HoSpanky wrote on Oct 29, 2024, 11:05:
As soon as ANY other platform has even half the functionality and features that Steam has, then this doofus' argument might hold water. Show me one other storefront with:
Something akin to Workshop.
Native VR support (not just asking someone else's storefront to do it for them).

Yep. Really great features when you are publishing games without modding/workshop support or non-VR games. Who doesn't like parting with 30% for useless shit?

Come on, dude. What is this? Communism? One for all, all for one? Fuck that shit.

Steam's 30% fee is preposterous. It might have been justified 20 years ago when Steam were the only guys and when the number of customers and transactions was small so you had to earn a lot of dinero to cover the costs.

But that was 20 years ago. Steam has become a behemoth with billions of transactions per year. The costs have actually decreased because broadband has become so much more affordable (gigs like Steam just buy Exabyte packs for el cheapo). Servers are much cheaper thanks to virtualization. You no longer need a 19" rack for each individual server.
The gross costs have naturally risen because of the sheer scale of the operation nowadays but the costs per transaction or per customer must be a tiny fraction of what they once were back in the early 2000s.

All of this was also a topic on a recent episode of German DevPlay and those guys (the head honchos of KingArt and Black Forest Games) also agreed unanimously that Steam's 30% cut is completely insane in 2024.
The 30% was actually established by Apple before Steam ages ago and everyone else just copied that model and barely anyone ever adjusted it for transaction growth, customer growth and sinking costs per transaction.

That is why Steam is as obscenely rich as they are and why they are regarded as possibly THE most profitable company (per employee) in the world. Steam would very easily still be extremely profitable if they would charge the same 12% as EGS. They just choose not to because Gabe likes money (a.k.a he's one greedy bastage).

P.S.: Well, OK, technically Steam has caved under Epic's pressure and they have that layered revenue system now where $10+ million revenue you "only" need to part with 25% and $50+ million revenue it is "only" 20% and there are rumors that the big guys like EA, Ubi etc. came back to Steam because of even better conditions so that's a start, I guess. Even Valve/Gabe are probably embarrassed at their own highway robbery cut by now. Rightfully so.