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That lawsuit against Steam’s 30% cut of game sales is now a class action, meaning many other developers could benefit
(www.rockpapershotgun.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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It's a monopoly on exposure.
The infrastructure and services they provide (outside of an advertising monopoly), do not cost, and are not worth anywhere near 30%.
Think about how much effort and time goes into developing a game, and then think about how much time and effort go into hosting the download files for that game and providing a forum. It's not 30%.
They should get more than credit card transaction fees, but nowhere near 30%. I expect Epic would be quite profitable at 12% if they hadn't invested in a terrible exclusive strategy that people hated.
You think all Steam does is distribute files?
They distribute files, automate one click installs on Windows/Linux/Mac, they automate compatibly for non-Windows installs, they offer cloud saves, and they offer unlimited downloads and installs of games.
That's a massive amount of infrastructure that makes sure games sold through Steam are playable for decades.
If you remember before distribution platforms you would see a game for sale at full price on disk for 6mo to a year, then IF there were any disks left they would slowly decrease in price until they eventually hit the $5 bin. After that the game was just unavailable to you and not generating any revenue for the developer.
On top of all of that, 30% is the cut that Physical stores take while offering NOTHING to the devs.
On top of that, the 30% the physical stores take doesn't cover the extra overhead of stamping, shipping, and storing physical media, so the devs are ahead there even if they get nothing else out of it
You clearly have no clue what running a robust, globally distributed file delivery system takes, even if that's all they did (and it's nowhere near all they do)... It's hardly "[no] cost".
You missed some context. Maybe you had issues with the sentence structure. My bad.
I was about to reply with something nasty but read it again, and I see what threw me off
To be fair to myself, it is a bit of a tortured sentence structure and not that clear, but to be fair to you, I've written plenty that make perfect sense to me at the moment that's hard for others who don't already know what I'm saying to follow
Anyway, I still assert that it's a lot more than maybe you realize, but I see you weren't trying to claim it cost nothing, so sorry for responding that way