Do You have any idea what the hosting infrastructure, steam works, and traffic costs?
Yeah, not 30% of all PC games. It’s how they turn out absurd profit.
Never said that. But what is better for the dev? Using those services or run their own?
And I am fine with Valve making absurd profits, after all, they have put at least 500.000.000 USD into open source (Around 100-200 external oss devs on payroll for projects like Mesa, SDL,…).
Will I leave steam and call valve out if they get toxic? Yes! Are they evil or the enemy right now? To the contrary.
Using those services or run their own?
If they could have still images and text on the Steam store and a link to their external site for everything else, it’d by far be running their own.
It’s the exposure that Steam has an effective monopoly on.
With Amazon and eBay fees for physical products being nearly that high it just doesn’t feel that absurd to me.
Games haven’t risen in price, ever. Gamers should be paying $100+ for most games now. That’s the truth. The amount of man hours, time, etc etc to make a game? Fuck that no wonder why games suck now! I’m a full time 3D artist and I would absolutely never put a game out unless it was a passion project because gamers don’t want to pay what these things are worth anymore!
Why do you think there’s so much bullshit nickle and diming in this industry? Because they can’t raise the fucking price! So they found the worst way to do it through login incentives, monthly seasons, and garbage dlc that should have been in the game to begin with.
GOG takes 30%, most publishers take 30 to 50%, apple app store takes 30%, as does Google.
Is this to high? Maybe, I don’t publish games. But at least it is not absurd in means of industry standards :(
GOG’s fee is flexible, as are publisher contracts, which have no relevance to the discussion, as it’s in addition to store fees and involves major investments. Google is changing its fee to 20%. Epic’s is currently 0%. Microsoft Store’s is 12%, itch’s is adjustable. In the PC market, Valve is pretty much the main outlier at this point.
It’s the exposure that Steam has an effective monopoly on.
See OP image. It’s an effective monopoly because the competition have dumped billions into squandering decades of consumer goodwill.
What would be better for the dev is a 9% platform cut and just a slightly smaller megayacht for Gabe.
architect@thelemmy.club 32 minutes ago
That absurd profit is really from that digital trinket store/gambling bs.
30% for a digital storefront? Cheap for what they provide. Y’all really need to understand how bad it is out here. Go look at what Amazon takes from authors. eBay takes 30% from me sometimes! That’s a real physical product i have to ship!
30% to valve for what they offer? Yes, absolutely a good fucking deal. They will market my game and make it look as best it can on their storefront. That is absolutely worth the cost.