Is Steam the “good guy” in all this? Of course not.
Too bad a lot of people, even here or in other threads, don’t get it, so they willingly cheer for Valve simply because Tim Sweeney sucks.
As per my understanding (which isn’t saying much), Steam takes a 30% cut of each sale. In UK, someone with a specific agenda claimed to represent gamers as a class and sued reasoning that the 30% cut inflates the price of games globally even beyond Steam’s store, harming everyone.
Did i understand it right? No idea. What’s the actual goal here? Also no idea. Is Steam the “good guy” in all this? Of course not.
Adeptus_Obsoletus@piefed.social 17 hours ago
KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 17 hours ago
I think devs actually get quite a bit for that 30%. Let’s present a hypothetical. What if Valve offered an option where you could list your game on Steam with no restrictions and they’d only take a 10% cut, but the tradeoff is, they won’t promote your game at all? Like, it won’t show up in any Steam storefront advertisements, can’t participate in sales, etc. - it’s still there if it’s linked to from off-Steam or if someone searches for it, but it won’t be promoted, period.
How do you think that would work out for developers? I’d argue not well, especially for small studios.
The promotion those games get applies to the game as a whole, not only through Steam - someone can see the promotion on Steam, then go shop around and buy it elsewhere. Why should Valve promote a game if they aren’t getting a cut of the sales?
lofuw@sh.itjust.works 17 hours ago
Well that’s stupid. If Steam charged less, the price of games wouldn’t change.
Developers and publishers would just pocket the difference.
Lfrith@lemmy.ca 4 hours ago
Best example is Ubisoft and EA when they took their games off Steam and Epic wasn’t around but didn’t sell their games any cheaper despite 0% cut. Or Final Fantasy 7 Remake released as an Epic exclusive, but was priced at $70.
It is weird. Every other product people know that companies want to charge as much as the market will take to maximize profits. Most noticeable examples being GPU prices over the years and now ram and storage.
But, gamers for some reason think companies want to price things lower as though game companies are so noble they escape the greed of capitalism to seek out exponential profits.