| It makes a lot of sense for businesses to seek to reduce their costs wherever they can. But, from what I've heard about brick and mortar distribution, you used to pay quite a bit more and get a lot less than what Steam gives you. From what I can tell, that 30% cut gets you -for the rest of forever- * distribution for both the current version of the game and some number of older versions you choose to make available [0] * a place in their searchable games index [1] * "cloud" storage for your players' savegames * basic forum and blog hosting for discussion of and news about your game From what I could tell as someone who used to buy games in retail stores, in a bricks and mortar distribution unless you were -like- the Starcraft/Diablo/Warcraft boxed set, you got like maybe a half year of time on the shelf. I've heard folks say that you had to pay a 50->80% cut for that. [0] Valve will even distribute games that don't work anymore. This is both good and bad, but Steam's no-hassles refund policy combined the existence of unofficial patches that make games work on current versions of Windows make me generally fine with charging for and distributing games that no longer work as-is. [1] ...at least until the wrong horde of pearl-clutching busybodies demand that credit card companies require your game be erased from the commercial world because it is art that discusses those busybodies' bugbear du jour |