John Gibson of indie developer Tripwire Interactive has come out in defence of Valve and the Steam platform, countering Randy Pitchford’s ”money grab” comments last week.
The Gearbox boss also said Valve were ”exploiting a lot of people”, but Gibson says ”if it weren’t for Steam” they’d have nothing, that ”brick-and-mortar” publisher deals ”terrible”.
”Is Valve exploiting independent developers? In short: absolutely not,” Gibson wrote on Gamasutra.
”As a small independent developer that has released multiple games on Steam, we are exactly the type of studio that Randy believes is being exploited by Valve,” he said. ”Additionally, as president of Tripwire Interactive, I’ve personally been involved in all of our business deals with Valve and have experienced firsthand how they treat independent developers.”
”Without pulling any punches, I can say with certainty that if it weren’t for Steam, there would be no Tripwire Interactive right now.” Traditional publisher deals would have crippled the studio team he explains, they’d have to sell hundreds of thousands to make anything.
”In the early days, when we were shopping our first game Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 around to traditional brick-and-mortar publishers, we were shocked at how terrible their proposals were.”
”We were getting pitched offers like, “We’ll give you a 15 percent royalty rate, take the IP rights to your game, and slap a $1.5 million administrative fee on top of your recoupment costs.” And deals like this were being offered for a game we funded ourselves!”
”With deals like those, we were wondering how any third-party developer could be successful in the game industry. Under the terms of that deal, we would have needed to sell hundreds of thousands of units before we would have seen one cent of royalties. Enter Steam.”
It’s an interesting read alright, a perspective ”from the trenches.” Gearbox’s Pitchford has been countered and balance restored to the Valve universe.
”…the next time someone wants to say that small developers are getting exploited by Valve, I suggest they talk to a few first,” added Gibson.
