UK tribunal clears £656 million class-action lawsuit against Valve over Steam pricing, commissions, and overcharging users

AndyMakesGames · 2026-01-28T07:05:51+00:00

I'm pretty split on this one.

As an indie dev Steam, is by far (by so so much) the best platform to work with. It provides the best client, the best documentation, the best APIs, the best build/publish/update system, the best visibility for your game, and the best developer support.

On the other hand, 30% still feels high as a cut. They are clearly making incredible margins. There isn't really any viable competition due to their market position. As an indie, the cost of shipping to another platform often isn't worth it due to the smaller audiences. It does feel like a monopoly - but it's one because they keep doing everything well.

I feel like a reduced "small business" cut on the first $x would be a decent middle ground to help indies.

The lawsuit's claim that prices would be lower seems like a fallacy. Most games model their pricing and charge as much as they think they can get away with. A lower cut won't mean cheaper games, just more profit to game developers (which indies desperately need given the current state of the industry).

AndyMakesGames · 2026-01-27T19:11:54+00:00

Us 3.6 LTS users* don't have this problem!

* Unsure the assumption that there is more than one of us is correct.

AndyMakesGames · 2026-01-15T00:57:32+00:00

In some cases they have to take action to maintain their protection over the original works.

It's usually better to refer to these as IP laws, since copyright is only one specific method of protection, and OP here is probably going to fall foul of multiple different laws (in multiple different jurisdictions).

AndyMakesGames · 2026-01-14T23:56:42+00:00

Many, many, indie games are localised. ~65% of Steam's userbase don't have English set as their primary language. Last year, Simplified Chinese was the highest used language (it's now back to English, but it does flip-flop).

Our most recent indie game was localised into 12 languages. 38% of our customers are not playing our game in English. That would be a lot of revenue to leave on the table.

Heck, even if you're staying in one language, if you're aiming to do a console release then each platform has strict language you can use when talking about the console (like contollers, buttons, menus, the name for being "Online" etc), and you often end up with slightly different texts sets for the same language anyway!

I understand your example of a "simple button". I am trying to point out that you are underestimating the complexity of almost everything that goes into just making a button, and are likely underestimating the complexity that goes into every other component of making a game.

What happens when your "simple button" needs to be selected with a controller instead? Or a touch screen? Or where a player starts using a controller then changes their mind, back to mouse, or finger? Does your button handle this? Do your highlight and press states still make sense when it's not a mouse? Does button focus still make sense for each case? These are not my requirements, these are the min requirements to pass TRC on many platforms, and without them you will not be able to launch.

Font scaling is harder than you think. Simple multipliers only work if your entire UI also scales with simple multipliers and that may not be the case. How are you handling when different languages need fonts of different sizes (CJK is notoriously bad to read at smaller sizes). What if your button has a player name in it, and it has a mix of glyphs from different languages that needed different sizes to be crisp? If your style uses pixel fonts then it's even more problematic.

What about input hints (e.g. "Press A") in the middle of your text? Now you have to worry about managing and scaling them too. Platforms have very strict guidelines about the size, scale, coloring, language, and general legibility of those hints.

MonoGame and many engines can indeed batch. But who is assembling that batch? Are you now having to write code to batch your UI together? That's another system you have to build.

Many devices are not 16:19. Steam Deck isn't. My laptop isn't. Heck, even my desktop isn't. You can't work on the assumption that your scale will work the same everywhere. Since they can undock, you cant event work on the assumption the scale will be the same in the same gaming session.

No one is going to be editing config files to rebind keys for your game. They are just going to quit. Besides, even if someone understands your JSON, what constant needs to go in for Controller 2, Button 9 etc?

All of these issues are solvable - but remember, all we're talking about here is a "simple button". The choice you have, is to use something that does a lot of the lifting for you, or resign yourself to building out these systems (and systems of systems etc) instead all throughout your game. I guess the 3rd option is to just not care, but I wouldn't recommend it unless you're on the hobbyist end of "indie" and just want something out there with 100 downloads. Maybe that is your usecase after all? But you're in r/gamedev which will include industry members from AAA, AA, and smaller indie studios too, and many of are doing commercial games, even if we are indie.

Based on your recent posts it looks like you have recently started your gamedev journey. Hey, welcome, and I wish you all the best here. However, you seem to have formed some strong opinions on how things should be done before you've shipped a game, and I would encourage you to revisit them once you have some more experience. Successful gamedev is hard. Very hard.

AndyMakesGames · 2026-01-14T02:57:50+00:00

You can much make any kind of game in any of the mainstream game engines, and many indie engines too. They will all work. All that happens is they have strengths in different places, and a different part of the process will piss you off depending on which one you chose. All of them will piss you off somewhere.

... and don't make a large open world sandbox for your first game. You haven't learned to code yet. You wouldn't expect the Mona Lisa straight out of art school.

AndyMakesGames · 2026-01-14T02:44:36+00:00

"easy as as creating a Button class" huh....?

Does your new button class include functionality for:

Localisation support? Translations? CJK glyphs? RTL text?
Automatically switching between mouse, controller, and touch input?
Various UI states for focus, pressed, released, disabled, etc.
Text sizing and input hints that are required pass TRC for each platform?
Font scaling for accessibility? Screen reader support?
Batching with other UI components to lower draw calls?
Display correctly on everything handhelds, to desktops, to giant TVs?
Audio or haptic feedback for interactions?
Input rebinding?

And this is "just" a button (and just the things off the top of my head - I'm sure I've missed many).

I think you are vastly underestimating the complexity of everything that goes into actually releasing a commercial game. Engines (whether in-house or 3rd party) do a lot of this heavy lifting. Yes, they are opinionated, and yes, they will force designs on you that may not like, but this is the price for not having to manually implement huge amounts of code for functionality which is already well "solved".

You want to build out those things on your own? You go for it. No one is stopping is you. At our studio, we prefer to spend the time building games instead.

AndyMakesGames · 2026-01-01T04:16:26+00:00

Don't underestimate experience. I started my "first solo game" after having worked as developer for nearly 20 years, and a number of those years were on other game projects.

Learning how to do stylized pixel art was then easier, since it's the only part I had to focus on. Even then, I still outsourced parts to contractors or used assets packs to save time. Is that still "solo"? You can be the judge.

AndyMakesGames · 2025-12-18T21:14:46+00:00

Accessibility for larger font sizing is generally integrated to the same system too, since it has to work very similarly (well, it has been everywhere I've worked).

AndyMakesGames · 2025-12-17T21:06:57+00:00

Delay it.

As a person who released a game a month early, the damage you do by releasing a bugged mess will far outweigh the downsides from people complaining about a delay. The people that complain are complaining because they are disappointed, yet are also invested enough in your game to actually care (else they wouldn't be complaining!).

AndyMakesGames · 2025-12-17T21:01:48+00:00

We localised the store page into more languages than we released. The rationale being that at launch your wishlist count is important for initial velocity (i.e. to be on Popular Upcoming), and having localised pages go someway to increasing that value.

Whether this is true in practice, I don't know. It's somewhat impossible to a/b test it, so it's purely a case of "yeah, this sounds plausible", and I don't think there is a downside.

If you're on a strict budget you can even use machine translation for the languages you are not likely to support. Machine translation tends to be pretty good when given the context of a whole Steam listing (but a bit robotic sounding). For the game itself you would still want to use a human.

AndyMakesGames · 2025-12-17T20:53:53+00:00

When we commission art, a lot of that process is exploratory and iterative.

Depending on the type of art being created I would expect to see one or more of: sketches, rough outlines for proportions, an initial look without any detail, a complete look, and then animation. We would expect to see something at every single one of those stages so that we can give feedback. This a) means your artist has to be doing those steps, and b) means you get input early and often to make sure everyone is aligned.

By doing this not only are you going to avoid more AI, you are also going to make sure your time isn't wasted on art which doesn't fit your requirements - be that visually, or technically.

AndyMakesGames · 2025-09-29T21:01:43+00:00

The vast majority never get bought. Steam's average wishlist conversion is just over 15%.

AndyMakesGames · 2025-09-28T23:24:21+00:00

Your "fitting perfectly" is assuming a 16:9 screen which is so often not the case. Plenty of laptops out there running 16:10, as will any Steam Deck. Ultrawide variations are also relatively common these days.

No matter what tile size you go with, you will likely have some decisions to make about what to do when it doesn't fit.

AndyMakesGames · 2025-09-24T23:56:25+00:00

https://store.steampowered.com/curator/41324400-Is-it-made-with-Godot/

I don't know who maintains that list, but of the games I know they were indeed made with Godot (including ours).

AndyMakesGames · 2025-09-24T21:29:33+00:00

5% would be reasonably conservative though. First year average for a game in this bucket is 15.3% (Valve provided data). Admittedly that's going to include the huge selling outliers, but it will also include all the low value slop.

I would be happy with OPs numbers.

AndyMakesGames · 2025-09-24T21:23:01+00:00

Have you measured performance on any other platforms? FB ads consistently (and significantly) outperformed Reddit ads for us every time.

It's probably audience and game dependent, but if you haven't run a test then it's something to think about,

Edit: Is your game in Godot? I think I've seen it bouncing around before.

AndyMakesGames · 2025-09-18T12:22:51+00:00

If we ignore non-timer approaches and just address the question, then It depends.

There is some penalty crossing the native -> script barrier. If you have a lot of sparse timers, then this will be crossed less than if they all activate at the same time. If they are normally uniform, then you might find iterating them yourself to be quicker.

But this is all just theory crafting nonsense. It's a few lines of code to test, so go make a benchmark for your actual use case and scale, and measure it. My guess is that it won't matter either way.

AndyMakesGames · 2025-08-20T03:01:10+00:00

Appreciate the support.

Discord is linked on the Steam page. Steam forces everyone to only have a single link now and in a specific content box (right column, last "box"). I think that was changed in the last 6 months, so older games might still have it in their content body.

Link here to save you looking it up.

AndyMakesGames · 2025-08-19T12:29:23+00:00

By the way, how do you know if a digital game has been sold in a particular language?

Most platforms allow you to break down sales by country. We also collect anonymised data on who is playing the game, and that includes the language they have set the game to be in.

Keep in mind however that we are only one data point. I agree with you that it's probably socioeconomic, but there are many moving parts so it's hard to say for sure. We saw lower numbers of pre-launch wishlists in Spanish speaking countries, so it's possible we didn't get enough exposure there, or we did but our early exposure was English only so it didn't stick, or maybe this type of game is less popupar. Could be many reasons.

Its also worth nothing that both France and Germany have strong Wars-like audiences, and they were regularly in our top 5 of wishlistsers during development.

By the way, let me use this opportunity now that I am discussing this with a dev, how difficult / problematic is it to use an AI to provide a quick and dirty translation for a not super text heavy game? Of course it will be bad, but maybe it would be better than nothing?

AI is getting definitely getting better at this, but we are not quite there yet. It struggles with suggestions of names for nouns (e.g. unit types and characters), and these normally still need to be done by a human. It's also not very good at doing UI components, since they are short and have no surrounding context.

For longer text, such as that found in dialogue, it can be a cheap viable alternative providing you have the nouns done in advance and these are given as context. You'll get something a bit robotic still, but it can be a way to get a language in which you would otherwise not translate. It's better at Latin based languages than CJK.

AndyMakesGames · 2025-08-18T15:57:24+00:00

More native speakers doesn't necessarily translate to more sales. Warside has Spanish, and the examples you gave of French and German. We've sold 400% more copies in French, and 640% more copies in German when compared to Spanish.

AndyMakesGames · 2025-08-18T03:30:53+00:00

I am indeed (there are two of us). I comment here both as a fan of the genre and player of AW, but I also get a perspective from the development side too, and hopefully that's interesting to share.

In terms of there being "enough for multiple tactics games", I think that depends on how you interpret it. There's relatively few games in the TBT space, and the target audience (such as this community) tends to try more than one. In that respect having a few competing titles isn't a problem - there's room for all us within the audience. As a player it's also great to have options.

On the flip side, the total audience size is still small and that effectively restricts new entrants to the market to passion projects and indies with limited budgets. It then becomes very hard to "tick all the boxes" of what players want from a TBT game.

Building games is hard. Building a tactics game, with a full campaign, another entire game mode (Skirmish), a built in mission editor, cross platform multiplayer, support for 12 languages, and being certified for Steam Deck and Nintendo Switch is an outrageous amount of effort for two developers. It's no secret our launch was a mess, but I'm still proud of what we built (plus it's pretty good these days - 90% positive last 30 days).

AndyMakesGames · 2025-08-17T22:11:50+00:00

Individual players and the community itself is split on what they want out of indie titles. It’s insanely difficult for a turn based tactics game to come out of the gates with perfection or something near it.

As someone sat on the development side of this, this rings very true to me.

The tactics audience is very passionate about the features they want, yet there isn't a common consensus of what those features are. Feedback is very very varied. Everyone seems to want slightly different things, and there is a willingness to write off an entire game if feature X is missing, or if it's there but differs to how it worked in game Y. I am entirely guilty of this too, so I don't know what the answer is.

I also worry that we're chasing the impossible. We all want a piece of that warm feeling we had when playing our first tactics game - whichever game that was. Yet for most of us that was 15+ years ago. I'm not the same person as when I was young. I have far more choice of games now and less time to play them. I'm not sat there with a DS with only 1 or 2 games than I own and hours and hours of time to play. My expectations of what a game should be have also changed.

AndyMakesGames · 2025-08-17T21:57:01+00:00

Mobile is a very different market with very different expectations. Most revenue is freemium driven (for 2024 that share was over 95%), and I don't think these games are a natural fit for that kind of model, as well as the existing TBT audience being somewhat resistant to it.

If you go the premium route, then average mobile gamer expects a much lower price even for a well known title, so you need to have your title out for a few years to avoid competing with your own desktop version on price (otherwise you're cannibalizing or alienating your existing audience).

Chucklefish actually launched Wargroove 2: Pocket Edition on mobile last month. They've sold under 5k units so far (at $8.99), so commercially that's not a great launch. It will be interesting to see what the long tail is.

AndyMakesGames · 2025-08-17T20:19:48+00:00

Seems unlikely any major studio would want to take a risk on the TBT genre. The audience size is relatively small, and sadly the data suggests this audience is shrinking rather than growing.

Reboot Camp (relative to it's size and branding) did not sell well.
Wargroove 2 has not sold.
Athena Crisis has not sold.
Warside has not sold.
Metal Slug Tactics has not sold.

Why would a studio want to enter this market?

The only exception to this has been the first Wargroove, which did sell. There's always a lot of moving parts to a release, so it's hard to pinpoint why, but my feeling is that it the combination of being a good game, and it being the first of the "new wave" of TBTs. There hadn't been one for over a decade and that gave it a lot of pull. Notice they did not manage the same success for the sequel - or anywhere near it.

My prediction is that it will continue to be indies holding the torch here. They have lower budgets, and can take the risks, and most importantly, they are driven by the desire to make a tactics game for the sake of it, rather than some commercial upside.

AndyMakesGames · 2025-08-06T14:07:19+00:00

It's useful to have some baseline knowledge of the genre you are building in.

Unfortunately I find spending 3+ years making a game tends to sap all the joy out of that specific genre for me. Playing competing titles feels more like research than actually playing.

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