Valve just made a change to how it splits up revenue from games on its Steam platform that will share more money with developers.
Valve announced the change Friday night, which details updates to its distribution agreement and reveals a new revenue share tier system. After a game makes more than $10 million on Steam, 25% of earnings will go to Steam. At $50 million, 20% will go to Steam. This includes revenue from game packages, downloadable content, in-game sales, and Community Marketplace game fees. This is for revenue from Oct. 1, 2018 and onward, but will not take into account any revenue made prior to that date.
Prior to this change, Steam would take about 30% of all revenue, as noted by The Verge. This was largely true across the board at any revenue level, with exceptions only made for smaller developers that participate in its Steam Direct program, which allows new developers to easily submit their games to the platform.
The move comes as more competitors look to dismantle Steam’s dominance, which for a long time was the main source of PC gaming. EA, one of the largest game developers, has its own Origin platform, Discord, a chat service used heavily in the gaming community announced its competitor The Discord Store just over a month ago, and more developers are self-releasing titles to avoid splitting its revenue.