[AmVess]

25% is a steal. They handle all the financial transactions and host and distribute the game files on the most popular client on the planet. They also handle the security.

Handling your own billing is expensive and time consuming. Setting up your own distribution and hosting is also expensive and time consuming, and then there's the bandwidth cost.

All this adds up rather quickly. Having someone else do the business end of selling games, and only for 25% is a bargain.

[MattRix]

It's not a steal at all. Those things (especially stuff like hosting and bandwidth) cost a small fraction of the price. You can argue that it's worth it because of how popular Steam is, but it's getting harder and harder for smaller devs to even get seen by that large audience in the first place.

[kkarakk]

As a layman gamer who has only used steam as a consumer - This comment ignores the ground realities of Steam having a seemingly endless amount of trash. i logged on and wanted to play a game with wallrunning and a cyberpunk aesthetic and i only found ONE that was worth playing out of the seemingly thousands of options.

Game developers on steam seem to release what they want to not what the audience wants in the vast majority of cases. Couple that with amateurish quality and it's actually easy to be seen if you choose to cater to the non oversaturated categories imo.

[MattRix]

> it's actually easy to be seen if you choose to cater to the non oversaturated categories imo.

You're wrong, but sure.

[ehsankia]

Steam provides many other things too, past CDN and billing. They provide a game hub, steamworks (match making, voice communication, friends list), workshop, cloud saves, advertising for your game, and much more too.