this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
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[–] Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 hour ago (4 children)

They already take 30% on each game. It's huge, considering they didn't spent a dime on these games. That means they will take most of the profit margin on a game, if any, while a studio has to pay for dozens or hundreds of employees, tons of hardware, workspaces, etc.

[–] vapeloki@lemmy.world 18 points 1 hour ago (2 children)

Do You have any idea what the hosting infrastructure, steam works, and traffic costs?

Also, valve is giving massive contributions to open source from those 30%

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 4 points 38 minutes ago (1 children)

Do You have any idea what the hosting infrastructure, steam works, and traffic costs?

Yeah, not 30% of all PC games. It's how they turn out absurd profit.

[–] vapeloki@lemmy.world 4 points 15 minutes ago (1 children)

Never said that. But what is better for the dev? Using those services or run their own?

And I am fine with Valve making absurd profits, after all, they have put at least 500.000.000 USD into open source (Around 100-200 external oss devs on payroll for projects like Mesa, SDL,...).

Will I leave steam and call valve out if they get toxic? Yes! Are they evil or the enemy right now? To the contrary.

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 1 points 8 minutes ago* (last edited 7 minutes ago)

Using those services or run their own?

If they could have still images and text on the Steam store and a link to their external site for everything else, it'd by far be running their own.

It's the exposure that Steam has an effective monopoly on.

Not everything has to be black and white. I appreciate Steam, but 30% is absurd. They're absolutely raising the price of games and taking money away from developers.

[–] Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works 3 points 56 minutes ago (1 children)

Valve is one of the most profitable company in the world.

https://www.itidings.com/news/valves-17-billion-revenue-projection-puts-gaming-giant-among-the-worlds-most-profitable-companies/

I mean, just look at this thread and see how much free propaganda they get from gamers. That's a lot of free labour just to defend a billionaire that profits from gambling for kids.

[–] vapeloki@lemmy.world 7 points 54 minutes ago (1 children)

What exactly is this the answer to?

Yes, they make a shit load of money. But assuming you want to distribute a game directly, how much of would that cost you, and let's ignore the whole visibility shit for a second.

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 2 points 36 minutes ago (1 children)

Honestly not that much. The biggest thing Valve brings to the table is advertising and access to customers.

Hosting doesn't cost that much. If you were that desperate for bandwidth (no one is), torrents exist as an option. Blizzard used to have torrents built into their downloader.

The infrastructure is a nice afterthought.

[–] vapeloki@lemmy.world 1 points 27 minutes ago

My day job is designing complex IT platforms.

And the cost goes massive down with size.

So. If your game sells badly, you will most likely spend more. Oney in hosting and distribution then you would make profit.

For example, assume your game has around 50gb. You sell 100 copies of it. You can easily calculate 1-2$ per download.

Add your own personal on top of it, someone has to run that stuff, and licensing and more for statistics tooling and more.

Platforms like valve allow indie devs and small studios to avoid all those costs upfront.

"Not that much" depends on the view

[–] carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 41 minutes ago)

There definitely is some amount of expenditure by valve. I don't know if its 30% worth. For multiplayer games they provide a server/client DDOS protection and traffic optomization service though it is opt in by the developer through an api. The other option for this tends to be a "contact sales" priced product from cloudflare. There is also some of proton's development, some linux graphics driver work, and workshop support though I suspect hosting and content moderation expenditure there is fairly minimal.

[–] LodeMike@lemmy.today 2 points 46 minutes ago

Brick and mortar stores take 50% of revenue usually. The profit margin for the manufacturer applies after that

[–] ericwdhs@discuss.online 0 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (2 children)

30% is the industry standard though, and Valve's contributions of distribution and discovery infrastructure, its audience, and expanding hardware initiatives are not nothing. If you're not pricing a game to give yourself a healthy margin within the 70% or your development model doesn't make that viable, that's really on you.

[–] Yerbouti@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

I mean, Spotify's model is the industry standard, and it still suck big time and doesn't give a shit about artists.

Anyway if I've learn anything over the past 10 years, it's that it would probably be easier to convince a room full of maga to vote for Hillary Clinton than the average gamer to admit that steam sucks. So keep kissing this billionaire's ass because he really does care about you, and remember Ubisoft and Epic (12% cut) bad.

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 2 points 34 minutes ago

I'm not gonna say Steam sucks. It's a nice organizational tool that enforces some standards.

I'd rather have a drm free game that's 20% cheaper though. The devs can pocket the other 10%.

[–] Fredthefishlord@lemmy.blahaj.zone -1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

Industry standard doesn't mean reasonable. It's renter class bullshit, profiting off of other's labor. Pretending creating a distribution and discovery platform is seriously deserving of 30% of the value of the hard work of game devs is not reasonable. If it was reasonable, gabe wouldn't be a billionaire.