Ok let's say they were to disclose where all the sales come from.

And such sales did attract the attention of many tax authorities. (based on whether there are Double Tax Agreement with the respective countries)

Work to provide such documents to each tax authorities would be very heavy.

2ndly, there are trade secrets in such documents, Valve would definitely have the right to remove certain portion of the documents.

Then tax authorities would take their time to analyse, understand the business model and try to look for the relevant laws applicable to it. If law not clear, use cases and etc.

Then discuss with Valve.

Very long process not to mention expensive to Valve.

Note that is a very simple explanation.

If I were Valve, I'll do the same, won't disclose unless requested by different tax authorities.

This post has been edited by kianweic: Apr 22 2011, 11:05 AM

I think you hit the nail on the head the first time out - that there's no point in them disclosing numbers. It has absolutely nothing to do with taxes. When they make their filings domestically, their returns will contain that information. Based on their turnover and revenue, I'd say that they would probably have to do full segment reporting for both geographic and product segments. However, this information would probably not be very useful to the industry press and fanbois alike. (<---ex chartered accountant here).

Is anybody actually asking for that, as in the geographical breakdown of sales? I thought the issue was just with the overall sales figures.

That was my initial impression as well.

it just sounds fishy too me.
from what i know, Distributers usually reveal info on total sales, so developers know how well are they doing on that platform, and they could cross check if the sales, tally with the revenue they recieved from the distributer.

Publishers will naturally share the sales info to their own developers internally... I'm pretty sure Valve is doing the same. Publishers announce them publicly because they are publicly traded companies (Unlike Valve, which is a private corporation) and have to do so by law.

That's why the original "non-news" article which started this anyway just states that valve is not providing data to a so called video games chart. The publisher knows exactly how much he is earning from steam, he just doesn't know how much everyone else is earning. Basically because it's none of his business.

If you really wanted to know how DD was doing compared to retail, then you would have to aggregate all the individual publisher's accounts which i'm sure (if they were listed) would contain a breakdown of sales from DD/retail.

Still no weekly charts though.

well i do understand the circumstances companies needs to protect themselves. But as a developer, could u trust all your distributer data?

Yes you could, such companies normally have controls in place to assess the completeness, accuracy and valuation of the data. One control that we have seen is where steam has run out of keys especially during a sale.

By that logic, do you think developers get sales numbers from traditional retailers directly? TSB doesn't publish numbers at all even.

Ahh but when we're talking about traditional brick and mortar and physical products, the control is actually in the publisher keeper records of how much stock they have sent out, received, cash received etc, ie physical controls.

With DD its intangibles so there needs to be something worked out between steam and the developer/publisher.

Probably only way to find out is to submit your own game for steam certification.

Yeah I know. But he was insinuating that the publishers "lie" to their developers about sales and retailers/DD providers disclosing the sales figures publicly would counter that.

It would be a pretty big expectation from DDs if traditional brick n mortar companies didn't even do that.

This post has been edited by H@H@: Apr 22 2011, 12:27 PM

http://goodfriday2011.com/

Hmm looks like steam going to release some sales tmr

i was also wondering how many units of games portal 2 sold compared to crysis 2 since they are both neck and neck in steams top sellers chart. I'm sure portal 2 is miles ahead of crysis 2.

the top seller chart calculate in revenue not unit

Wow, first time I heard that.

So it means if a game goes on sale and tops the chart, it actually makes more money than any game that sells at full price. Good to know the publishers that are lenient enough to give us sales still make loads of profit.

Is anyone facing this issue?

Download 400mb + update / files for Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes.

This post has been edited by kianweic: Apr 23 2011, 12:13 AM

Nothing much to see in Steam for now except these 2 below.

Fate of the World | -33% | $6.69
RailWorks 2: Portsmouth Direct Line | -20% | $31.99

What was all the Railworks DLC worth again?

$1198.31

where is the god damn easter sale?