this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
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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.
Ask devs which platform performs for them.
0% cut sounds nice until you sell nothing.
Same with the rest.
Oh yea I’ve got a platform right now that is charging 0% (out of the goodness of their heart I’m sure LOL yea right) and I make… nothing! Nada! Why? Because no one fucking wants to buy through them!
Meanwhile the platforms taking more are paying the bills and more.
See OP image. It's an effective monopoly because the competition have dumped billions into squandering decades of consumer goodwill.
With Amazon and eBay fees for physical products being nearly that high it just doesn’t feel that absurd to me.
Games haven’t risen in price, ever. Gamers should be paying $100+ for most games now. That’s the truth. The amount of man hours, time, etc etc to make a game? Fuck that no wonder why games suck now! I’m a full time 3D artist and I would absolutely never put a game out unless it was a passion project because gamers don’t want to pay what these things are worth anymore!
Why do you think there’s so much bullshit nickle and diming in this industry? Because they can’t raise the fucking price! So they found the worst way to do it through login incentives, monthly seasons, and garbage dlc that should have been in the game to begin with.
And 30% of the purchase price doesn't go to those people. It goes to Gabe's yacht.
That absurd profit is really from that digital trinket store/gambling bs.
30% for a digital storefront? Cheap for what they provide. Y’all really need to understand how bad it is out here. Go look at what Amazon takes from authors. eBay takes 30% from me sometimes! That’s a real physical product i have to ship!
30% to valve for what they offer? Yes, absolutely a good fucking deal. They will market my game and make it look as best it can on their storefront. That is absolutely worth the cost.
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.
So you're not really saying anything at all then. Got it
Then you need to read better.
They are calling out the hypocrisy of those criticizing Apple but worshiping Valve using the same argument for both.
Exactly.
No one needs to worship Steam. Gabe will never let you on one of his 50 yachts.
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
You can litteraly watch 45gb movie instantly over torrent these days.
Because p2p ... How exactly does this apply to content distribution? Torrents are not always a reliable option....
There's tons of options to host and share files, torrents are just one.
Steam, like spotify and other platforms is just convenient, and in this era of me, myself and I, it's only thing most people care about.
Anyway, I'm done with the steam fanboys and their cognitive dissonance. Just remember you are directly creating the enshitifcation of gaming, because at the rate studios are firing people, you will soon enjoy only AI stuff, the only way to make profit from games.
So. Hosting shared files is the same as hosting a game you sell. And want the people to buy it and not just download, some kind of at least activation? Right?
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.
They spend money on each game uploaded to their store. How could you seriously think they aren’t spending any money?
You’re more making an argument that games are too cheap now.
You don’t think valve has employees and hardware to maintain?
Brick and mortar stores take 50% of revenue usually. The profit margin for the manufacturer applies after that
You comparing a store with a digital storefront? Anyway enjoy the library you don't own, at best it will die with you because you can't even transfer it, that's if steam doesn't change their buisness model for whatever reason.
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.
30% is the industry standard though, and Valve's contributions of distribution and discovery infrastructure, its audience, and expanding hardware initiatives are not nothing. If you're not pricing a game to give yourself a healthy margin within the 70% or your development model doesn't make that viable, that's really on you.
Industry standard doesn't mean reasonable. It's renter class bullshit, profiting off of other's labor. Pretending creating a distribution and discovery platform is seriously deserving of 30% of the value of the hard work of game devs is not reasonable. If it was reasonable, gabe wouldn't be a billionaire.
I never called it reasonable. I just don't think it's especially egregious. Honestly, I would price the value of Valve's contribution (which is definitely not zero) at maybe 15% to 20%, but that's just a gut feeling.
I mean, Spotify's model is the industry standard, and it still suck big time and doesn't give a shit about artists.
Anyway if I've learn anything over the past 10 years, it's that it would probably be easier to convince a room full of maga to vote for Hillary Clinton than the average gamer to admit that steam sucks. So keep kissing this billionaire's ass because he really does care about you, and remember Ubisoft and Epic (12% cut) bad.
I'm not saying the standard doesn't suck, just taking issue with the implication that anyone using it is uniquely bad to do so.
But yeah, you're right that getting me to admit Steam (overall) sucks would be nigh impossible. I genuinely don't believe it does, so there's nothing to admit. Maybe you could convince me to lie about it though? Lol.
I do admit there's a few places it sucks, the gambling stuff being the biggest, but their positives eclipse those for me. I also acknowledge I'm in a privileged position being able to enjoy Valve's efforts in VR, Linux compatibility, etc. directly and that I might have different opinions if I was on the outside looking in. I imagine that's not quite the admission you want though.
I'm not gonna say Steam sucks. It's a nice organizational tool that enforces some standards.
I'd rather have a drm free game that's 20% cheaper though. The devs can pocket the other 10%.
The "30% is the industry standard" claim is not even true anymore. Epic currently takes 0% to expand its catalog, though from what I remember, it estimated that it needs to take 7% or so to be profitable. Microsoft takes 12%. Itch allows to adjust. GOG's fee varies from deal to deal. Ubisoft (and EA) no longer sell third-party games, so they're out of scope here.
The only way I've seen people try to counter this is by referring to the mobile and console store fees, but going by the Epic v. Google trial where the jury was asked to define the market and defined it as Android, there's just no way that argument would hold water. Still, console manufacturers produce at a loss, so they need to make up for that. In the mobile market, Google is already changing its fee to be 20% or less.
Edit: lawsuit->trial
Yea we are talking about platforms that sell vs platforms that are desperate to sell.
Do you buy games from fucking Microsoft of all companies?!
It’s a joke to think that Microsoft is doing this for any other reason besides they have to to trick idiots into investing into their platform (again after giving it up the first fucking time!)
Gog and itch are fine but itch is definitely a particular gamer market. Gog is easier to use for pirated games.
Challenging biased views, half truths, or having your own opinions isn't kissing some billionaire's ass. I don't want billionaire's to exist. Gabe shouldn't need to be a billionaire. But all of this is absofuckinglutely irrelevant to whether or not Steam is a good platform, unless Gabe was wielding Steam in a way that would promote a billionaire class, which he isn't.
Oh, I didn't know you were a personal friend of Gabe, my bad.
Anyway I don't care about people like you, you are the problem. I care about people looking for solutions to have a healthy and fair industry.
I use to make a decent living out of music and sound design, 15-20 years ago. Then spotify came along and nobody lives from selling music anymore. Now I teach and if I was honest with my students, I'd tell them they are wasting time. Even here in Montreal, with hundreds of studios, there's basically no more job in audio because the only way to make profit out of game is with AI and sound banks. So yeah, enjoy the enshitification of games, you're directly promoting it.
You really need to take a good look in the mirror, because you are reading things that aren't there and embarrassing yourself and the industry you claim to care about.
Lol. blablabla steam is good blablabla good billionaire blabla
If we could collect only 10% of the energy gamers spent on kissing gabe's ass, we could solve the energy crisis forever.
Think of me in a few years, when you complain about studios releasing only AI stuff. And if you have kids, I hope they don't become gambling addicts because I do care about that.
And if gamers actually only bought the games they were going to play and finish, not a single game dev would have a job outside of EA.
Holy shit dude, go to bed and dont text your ex.