this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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Why should valve, or sony, or Apple, or Google get 30% of the revenue of entire industries for having a download and payment service.
It's extortionate and undeserved. When I play a game I absolutely love, one third of the money for that game didn't go to the people who made it, it went to valves endless bucket of money. It's not right and we should not be defending these extremely high cuts.
When you buy something at the store, did you know that in most cases the company selling probably saw less than half of what you paid? What if they don't have it in stock?
steam provides a ton of benefits at scale that would have probably eaten up more than 30% of the price for the game company, with the ability to instantly scale with no limitation if it picks up in popularity.
If I buy a single player game, more than likely, valve is making entirely profit on that 30%. The cost of the download is below a penny to valve. Yet they still get s third of that companies revenue.
Charge them for the services if you want. They aren't doing thst, they are taking 30% of an industries revenue for doing nearly nothing.
And Valve has other bills to pay, servers to run, employees to pay. Software to develop, did you think all of these great features Steam has were free to develop? Incidentally, remember when Valve released their in house animation software for free when people asked to buy it?