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.
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.
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
Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works 15 hours ago
You can litteraly watch 45gb movie instantly over torrent these days.
vapeloki@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Because p2p … How exactly does this apply to content distribution? Torrents are not always a reliable option…
Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works 13 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.
vapeloki@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
So. Hosting shared files is the same as hosting a game you sell. And want the people to buy it and not just download, some kind of at least activation? Right?