this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
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Some day, Steam is going to enshittify, eat game devs for breakfast, and all these Steam fans will wonder how anyone could have possibly seen this coming.
Kind of like a certain online bookstore named after a river.
Not that I don’t enjoy Steam. But I trust them as much as any corporation: not at all.
Hearing those arguments for how many years now? Right ...
The day Gabe is bo longer there things may get ugly, may.
But, Valve is not publicly traded, or has to cater to shareholders in any way. That is the reason they are still who they are.
They run a good service platform and aren't as greedy as they could be, but they're still not safe.
Use them, but no fangirling. They're a business.
I'd be completely in agreement of what you are saying if it wasn't for the fact that there are so many people acting like Steam is the worst platform in existence every time they get brought up. People are awfully quick to suck Tim Sweeney off for only charging 12% and fill up the comments with whatever the opposite of "fangirling" is.
Yeah, that’s going too far, but I understand the reaction to fanning over Valve.
There are a bazillion historical examples of why one should use, not trust, big businesses. They are entities to make transaction with, not people, and they will tighten the screws even if it takes decades.
This is doubly true in the software business.
And if the Valve superfans look at the world in 2026 and somehow don’t see that, I honestly don’t know what to tell them. They’re in such a completely different world than me I don’t know where to start.
Just ignore those people and keep the shilling to a min, that's all I'm saying. No they're not the worst thing ever, they're actually pretty good in a lot of ways, but they are a business and they do have a bit of a monopoly going on.
They get a free game and they turn into $2 hookers over it man. It’s insane.
They already take 30% on each game. It's huge, considering they didn't spent a dime on these games. That means they will take most of the profit margin on a game, if any, while a studio has to pay for dozens or hundreds of employees, tons of hardware, workspaces, etc.
Do You have any idea what the hosting infrastructure, steam works, and traffic costs?
Also, valve is giving massive contributions to open source from those 30%
Yeah, not 30% of all PC games. It's how they turn out absurd profit.
Never said that. But what is better for the dev? Using those services or run their own?
And I am fine with Valve making absurd profits, after all, they have put at least 500.000.000 USD into open source (Around 100-200 external oss devs on payroll for projects like Mesa, SDL,...).
Will I leave steam and call valve out if they get toxic? Yes! Are they evil or the enemy right now? To the contrary.
What would be better for the dev is a 9% platform cut and just a slightly smaller megayacht for Gabe.
If they could have still images and text on the Steam store and a link to their external site for everything else, it'd by far be running their own.
It's the exposure that Steam has an effective monopoly on.
Not everything has to be black and white. I appreciate Steam, but 30% is absurd. They're absolutely raising the price of games and taking money away from developers.
GOG takes 30%, most publishers take 30 to 50%, apple app store takes 30%, as does Google.
Is this to high? Maybe, I don't publish games. But at least it is not absurd in means of industry standards :(
GOG's fee is flexible, as are publisher contracts, which have no relevance to the discussion, as it's in addition to store fees and involves major investments. Google is changing its fee to 20%. Epic's is currently 0%. Microsoft Store's is 12%, itch's is adjustable. In the PC market, Valve is pretty much the main outlier at this point.
See OP image. It's an effective monopoly because the competition have dumped billions into squandering decades of consumer goodwill.
So, Apple and other companies that charge 30% to host apps: BAD
Steam changes 30% to host games: GOOD
I'm not saying this is your argument, necessarily, but it's funny to hear that "30% is good actually!" in the tech space because the last few years it's been "Apple and others who charge 30% are taking too much! All they do is host and manage the traffic for apps!"
And I'm not trying to say Apple is good or anything. It's just funny.
Valve is one of the most profitable company in the world.
https://www.itidings.com/news/valves-17-billion-revenue-projection-puts-gaming-giant-among-the-worlds-most-profitable-companies/
I mean, just look at this thread and see how much free propaganda they get from gamers. That's a lot of free labour just to defend a billionaire that profits from gambling for kids.
What exactly is this the answer to?
Yes, they make a shit load of money. But assuming you want to distribute a game directly, how much of would that cost you, and let's ignore the whole visibility shit for a second.
Honestly not that much. The biggest thing Valve brings to the table is advertising and access to customers.
Hosting doesn't cost that much. If you were that desperate for bandwidth (no one is), torrents exist as an option. Blizzard used to have torrents built into their downloader.
The infrastructure is a nice afterthought.
My day job is designing complex IT platforms.
And the cost goes massive down with size.
So. If your game sells badly, you will most likely spend more. Oney in hosting and distribution then you would make profit.
For example, assume your game has around 50gb. You sell 100 copies of it. You can easily calculate 1-2$ per download.
Add your own personal on top of it, someone has to run that stuff, and licensing and more for statistics tooling and more.
Platforms like valve allow indie devs and small studios to avoid all those costs upfront.
"Not that much" depends on the view
Everyone in here is just choosing a different flavor of billionaire to get behind, though.
Epic is not a co-op, lol.
They help market the game as well on their storefront, and im sure all the analytics around the steam pages for the game.
They could just let you rot in obscurity.
They provide forums and a place for mods to work as well.
They provide chat/friends
There definitely is some amount of expenditure by valve. I don't know if its 30% worth. For multiplayer games they provide a server/client DDOS protection and traffic optomization service though it is opt in by the developer through an api. The other option for this tends to be a "contact sales" priced product from cloudflare. There is also some of proton's development, some linux graphics driver work, and workshop support though I suspect hosting and content moderation expenditure there is fairly minimal.
Brick and mortar stores take 50% of revenue usually. The profit margin for the manufacturer applies after that
Those studios are paying Valve how much for tailored marketing throughout the game's lifespan?
30% of all their revenue throughout their entire lifespan.
Precisely.
So... what? Hate them in advance, so that if they ever turn evil we'd be prepared?
Be prepared.
Don’t hate, but don’t trust Valve. Treat your Steam library like you don’t own it, and it could be enshittified at any time, because you don’t, and it could.
In practice, prioritize DRM-free stores when convenient. Or better yet, 1st party game dev stores. Archive any games or saves you actually want to go back to, just in case. Game like your Steam client install could require a subscription at a moment’s notice.
Amazon was toxic from day one, anticompetitive, borderline illegal, definitely corrupt as hell. It is what Epic Games Store would have been if it had been long before steam lol. The amount of shit that they bankrupted into the ground with cheap Chinese copies off the backs of VC funds while making tons of loss and then removing their storefronts...
But as soon as GabeN dies, steam will become shit probably as the vultures close in.
It really puts into perspective the importance of supporting free software. Even after Valve goes to shit, their contributions to the ecosystem will live on.
It's why the average sheep can never see the value in free software; it keeps them dependent on corporations.
Amazon enshittified with their one-click-shopping patent, though. They were never good.
Amazon was always publicly traded, so it was always going to get worse. Steam is privately owned by Gabe, and is therefore more resistant to enshittification. Unless Gabe sells or dies, Steam's pretty safe.
I got bad news for you. Gabe is human and barring a miracle in medical science; he will die. He's 63, the tables on Age Cohort death aren't kind after 60. (They're brutal after 70) Only 1/3rd of men reach 80.
This is something we need to be thinking about now. It could easily take 5-10 years to get competitors working.
Gabe still owns Valve not shareholders. It's after he dies that gets me worried simply because he's way older than me. I buy GOG these days but mainly because Valve is American and I don't trust their government to not interfere long term with what Valve can and cannot do or host. The DRM is less of a pain point because I'm a skilled pirate and data hoarder.