[throw10920]

> should get c25% of all transactions for offering very little value

"Very little value"? It's clear that you've never developed a game before. Don't speak so confidently out of complete and total ignorance - it leads to making utterly insane and totally factually wrong statements like this one.

[Closi]

State where the value is then, without just stating features that cause lock-in.

You can't blindly just call me an idiot and say there's loads of value without stating what it is (I mean you technically can, but it's not a brilliant way of getting your point across).

[throw10920]

> without just stating features that cause lock-in

That's a false dichotomy. Features that cause vendor lock-in can still be incredibly valuable.

> You can't blindly just call me an idiot

Sorry, that was a little harsh. I wasn't meaning to call you an idiot - I'm sure you have domains of expertise that you're highly proficient in. But you clearly have little (if any) experience with gamedev, and my point is that you should be far less confident when speaking about it.

For instance, you said something just factually wrong:

> The reason the 30% rate is sustained though IS the abuse of market power with the PMFN clause, which ensures that competitors cannot price lower.

...which was debunked by another comment:

> Steam's official price parity policy applies only to Steam Keys, which are free to generate and cost Valve nothing.

As for features that are actually useful to devs and users:

Local currencies, regional pricing/payment methods, gift cards, Steam Wallet, game gifting, product keys, wallet/credit system (Steam wallet), bundles, DLC, complex storefront (topics/labels, discovery queue, wishlist, sale notifications), user reviews, game refunds, CDN, a really good download/update system, player metrics, shader pre-caching, shared runtime management, cloud saves, game management across multiple drives, LAN downloads/updates, beta/release/build management, DRM and anticheat, game collections, developer updates, forums, Big Picture/Steam Deck UI, Proton, Steam Input, a complex social system (friends, text chat, voice chat, add codes, profiles), social integration with games, account 2FA, and many, many, many more things. (go and ask a LLM and I'm sure it'll be more than happy to give you a far longer list :)

These are all things that developers and players benefit from. The value added is immense and blindingly obvious even to people who only play games, let alone to developers who have some idea of how difficult it is to actually implement all of the above.