this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
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Well, eventually.
When Steam was first released, the running joke was "steaming pile of shit". It was slow, unreliable and only a couple of shades of green away from the worst color in the world. People complained about the birth of "always online" games and about paying full price but not even getting a box with it.
It's not exactly unassailable now either. It's my platform of choice as a user but for indie developers, the 30% cut is brutal and last I used it, the Steamworks SDK was pretty rough. The app itself also has a lot of legacy bloat like a built in MP3 player.
It's ahead of the rest but I think "good will, good prices and good features" might be an overly romantic take on "it's where all my games already are".
Reportedly Epic's 12% barely covers costs and would not if they included transaction fees. 20% seems to be the bare minimum if you want a store to actually have good service, and then I'm giving Valve additional credit for sinking boatloads of money into general infrastructure, in the long term Proton alone is worth those 10%. Much unlike the rest of the stores (exception GOG) which take the same 30% and are run by humongous multinationals.
...and then there's itch.io. If you're a small and scrappy indie very much an option: They're also small and scrappy. And they'll probably shout at you if you try to upload a 20G game I very much doubt their servers would survive an AAA launch. OTOH, reportedly their average revenue split is 8% (customers can choose).
The difference is that Steam sells a ton of copies every single day. The vast majority of Valve's fortune has come from that fee. People jump to defend Steam but it’s already been established by lawsuits against other major corporations that a 30% cut is mostly driven by greed.
The 30% cut was industry standard for digital distribution for years. Google, Apple, and numerous other players all took 30% as standard.
That being said, Steam hasn't taken a flat 30% for years now - their standard agreement starts at 30%, decreases to 25% after the first $10m in sales, then decreases further to 20% after $50m.
Furthermore, Valve has done more in terms of providing services, APIs/libraries, and end-user features (all with no additional fee to the developers or consumers) than any other game storefront has. I'd say they more than justify their cut.
Industry standard by massive corporations synonymous with corporate greed. Boy am I glad the fee decreases after $10m in sales. That will go a long way with helping out indie devs.
It’s okay to like Steam because they’ve provided us with a good way of purchasing and playing games. I like Steam but we don’t have defend things that are obviously greedy.