Greenlight, which of course requires a Steam account. I feel like a conspiracy nut talking about all this stuff, but this kinda thing doesn’t happen by accident. Valve are smart. They know exactly what they’re doing.”
This obviously implies a quite deliberate policy of controlling the market and building the Steam powerbase, which is no great surprise. But not everyone looks upon these structures as negative. “Steam is by far the best network I distribute through,” Sean Edwards, Shovsoft founder and lead developer, insists to us. “Being able to distribute Steam keys through other vendors as well makes the whole process of keeping the game updated through one source a godsend. Having to create multiple builds and Installers for other stores every time a patch is rolled out is time consuming and sometimes not worth the effort given the small amount of revenue.”
Chris McQuinn, designer at Guacamelee developer Drinkbox agrees. “One of the pros we’d list as a studio is that Steam is incredibly transparent, and more than anything, it’s sensible. It allows us to log on immediately and see our sales for the day, change prices, and do anything we want. It’s so easy to use.”
“It’s more straightforward than the traditional console platforms, and less straightforward than mobile platforms,” Sigurgeirsson adds. “On the other hand, on mobile you have very little contact with the platform owners, since you do everything yourself. I’d say it’s a scale with mobiles at one end where everything from deployment to sales tracking is automated, with perhaps Nintendo at the other end of the spectrum, where many things are cumbersome but you instead have splendid individuals helping you out.”
Sigurgeirsson’s Image & Form have seen success and failure with Steam having had iOS success Anthill rejected by the platform and later seeing great results from SteamWorld Dig on the service. As such Sigurgeirsson has quite a balanced view on the good and bad of the services Steam provides. “I believe we’ve been really lucky with our personal contact at Valve, and that this is a key factor to having a good experience on Steam,” he tells us. “He’s very quick to answer e-mails, reasons with us and suggests what we should do and how we should do it. He’s also frank when delivering letdowns. At one point I was asking for a Daily Deal, and he told me that unfortunately Dig hadn’t reached the sales levels yet at that point. I was quite saddened and thought the door had closed, but as sales continued we reached a point where we qualified. I’ve heard from others with managers that don’t seem that interested, which obviously must be very frustrating: you think that you’ve got it made, and then very little happens.”
Clearly the latter was much more like Maulbeck’s experience. “The interface is horrible and over-complicated on the developer side, they’re slow to respond to questions/complaints, things frequently break or don’t work right, to which you will either get no response or they’ll just tell you not to use whatever you’re trying to use that’s broken,” he reveals. “They make decisions seemingly at random. Every decision more idiotic and contradictory than the last. A game gets a publisher to avoid the slog that is Greenlight? Don’t let the publisher put the game onto Steam even though they’ve published dozens of games onto the platform before because they don’t want publishers using Greenlight to ‘prey’ on indies.”
At the other end of the spectrum, Edwards feels things have been improved greatly since his earlier Steam experiences. “In 2012 when I first put Lunar Flight on Steam I had to upload new builds to an FTP and send a tech support email to have it updated. Likewise for any store page changes I had to request them. Since then Valve has improved the pipeline significantly putting all the controls of the store page in the hands of the developers through the Steamworks web portal. Likewise uploading builds now uses ‘Steampipe’ which automatically creates and uploads an update reducing patch file sizes.”
“Steam is huge, only a small percentage of the audience needs to like your game for you to do all right,” Sigurgeirsson reminds us, but there are some peculiarities of the Steam audience you have to contend with too. “On the whole, Steam consumers will wait out your game until it’s on sale. They have gotten used to it and know that very soon after release they won’t have to pay top dollar for a game. They don’t have to, since many of them have already bought more games than they’ll be able to finish during their lifetimes. That means that some time after release, when the diehard fans have picked it up, your game will more or less flatline between sales.”
So, it’s a platform you have to be on as a developer; in some respects a holy grail, but simply publishing on Steam isn’t the end of the journey. There are hurdles to leap, contradictions to navigate and winds of change that may make it an unpredictable place to publish. Steam can have a huge impact on a game, and it wields a huge amount of power, but that brings us back to the key question: is it too powerful?
“There’s no question that Steam is too powerful,” Code Avarice’s Maulbeck responds. “It’s impossible to not use Steam as a professional developer, and damn near impossible not to use it as a player.” However, Image & Form’s Sigurgeirsson thinks Steam is a power, but not one that’s looking to create a monopoly. “They’ve carved out a (very big) niche for themselves, and even other players on the same platform, such as GOG and Humble Store, can co-exist with them,” he tells us. And Edwards feels if it’s become a powerhouse, it’s a well-deserved position. “It certainly has a huge loyal user base and I believe that is due to the respect they have earned as a company. If Valve ever sold out to another company with different values then I think it would be something to be concerned about.”
McQuinn has a more pragmatic view of Steam’s increasing power and influence. “Steam is a company, so ultimately they can do what they want. People might not think some of the things they do are fair, but we didn’t vote Steam in – they’re a privately-owned company, and there are alternatives, so if people don’t like what they’re doing they’re free to go elsewhere. Everyone’s allowed to draw the line in the sand, and we’re free to criticise where that is, but it’s ultimately Steam’s choice. That’s that.”
As McQuinn points out, Steam isn’t the only option out there for PC developers or consumers, though, as a number of competitive options have emerged in recent years. “Humble shows the most solid numbers of any non-Steam I’ve worked with, and they’ve got those super lucrative bundles every now and then,” Maulbeck tells us. “I find loads of people use itch.io to donate to developers, paying way over the cost of the game. They’re insanely easy to work with, too. I’ve heard GOG is Steam’s strongest competition sales wise, but I can’t speak to the validity of that since I’ve never worked with them. Really you should try and get your game on as many storefronts as possible. Pretty much no matter where you go you’re not gonna sell nothing, so they’re all worth working with.” Certainly Humble has proven to be very attractive to consumers, offering great value bundles of classic or Indie games that can compete with the regular Steam sales and GOG is looking to offer similar bargains on a regular basis, drawing in more interest.
Lunar Flight developer Edwards doesn’t seem to feel the alternatives are as attractive as a developer though. “There are a quite a few other Online Stores but none of them have the same market share that Steam has. As an indie developer with a ‘niche’ title like Lunar Flight, Steam is the only one that makes decent revenue. In fact 95 per cent of the revenue [has been] from Steam and it is available from around ten different online stores.
“A large part the reason people only want to use Steam is because they have accumulated a large library of software,” Edwards continues. “Many people feel having multiple Digital Store clients like Origin and Uplay is inconvenient. Steam also has very good social community integration and I doubt any competitors will be able to attract people away from where their friends are.”
For Sigurgeirsson, it’s all about finding a place where you can stand out from the competition, whether that’s on PC, mobile or somewhere else. “As a former mobile-only developer frustrated with the congestion and the race to the bottom, I didn’t view Steam as the monster to flee from. Two years ago, people were sceptical when we told them that we were making a game for the Nintendo 3DS, but I reckoned it was better to be a growing fish in a small pond rather than starving to death in a red ocean. We weren’t making money on mobile, and neither were most of the others. I didn’t see the 3DS as “our” platform either: as long as we made good games we would have ample space to release to other platforms as well. One successful release often leads to another, and that’s how I plan to continue.”
On the whole, Steam seems to be doing most things right. Greenlight is giving developers a chance by letting the community decide if they’re worth supporting, it’s introducing indie studios on an equal footing to the big publishers and it rewards developers with a good cut of the sales from games on the platform. But, the process of approving and rejecting games is clearly still not clear. That Newell had to step in to revive Hatred’s Greenlight campaign is evidence enough of that and as the platform becomes larger and moves into the living room with Steam Machines this year there’s only going to be greater scrutiny on Valve’s policies and processes. Valve hasn’t had the experience as a service provider that the likes of Microsoft or Sony have over the years, but it’s managed to become a massive player in a short time all the same and maintained the respect and admiration of gamers too. How it uses that influence in the coming months and years is going to be very interesting to see as the possibility for more controversies like those discussed will likely increase.
You can read plenty more about Valve’s amazing games in our FPS celebration, Trigger Happy, available for iOS devices now
