[georgeecollins]

When they established a 30% fee they were on the cutting edge of digital stores and doing something very risky. So to make what they made work was great for small developers.

I would argue they still aren't evil (and Apple is, though I am a shareholder) because Steam, the Windows store and Epic can all live together on my PC as competing store / DRM. If a developer doesn't want to give up 30%, they have viable alternatives.

[BobaFloutist]

Developers can also absolutely just sell exes directly from their website, or on itch.io.

Is it a great way to get publicity? No. Is it a perfectly reasonable way to sell a game? Yes.

[kemotep]

Hacker News has dozens if not hundreds of threads about people complaining about bandwidth costs on their static blog going viral and getting inundated with views. Some games taking up 100+ Gb and getting millions of downloads for week’s can’t be cheap.

[infensus]

Making people think that you need to pay for bandwidth is the greatest scam pulled off by AWS

[crtasm]

If people like your game they'll seed it for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent#Software

[BobaFloutist]

I mean if the cost of the game doesn't pay for the download cost that sounds like an arithmetic issue.

Also, what small-time indie game is >100gb?

[kemotep]

?

This is a thread about steam charging a 30% cut and people asking about what costs they could possibly have?

If Steam didn’t take a cut then they would not be able to pay for bandwidth. And even a 100 mb indie game downloaded a million times is still a lot of bandwidth times that by tens of thousands of games and it’s more than just games, screenshots, saves, mods, forum posts, video trailers, patches, etc.

A one time sale of a 4 dollar game that could support 100 gb worth of mods with being able to delete, download, and reinstall dozens of times has ongoing costs.

Selling on your own website, yes, you should be able to cover sending your own exe 100gb or not with each sale.

[johnnyanmac]

>Selling on your own website, yes, you should be able to cover sending your own exe 100gb or not with each sale.

I think the point was that if you were hosting independently, your video game isn't going to be 100+ GB. You will handle the costs or build it into the price of the game.

Dunno how thin margins Valve operates on, but I think they can survive on less than 30%, especially since they offer lower rates to AAA studios.

[BobaFloutist]

Oh I was agreeing that Steam provides value, and supporting it with the suggestion that if they didn't people would opt out and just sell games without Steam.