Dude, unless you’ve ever tried publishing your own game you should stop parroting stuff you hear online. I’ve released a (borderline shovelware) game I made for educational purposes, and steam is god damned amazing and has such good support for a novice like myself. On the complete opposite of what you’re claiming, the gamers and indie companies stand to gain the most from a service like steam.
It’s not surprising that it’s more or less only people from huge companies like blizzard and Ubisoft who complain and try to gaslight Valve. If I were to release a game again I’d rather publish it on steam if they took 60% of the cut than anywhere else. (Unless you want to pay me a godly amount of money for exclusivity Epic Games, then hmu lol)
You would have the same service if you paid 5% or 60%, steam is ridiculously profitable.
I’m a consumer and I care about the industry, I won’t shut up just because you made one shovelware game and tell me to. This is literally against your own self interests, are you sure you aren’t the one parroting stuff valves marketing team drilled into you?
Explain to me how regulations and limiting the rate to 5% wouldn’t be a clear cut benefit to everyone involved including you. Do you think they go bankrupt? 336 employees and 8000 million. And no, their hardware cost for hosting games does not come close to costing 8000 million.
Great, give me an alternative then.
Afaik, except for steam only Itch even has a native Linux client for starters? EGS is a pos software that doesn’t even have an “appear as offline” mode and bleeds money while still taking a 12% cut. And Epic is not a small indie company trying to break into the market.
Steam workshop, their VR integration, their work with Proton for Linux, Steam marketplace, the ease of generating keys for resellers without the 30% cut, great mobile app/interface, actually good storefront browsing, the list just goes on with things Steam does better than any competitor, and that’s just a few examples of where the 30% cut is going (ofc they still make absolute bank on top of this).
But regulating this to something insane like 5% would definitely make us lose out on several of these features, not to speak about future features.
regulating this to something insane like 5% would definitely make us lose out on several of these features, not to speak about future features.
They would still have more than a billion in revenue. Steams is running on insane profits and it would still be running in insane profits at 5%. Look through the document posted and do some napkin math. Even at 0.5%, Gaben would still be able to buy a yatch, just maybe not the six like he currently owns. That isn’t an exaggeration, he owns six yatchs and spends between 70 million and 100 million a year maintaining them. That is who you are defending.
