Who said anything about costs/bills? I’m talking about excessive wealth extraction. If a group of people gets massively wealthy by taking lots of money from other people, one should wonder if they really need all that money.

If the amount of money massively outweighs your bills, then I would say yes. Also if your “bills” are extreme luxury, then even without that. We really need to stop with this massive wealth inequality. Our economy works on transactions. If the profit margin on any transaction (including labor) is exorbitantly high, then something is going wrong. An investment banker is not more valuable than a teacher. A CEO is not more valuable than a janitor.

Exactly. The question is how much is really necessary to operate that service. We as a species really need to stop thinking about constant growth and more and more wealth, and that includes growth and wealth that is “reasonable” compared to other extremely greedy people. Right now it looks like Steam is growing to infinity and making more and more money. They’re the same like everyone else trying to make more and more money. Of course they’re more ethical and they return value for that money, but they’re still part of the same system of infinite growth that is not sustainable.

This infinite growth is happening because they extract more value than they require. If they extracted as much value as they require to sustain their business, they wouldn’t grow. But of course constant growth is what everyone expects and thus no one sees a problem with it.

I see it as stealing.

This is a thread about how Valve makes over 8 billion dollars despite basically all their revenue coming from an in-game store that sells other people’s content. Of course its too much.

Steam is the only store putting the customer first. The refund policy is top notch. Heck just making proton, giving gamers the choice of os, is the best thing for gamers since computers was invented!

https://youtu.be/gwoAmifo9r0

You pay less because you get less. I’m selling a product. The last thing I’m going to cheap out in is sales. I’m not going to see great sales from the EGS because A)Nobody uses it

That’s exactly it, Devs have to accept Steam’s cut because it’s essentially the only place you can sell things. It makes logical sense, but do you not see why this is a disadvantageous position for the Devs to be put in?

It’s like trying to sell your hand made Combs. The gas station on the corner is happy to take only 20% of the profit. They’re all over the place and accessible. But you really want to sell it at the boutique shops because they have more comb-seeking customers.

This would be a fine analogy, if there weren’t a single digit amount of storefronts. Steam and EGS are more equivalent to supermarkets. Sure the odd person is going to go to speciality stores on occasion, but the vast majority of sales are done through supermarkets. Steam is a supermarket competing against speciality stores. The only other real supermarket in town is EGS and as you’ve discussed, it’s such a dumpster fire no one shops there.

I’m not disagreeing that Steam deserves its position, it does for sure. But we live in a world where it has no meaningful competition, and one of the ways it exercises its position is by maintaining their 30% cut. A cut which was established by stores that had to manage the logistics for real physical copies of the games.

My point is that there isn’t a reason that Steam has such a high cut, other than it wants more money, and has the market saturation to command more money

What point? That you’re a corporate bootlicker?

By charging 3% instead of 30%? Do you really think their servers cost $8.5b? Does the work to distribute a game and process payment equal 30% of the labor required to make a game?

A more advanced answer would be a cost plus profit model, so if it costs Valve $1 to transfer 1TB of data transfer (in terms of server costs), then charge $1.10 for 1TB. That’s obviously very difficult to calculate though I bet Valve has some internal metric of costs.

Valve today does the exact thing Unity was trying to do, charging a percent of revenue for providing infrastructure. Unity got raked over the coals for it.

Okay Valve is also a publisher but how many games have they published from outside developers? The only one I can think of is Garry’s mod and a Portal spin-offs. So it’s virtually impossible to get your game published by Valve the publisher. The person above said that Valve takes a 30% cut, they were obviously referring to the store fee. But then you replied “don’t work with a publisher then” Which doesn’t make sense since Valve only publishes their own games.