Why the heck should you pay to develop games for wii u?
I understand steam’s 100$ price tag. they don’t want garbage on their platform.
Because setting a price point like this creates a barrier to entry limiting the number of titles flooding the market. It all goes back to the Great North American Video Game Crash in the 80s. Nintendo is the company that turned things around. They did this mainly by two things: first they only accepted certain games and those games displayed the Nintendo Seal of Quality. The second is companies had to license the right to develop games for the NES. These two things together created a minimum standard for quality and a barrier to entry to keep the amount of titles to a certain number. Basically these two things were to prevent the two biggest factors that caused the crash: Low quality games and too many games released too quickly.
Probably more than you cared to get but there it is. I am thinking the price in part may be due to that line of thinking still being present at Nintendo. On the other hand, it could be they actually give you some hardware and software they feel is worth $1,500. 
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Its funny everyone is so OBSESSED with steam. PC games were selling like hotcakes with an entire industry around it well before steam came along. Steam is just one of many portals, and there are a TONNE of games being sold on PC from people’s websites and other places. Remember there are more than a billion PC’s out there, not to mention also adding in all the mac and linux users. What, selling directly on PC is old school now? Have you any idea how many people actually still buy pc games, especially the huge volume of casual game players?
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Discoverability. Steam brings a lot of eyes with it. If you don’t have a built in fan base and don’t do marketing well, then Steam has the potential to get your game in front of a lot of customers.
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In addition to the discoverability aspect of Steam, there is also the trust aspect. A lot of end users trust Steam more than some unknown website. This is especially true now with the addition of refunds at Steam.
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From what I can tell, http://itch.io/ is a good option if you just want to throw a game up without needing a full site in place. Haven’t heard any horror stories at least.
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Pretty much everything needs you to pay to develop on it. Or be a successful developer already for console. steam greenlight gets the worst of it because their only gate is $100 and community votes.
Jim Sterling has an itch.io series now
I almost wasn´t sure if this was sarcasm or not…
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Steam’s Greenlight is flooded with crappy games. Since adding a $100 license fee, they did nothing.
Itch also lets devs take payments directly. No chance of the site going bust and creditors getting dev revenue.
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Although I agree with the general sentiment, this isn’t entirely true. Apparently before the fee there were people putting up games they didn’t create that they just happened to want to see on Steam. Like Minecraft or whatever. At least it stopped that.
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I remember that. Half Life 3 jokes were around every corner on a Greenlight page
Steam is still the biggest market with over 125 million active steam accounts.
But even with that without the pr your going to sell not that many, probably the numbers will start falling as the number of game starts to increase to mobile figures. news
Before doing that you should mention that the 2015 European VAT law is applicable if you take payments directly. That’s why Itch.io implemented in January the recommended option to let the website collect the money first and then the dev asks for the money to Itch so legally you are in a B2B transaction and not a B2C (unless you want to comply with heavy rules).
To bring back the official documentation:
http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/taxation/vat/how_vat_works/telecom/index_en.htm
Damn, that reminds me I have to fill in my quarterly VAT report 
Exactly how do you think billions of dollars were made selling pc games before steam?
I think it’s fairly obvious we are talking in the context of indies/hobbyists and not EA/Activision/etc. hence the ‘build in fan base and don’t do marketing well’ part of my statement.
Steam basically creates a middle class for quality game developers. If you make a good game, do some decent marketing, you can earn decent money just by using steam. In the past before steam, a person with a similar game would get almost no sales.
There are always going to be lottery ticket winners like Minecraft, but steam just raises the floor significantly for serious developers who don´t win the lottery.
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And how many of those billions went to indies? because that’s the context here.
That’s a fantastic way to put it.
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Call me old fashioned but if a game has steams name on it I dont buy it. They may have a huge client base, but they are as disliked like Radioshack due to their bad reputation and look what happened to Radioshack? Steam is so hated that steam has gone a step further and sell full box games without the box mentioning their name at all then the person opens the game and finds
the dvd to not be a game at all but a steam installer. My bank fully refunded me for 5 games when they saw this. If people go out of their way to buy a box game, unless its a mmorpg, we want the game full and no third party log in.