Xbox Empire

[derpysquirtle64]

shikamaru317 said:

Raven said:

I think that if anything Microsoft could create a better scaling system where profits up until a certain point have less of a cut taken from them to help the smaller devs, but then big players like CoD will still have the typical cut taken because they'll always be bringing in more profit than that threshold.

Exactly. They need a scaling system like Valve has now. 30% cut is far too much for small niche devs, including many JP devs, and is chasing them away from the system, and that situation will only get worse when they can release on Windows Store for 12% and skip Xbox Store due to it’s 30%. Disgaea 5 already skipped Xbox but released on Windows Store, we will see even more JP situations like that in the future if something isn’t changed.

I believe that Valve sliding scale is:

-20% cut up to $1m in revenue

-25% from $1m to $10m in revenue

-30% above $10m revenue

Copying that would work well for winning over more niche devs, especially niche JP devs. Or they could improve upon it further with:

-12% up to $1m in revenue (matching Windows Store)

-20% from $1m to $10m in revenue

-30% from $10m revenue up

That way the niche JP devs and indies aren’t so adversely affected, but Microsoft still brings in big revenue from the AAA 3rd party games.

Quite ironic, but as far as I remember in Valve case, they take 30% for all games and 20% if your revenue is more than some value. Very strange approach that benefits the big sellers but not as good for small developers