They make billions in profit, fuck off with it being fair.
Comment on Steam Is Run By Fewer Than 80 Staff, Lawsuit Docs Reveal
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 1 month agoit’s hard to argue that Steam sales cut is fair
It’s actually pretty easy to argue it’s fair once you look at everything. Steam offers a shit ton of resources for that 30%, including hosting, distribution, patching, workshop, etc. And that’s not even getting into the fact that the dev can get all of that AND get steam keys that they can distribute themselves (meaning valve doesn’t get a cut of that) that still utilizes the same infra.
I wish I could find it, but I recently saw a video of Thor (@piratesoftware, does his own game deck and used to work for Blizzard) talking about this and going into even more detail than I can remember at the moment.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
bizarroland@fedia.io 1 month ago
Making money isn't evil.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Making billions always happens at the expense of people like you and me.
PythagreousTitties@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Show us on the doll where the Valve hurt you
PythagreousTitties@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Waah it’s not faaaair!
Fair isn’t a thing.
ZeroHora@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Blame the game not the player, it’s not like they are doing some next level weird shit like all the competition does. This rigged economic system allowed this situation.
misk@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
The cut would be less if competition was possible. I will bet my arm, first child and souls on this.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 1 month ago
And you’d lose all of that.
Competition isn’t possible? EGS is an active competitor that only takes 12% and they still can’t get fucking anywhere because their store fucking sucks. GoG exists and also takes 30%, their store/launcher are ok, but they don’t offer nearly as much for that 30%, but they make up for that with drm free games. There are other minor players out there, so competition is definitely possible, but not one of them offers a comparable product.
The only way steam would lower their cut is if someone came along and made a game store that actually offered a significant portion of the services steam offered and was about as good but also had a lower cut of sales. But good luck finding someone who can do all of that and also takes less than 30%.
misk@sopuli.xyz 1 month ago
You don’t seem to understand what a monopoly is. Having some small competition that’s not ever going to threaten you because you can leverage your dominant position is also a case of a monopoly.
Epic poured billions of Fortnite money with little to show for it. How is anyone going to compete with a platform that most gamers have all of their games on? This is why they need to be broken up or brought to order via regulations. Companies are not your friends.
rtxn@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Success is not illegal. Valve isn’t buying up smaller competing storefronts, or paying off developers for exclusivity, or burying competition in legal fees and prepared 80-page lawsuits. The only thing holding back real competition is the competing platforms being dogshit.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 month ago
How is anyone going to compete with a platform that most gamers have all of their games on?
They could offer their games DRM-free, guarantee that their multiplayer games have LAN or provide servers and/or at least provide that information clearly the consumer, write an open source drop-in replacement for Steam Input and Workshop, guarantee more uptime on their matchmaking/friends servers, retain old versions of games that they distribute, and allow for user-customized or open source clients to fit all sorts of UI preferences, off the top of my head.
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Epic poured billions of Fortnite money with little to show for it.
Yes, Into fortnite, not EGS. The eggs spent all their money on timed exclusives instead of a better product, and that’s why they failed to make a steam competitor.
Kedly@lemm.ee 1 month ago
You dont seem to understand what a monopoly is either since steam isnt one
NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 1 month ago
As an Indie dev, a 30% cut of profit could be the desth of my one man studio (if I ever get around to actually starting it)
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Ok, so then handle all of that yourself at cost. Which will lead to the death of your studio faster?
Seriously though, a $15 game selling just 100k copies is still $1m to you (before taxes) and has no upkeep. You do all that steam does yourself, you’re going to drown in operations costs and upkeep time.
bizarroland@fedia.io 1 month ago
I agree with you but at the same time I feel like I should point out that this is the China fallacy, where there's a billion people in China and if you could just tap into even 0.3% of their market you would make bank.
While it's technically true, the fallacy behind it overshadows the difficulty of acquiring that percentage of the market. The grand majority of games released never become cash positive, and over 50% of games on steam alone never make more than $4,000.
https://vginsights.com/insights/article/infographic-indie-game-revenues-on-steam
This is not an issue with distribution, it's an issue with marketing and market fit, and accompanied by the base fact of that if you're the kind of person who is good at making games, it would be a rarity for you to also be the kind of person that's good at marketing the games you made.
Those are two entirely different wheelhouses that function best with two entirely different personality types, and that's not covering all of the different disciplines that you need to make a game or run a game making company in the first place.
Kedly@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Use Steams competitors then if you don’t want to pay Steams cut. If you’re getting less overall from them, that tells you all you need to know about the validity of Steams fees