[gamblor956]

The costs aren't 30%.

Assume a $50 game. 100,000 sales. 5 gigs.

Storage and bandwidth = $28,000 (per Amazon's calculator) Cost of doing business in N countries = use paypal = 2.9%+0.30/sale = approximately $1.75/sale = $175,000

Costs = $203,000 Revenue = $5,000,000 Ratio = 4.1%

So yeah, Valve is not the shining knight here and that 30% fee is unjustifiable. Even Epic's 12% share is still very much profitable for Epic.

The 30% fee is also nowhere comparable to wholesale pricing schema of the retail model (effectively a 40-60% fee), since that involved the sale of physical copies of goods, and the retailers had to deal with issues like shrinkage and the risk of unsold inventory.

[zlsa]

I don't have any numbers, but I would not expect the median sale price to be anywhere near $50. I'd expect there to be more sales of <$30 games, as a percentage of revenue, than >$30 games. And the cost of distribution goes up relative to the cost of the game as the sale price goes down.

[learc83]

Assuming the sale price of the game in the OP's example was $10, distribution still cost less than 3%, and paypal goes up very slightly because of the $0.30 base charge, but the main fee is percentage based so it doesn't change. So even for a $10 game we're looking at less than 9% in total.

This example is also using s3 retail pricing and paypal retail pricing, which already factors in profits for Amazon and Paypal.

None of the big marketplace's costs are anywhere near 30%.