[efsavage]

A 70% take would have blown the minds of developers pre-Steam. Retailers took 40% and were ruthless about shelf space and inventory. Distributors took 20%. Plus you had to actually make a box/CD/etc. They were lucky to keep 30% not pay it.

This doesn't mean Valve is perfect but if a developer is "suffering" because of a 30% cut they probably need to improve their pricing/game/community/etc.

[account42]

Retailers and distributors had actual costs they needed to cover for the services they provided. Steam largely does not seeing how profitable they are.

[charcircuit]

The economy is not static. A good deal in the past is not necessarily a good deal in the present.

[mschuster91]

It still is a damn good deal. Steam abstracts a whole lot of messes. In ye olde times you as a game developer had to acquire a publisher for each country you'd plan on selling your game to deal with local distribution structures and laws, taxes, payments, update distributions, DRM and anti-cheat, user management...

Steam conveniently abstracts all of that for you. One stop shop. No complex deals just to deal with getting paid for your game (or additional content), barely any chargeback fraud, you don't even have to deal with stuff such as Germany's highly complex age rating because Steam abstracts that with a questionnaire. Steam claimed to recognize and support 237 countries [1], although that list includes disputed countries, so take it with a grain of salt, but in general I'd say unless a country is affected by US sanctions (i.e. North Korea, Iran, Russia, Belarus) or has its own restrictions (i.e. China), chances are 99% you as a publisher can sell your game in this country with everything being taken care of.

And on top of that, gamers likely will already have a Steam account with payment already set up, which means far, far less friction than the likes of Epic Games impose.

That definitely is worth a cut.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40263518

[charcircuit]

>taxes, payments

The market rate for this is low single digit percents.

>update distributions

Bandwidth is not worth a percentage of game revenue. If it were it would be <1%.

>DRM

Steam's DRM is terrible.

>anti-cheat

Also terrible.

>user management...

This is not worth a percentage of revenue.

All of these together is not worth 30%. The only thing worth 30% is the ability for the Stram store to put your game in front of a random person. Being able to reach new customers.

[mschuster91]

> The market rate for this is low single digit percents.

We're talking about virtually every country on Earth. Good luck trying to replicate that, the taxes/legal entity part alone will cost you an arm and a leg in setup time, not to mention ongoing costs in accounting, filing reports and dealing with other bureaucracy BS.

> Bandwidth is not worth a percentage of game revenue.

I'm not talking about bandwidth or a CDN here. I'm talking about a reliable and easy mechanism to get updates distributed to end-users - consisting of a management backend, the CDN and finally a client side software that's actually doing the upgrades. And the latter is something many have tried and failed to do or ended up getting 0wned in the process (e.g. just recently notepad++ [1]).

> Steam's DRM is terrible.

Is it? Sure, for some AAA titles you'll see Denuvo slopped on top, but for the wide masses, Steam's DRM is more than enough.

> [user management] is not worth a percentage of revenue.

Managing user data is an utter PITA in the era of GDPR et al, and on top of that it creates a need for customer support resources - people forget their password, get hacked, god knows what else. As a game dev under any of the major storefronts, you don't have to deal with that at all.

[1] https://notepad-plus-plus.org/news/hijacked-incident-info-up...

[account42]

> Is it? Sure, for some AAA titles you'll see Denuvo slopped on top, but for the wide masses, Steam's DRM is more than enough.

Because for the wide masses you don't actually need any DRM, which is about what Steam provides: nothing.

[fc417fc802]

> Good luck trying to replicate that,

Why would you need to? Notice that the comment you replied to used the phrasing "market rate". The service you're describing is commoditized today and none of the major players charge anywhere near 30%.

[mschuster91]

> The service you're describing is commoditized today

Payment, yes, that is effectively commoditized. But Stripe, Paypal or cryptocoins only solve the "collect and move money across the world" part, not the "deal with the BS around taxes and tariffs in an N-N matrix of countries for publishers and consumers".

As a publisher of a game or other piece of software, I either have to use one of the global storefronts (Apple's App Store, Google's Play Store, Steam, Epic, Microsoft Store) to abstract this problem away for me (and all of them but MS have a somewhat comparable revenue share), or I have to find publishers in each jurisdiction I want to sell and negotiate with them and have additional expenses and efforts in repatriating the income, or I have to go and create my own legal entity for each jurisdiction and deal with filing the proper taxes and other BS on my own. Oh and notably the latter case also applies to dealing with sanctions lists - can't imagine OFAC being happy when my, say, Swiss subsidiary has the sanctioned offspring of a Russian oligarch buy a game from them?

This regulatory moat of doing international business is what keeps revenue shares at ~30% across the global stores. It is extremely difficult to build a competitor for the messes I mentioned - otherwise, someone else would have stepped up long ago to capture this gigantic money spigot.

[na4ma4]

Covered by your reference to less friction, but there's also a trust level that goes with being on "Steam" vs random website.

Indie games would be far more of a gamble to buy if Steam wasn't around, and just finding them would be a huge hurdle.

[j_maffe]

> unless a country is affected by US sanctions

A list that's growing by the day lol

[mschuster91]

That's tariffs and you gotta admit, Steam abstracted that away, too! Everyone else had to deal with Trump's latest BS on their own.