[umvi]

I'm happier to pay Valve's 30% than Apple's. With Valve you could always switch to Itch or something if you didn't want to pay, but with Apple you have no alternative. Valve gives you access to a huge player base and lots of useful marketing tools and such.

[ThrowawayR2]

You are happy now and will probably be for as long as Gabe Newell is in charge of Valve. (He's 63, by the way; not quite elderly but not young either.) After he retires, well, Valve, as the dominant gatekeeper for PC gaming, has a lot of opportunities for cranking up monetization that investors would just love to get their hands on.

[scheeseman486]

So it's either choosing to buy from a company that might become public after the owner dies which then succumbs to the rot that you admit is inevitable with public companies. Or choosing the companies that are already public that is already exploitative and only interested in short term gains?

That's actually a very easy choice to make.

[pseudalopex]

Investors did not imply public. Enshittification is not limited to public companies. They did not say it was inevitable. Are GOG exploitative and only interested in short term gains?

[knollimar]

Don't they have a disgusting most favored nations clause that prohibits you from pricing anywhere else lower (e.g. you can't raise price X by 42% and sell on your site for X)?

I think they're being sued over delisting someone for this last I checked, even if their public policy might not interpret their MFN that way

[0xbadcafebee]

> Valve gives you access to a huge player base and lots of useful marketing tools and such.

So does Apple. Despite this, they are both engaged in rent-seeking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking), which has a harmful effect on everyone but them.

Imagine if roads weren't public, but were built by a single private company. You have a business that moves goods by truck. You can use the private company's roads, but only if you pay 30% of the profit of your goods to the company that owns the roads. It only takes 2% of the profit to maintain the roads; the other 28% is profit (rent) for the road-owning company.

You could choose not to use the roads. But then the only way to deliver the goods is by parachute (which may be possible, but isn't practical). So you use the roads. But this means you have to jack up your prices to make any profit for yourself. Competing is much harder (tighter margins), and your customers are paying more than necessary. Everyone's life is harder, except for the road company.

[mjr00]

Except in this example, there is nothing preventing other companies from building new roads. And in fact other companies have attempted to build new roads, competing by lowering the 30% fee to 10%, and even paying trucking companies to start using their roads. Except their roads are so poorly maintained that trucking companies choose to continue using the existing roads despite the higher fee. Also EA made some roads that went directly into the ocean for some reason.

This doesn't match with the definition of rent-seeking at all, as described in your wikipedia link:

> Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth.

To my knowledge, Valve has not manipulated public policy or economic conditions to maintain Steam's dominance. Steam hasn't pushed for legislation to prevent competitors, it hasn't prevented developers from selling their games on other platforms, and it doesn't even prevent you from installing non-Steam games on Valve's own proprietary hardware and operating system.

[roggenilsson]

>Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth

Would the PC video game market be bigger or smaller without steam?

[Loughla]

I think it would be smaller.

While I hate always connected DRM, and lamented the death of physical media when steam got huge (and also refused to get a steam account for years for that reason), we would have multiple shitty stores if steam didn't exist, I think.

Look at epic and all the other distributors. Their stores are terrible and that's with the inherent competition of going against steam. Imagine if they were the only game in town. . .

[Ekaros]

Also looking at history. Download stores run by game stores. Or some startup. Some random extra DRM involved. Shut down in a few years without recourse... Just imagine that repeating every few years. Maybe fine for Linux and Mac users who expect no longevity from their purchases. But as PC user, no not acceptable.

[worldfoodgood]

Ok!

Happier is a fine place to be. They are both still too high. Not everything has to be binary -- I can think Valve is offering some utility and also think that Valve is charging too much for that utility.

The fact that Gabe has a billion dollars worth of yachts probably suggests that maybe, just maaaaaybe, that 30% could be lower and Steam could still provide you the same level of marketing support and player base.

[daedrdev]

You can just not sell your game on steam if you dont agree.

The sales you will miss are what steam brings to the table

[Whoppertime]

The only reason EpicGameStore was able to rise as a competitor to Steam was because of the Billions Fortnite was earning.

[mathgeek]

Pretty much. If it weren’t for free games and exclusives there would be no Epic Store to speak of.

[Whoppertime]

It's like being a first party for a Video Game Console. Gabe Newell having a billion in Yachts, Bill Gates might have a billion dollars tied up in Real Estate. It has less to say about the personal greed of Gabe Newell and more to say about the relative size of the market.

[keyringlight]

I think while PC is a good example of epic struggling to compete with someone who took full advantage of being first mover, the apple appstore/google play mobile stores are also where they've put in significant financial/legal effort trying to create a more lucrative openings in that market as well.

[worldfoodgood]

I don't understand. You think Steam exists without Half Life and Counterstrike?

[DaSHacka]

Nowadays? Yes

[worldfoodgood]

Of course now it does, but it was bootstrapped off the back of commercial success. The parent poster was suggesting Epic could only finance a game store off the commercial success of Fortnite. Which seemed to be the exact same path Valve took, so I was curious to explore why the parent felt they were different.

[mathgeek]

I don’t believe what you are asking, nor do I claim to. Claiming one thing does not automatically exclude all other causes.

[galkk]

That’s weird argument. How about letting man to enjoy the fruits of his work?

[worldfoodgood]

That's a weird structuring of the concern. How about letting all developers enjoy the fruits of their work?

[gretch]

they are free to do that - simply don't sell your game on steam

[sumedh]

> The fact that Gabe has a billion dollars worth of yachts probably suggests that maybe

That is not a good argument though. Try building your own distribution and take some of those billions.

[jhatemyjob]

I think Gabe is doing a great job. If he wants to have a billion dollars worth of yachts, that's fine by me.

[klipklop]

Gabe made his initial fortune working at Microsoft. He almost lost it all putting it into Valve/Steam. At one point they were close to not even being able to make payroll. He bet everything on the company.

You are welcome to start your own progressive game market place for PC. Go undercut him and charge 5% fees. You literally just need to dump game files on a CDN right? How hard can it be? /s

I do find it odd that this account is new and the type of posts it leaves. Seems almost like an LLM...

[bigyabai]

> They are both still too high.

You don't get to decide that. Apple's price is not set by free market competition, Valve's is.

[rcxdude]

Valve's price is still very strongly predicated on network effects which make it very hard to avoid.

[jsheard]

Indeed, when big publishers like EA and Ubisoft started leaving Steam they introduced a tiered pricing system which progressively reduces the cut to 25% or 20% after tens of millions of dollars in revenue, to lure those AAA juggernauts back. The price is now indirectly based on how much leverage you have over Valve - Ubisoft can get away with not releasing their games on Steam, so they pay 20%, while small-to-medium studios effectively have no choice, so they pay 30%.

It's especially backwards when you consider that those AAA games put far more strain on Steams infrastructure with their >150GB install sizes.

[Shacklz]

They absolutely earn it though. Steam just works.

Heck, I've not bought games because they were not on Steam or required another launcher. Ubisoft and Rockstar are so bad that I held off on buying some games I really wanted to play; they're just that awful. EA's Origin was also pretty bad last time I checked.

I guess it's an actually hard problem to make a somewhat decent launcher in big companies with too many PMs playing turfwars, but still, almost everyone except Valve is shitting the bed so hard that as a consumer I'd happily pay quite the markup if it would allow me to avoid other launchers. They're that bad.

[DaSHacka]

Almost like they make the best game distribution platform around for customers, and thus customers flock to it.

[mrguyorama]

What? What network effects?

There are even games you can buy on one service and play multiplayer with people who buy it on steam! I chose to buy MSFS2020 through steam for example because the steam platform is dramatically better than the absurd way the Windows Store does anything, but we fly in the same skies!

There's no lock in or exclusivity. You can literally buy the same exact executable from multiple places, and the only change is the feature the store program supports. Buying a game through the Epic Store for example won't let you use steam input, but you can even then play it on the steam deck with some effort! I think you can even use Proton on executables you don't get through steam!

A dev can even make it so that, if you buy their game on steam, you do not have to have steam running or installed to play it. They have that freedom. They also have the freedom to mark a version of the game such that steam allows you to access that old version forever

If you are a dev who releases a game on steam, you can mint a bulk quantity of steam keys and sell or distribute those outside of steam!. Probably if you abused it, Valve would tighten it up or ban you, but why would you bite the hand that feeds you? It's how, for example, Humble Bundle initially worked.

That's right, you don't even need to buy your game from Valve to use all their features! A substantial portion of my library paid money to Amazon instead, through humble bundle.

People use Steam because it has 20 years of established trustworthiness in an industry otherwise made up entirely of assholes who hate you.

Meanwhile, in the place that Steam does poorly: Old games, GOG has much more of the market.

People actually are willing to pay for trust and care. Steam has repeatedly and regularly improved how their storefront displays information and informs consumers, because their primary problem is discoverability and wading through the mountains of games from people desperate to collect some of the money waterfall that Valve enables.

When you put a game on Steam, the contract ensures that anyone who purchases it cannot lose access without it being Valve's decision. Developers or publishers who do stupid things or pull games five years down the line cannot prevent you from playing a game you buy on steam if it isn't dependent on some server somewhere. None of the other storefronts have ANYTHING like this, mostly because they are run by the exact companies who WANT to be able to prevent you from ever playing an old game again, so they can sell the same thing to you in a new box.

Compare that to Apple's 30%, which similarly has lots of features their platform enables including unlocking significant consumer spending, but they do not give you any alternative. If you want even a single dollar from someone on an iPhone, you HAVE to pay apple 30%, and at least for a while they wanted that even to cover netflix subscriptions for example.

If you as a developer do not want to pay valve 30%, you are free to do like Notch did for Minecraft and distribute it yourself, and you are free to run into the same problem it had where my friend was unable to purchase minecraft for decades because his bank refused to send money to the Scandinavian bank involved, whereas even a literal child without a debit card can use birthday money to buy a steam gift card and purchase your game with no adult involvement. (maybe that's not a good thing for society, but it's great for game dev business).

Valve does not have a moat other than simply consumer trust. Minecraft sold a hundred million copies through a dude's website. There has literally never been a moat in computer game distribution. An entire industry of British children existed writing games and selling them in local stores. A moat has never been possible, because Valve cannot make your computer not run other software.

[ceejayoz]

Apple's price definitely gets affected by competition.

https://9to5mac.com/2025/05/19/apple-may-lower-app-store-com...

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-announces-app-s...

[bigyabai]

I didn't say "affected" though, I said set. Valve plays by common rules, Apple does not.

[ceejayoz]

This is an odd attempt at a gotcha. Neither Valve nor Apple has their cut “set” by the market. Both are “affected” by market influences.