alt Hacker NewsThey also nickel and dime the adults, but only the ones who make the games.
It's fine though, because they're nice to players and they've brainwashed them into giving their money to Valve instead of to the developers who actually make the games they fucking play.
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I agree that 30% is too large of a cut, but what would be appropriate? 15%? Steam does add a ton of value from an immediate audience, solid advertising opportunities, and amazing distribution for the developer.
Developers choose to give Steam 30% of their revenue because they know the steam channel increases their revenue by more than 30%. Doesn't that make it a good deal for developers?
When I'm interested in an indie game, I always go first to the developer's website to see if I can just buy a copy directly from them. The vast, vast majority of the time I have to buy it through Steam, maybe Epic, and itch/gog if I'm lucky. It's vanishingly uncommon for them to host the game themselves.
Plenty of devs choose to sell on other platforms or directly and do fine. Steam doesn't have a monopoly on games the way Apple and Google do
All distribution channels that existed before steam are still available. Multiple competitors to steam are available.
My understanding is the tools that Steam provides as part of it's developer platform are top notch. And there are a lot of integration points such as cloud saves, social, match making, achievements, store, and so on. There is also a robust CD pipeline.
I can easily see this providing value above and beyond most other retailers that would sell video games. For example, Best Buy takes a 30% cut for physical merchandise, without providing any of the above mentioned features.
Nah, I'm happy to pay the guild, they put that 30% to good use. I just wish their partner portal wasn't a gigantic pile of crap in return.
You can choose to not host your game on steam. Plenty of developers do.
Again that old, tired argument. nobody has a gun to the devs head to force them to sell on steam
Without steam, I'd still be playing my CD version of Homeworld 2.
I have paid $10 for every $1 of game I play, perhaps as high as $100:$1. A 30% cut of that seems totally reasonable. I have hundreds of games I keep just in case, and have played 10s of games I'd never have considered because they dont appear in Game Informer, PC Gamer, GoG, Twitch, Youtube, or other channels. They just are magically brought to me by steam, and I buy it and try it because I'm an adult now.
If game creators hate this, I feel bad for them, but I don't want anything to change as a consumer.