this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
650 points (96.2% liked)
Technology
59997 readers
2198 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
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
No harm meant. I do think Steam is the golden example of a big business done right. All I'm saying is that there's room for improvement.
We can make an educated guess. Amazon's S3 charges roughly $0.025 per GB, so an 100GB game would cost $2.50 for Steam to upload to a user. For a $30 game, that's around ~8.5% or just over 3 downloads before it's unprofitable.
Obviously Valve isn't paying consumer level S3 prices, and obviously users can download multiple times. But I would be extremely surprised if they didn't make a rather large margin on each sale
Total fair always room for improvement, no ones perfect.
Appreciate the good discussion!
For storage or for download?
Download. It's also rounded up. Storage is negligible compared to bandwidth, especially considering Steam's business model