this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
1461 points (96.1% liked)
Lemmy Shitpost
39015 readers
3922 users here now
Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content.
Anything and everything goes. Memes, Jokes, Vents and Banter. Though we still have to comply with lemmy.world instance rules. So behave!
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means:
-No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
If you see content that is a breach of the rules, please flag and report the comment and a moderator will take action where they can.
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
1.Memes
10.LinuxMemes (Linux themed memes)
Reach out to
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules. Striker
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.
See OP image. It's an effective monopoly because the competition have dumped billions into squandering decades of consumer goodwill.
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