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Steam is a video game digital distribution service by Valve.

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Tim Sweeney emailed Gabe Newell calling Valve 'you assholes' over Steam policies, to which Valve's COO replied internally 'you mad bro?' (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

To be fair, Steam provides a lot more than "just being a storefront". There's large feature set there in Steamworks which is 'free' for developers to use.
The game developers would probably spend more than 30% of revenue hosting their own game on their own store, so the value is there already.

It would be strange if Valve's cut went up the more money your game made, but it would be better for independent developers.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

To be fair, Steam provides a lot more than "just being a storefront".

Meh. I wouldn't call it "a lot". And most of the hardware they've made has been a huge flop, SD being the (amazing) exception.

The game developers would probably spend more than 30% of revenue hosting their own game

...what? How do you figure that?

[–] [email protected] -2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

That tells me you don't understand what they offer or the value of it.

And if you think hosting a CDN across the world is cheap, you have a surprise coming. Ignoring the fact Steam has a large audience and hosting your own game would bring in a lot less revenue than you would through Steam (even with the 30% cut), it's a lot of work to host and market a game online. If there's updates, you have to alert people the game has been updated and direct them to download it again.

Valve Index was successful, Steam link was great, Steam Deck is great, the Steam controller was good in it's own right and it's trackpads are now one of the best features of the Deck. They can experiment with hardware because of the profits, they can afford for them to "flop". Now Linux gaming is a lot better because of Proton too.

Not that I agree with the 30% cut in it's entirety, I think they could subsidise more for small independent developers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

You know nothing about Steam's operating costs.

Computers cost what they cost, it doesn't matter who owns them. You're deluded if you think Valve's profit margins are not enormous when they make more money per-person than Apple.