What exactly is this the answer to?
Yes, they make a shit load of money. But assuming you want to distribute a game directly, how much of would that cost you, and let’s ignore the whole visibility shit for a second.
Valve is one of the most profitable company in the world.
itidings.com/…/valves-17-billion-revenue-projecti…
I mean, just look at this thread and see how much free propaganda they get from gamers. That’s a lot of free labour just to defend a billionaire that profits from gambling for kids.
vapeloki@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works 17 hours ago
You can litteraly watch 45gb movie instantly over torrent these days.
vapeloki@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Because p2p … How exactly does this apply to content distribution? Torrents are not always a reliable option…
Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works 15 hours ago
There’s tons of options to host and share files, torrents are just one.
Steam, like spotify and other platforms is just convenient, and in this era of me, myself and I, it’s only thing most people care about.
Anyway, I’m done with the steam fanboys and their cognitive dissonance. Just remember you are directly creating the enshitifcation of gaming, because at the rate studios are firing people, you will soon enjoy only AI stuff, the only way to make profit from games.
Serinus@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
Honestly not that much. The biggest thing Valve brings to the table is advertising and access to customers.
Hosting doesn’t cost that much. If you were that desperate for bandwidth (no one is), torrents exist as an option. Blizzard used to have torrents built into their downloader.
The infrastructure is a nice afterthought.
vapeloki@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
My day job is designing complex IT platforms.
And the cost goes massive down with size.
So. If your game sells badly, you will most likely spend more. Oney in hosting and distribution then you would make profit.
For example, assume your game has around 50gb. You sell 100 copies of it. You can easily calculate 1-2$ per download.
Add your own personal on top of it, someone has to run that stuff, and licensing and more for statistics tooling and more.
Platforms like valve allow indie devs and small studios to avoid all those costs upfront.
“Not that much” depends on the view
architect@thelemmy.club 15 minutes ago
Everyone in here is just choosing a different flavor of billionaire to get behind, though.
Epic is not a co-op, lol.