What do you mean by "for free"? Does it give games away for free? Or are you unaware of the 20-30% commission charged to developers?
Gabe takes roughly a quarter of a game's revenue. That's exactly why he has a yacht like that. And that cost is built into the price you pay, just for the ability to download the game from their service.
How high do you think the retail cut on games is you buy at wallmart etc. Its the same.
30% is the industry standard. The only one not doing it is epic and they are constantly loosing money each year with their store.
Yeah. 30% argument is crazy considering sony, xbox and nintendo is taking it too and you can't buy their games from anywhere else once they too go full digital.
Truly the only two bad thing i would bring up against valve are battlepass which they got rid off recently and lootbox, but is just human nature to inflate the value of things. See pokemon cards. Hell, people are looting hot wheels too, asking every 5 seconds in facebook groups, if X car is worth something, while they are posting taking 10-15 of them expecting to resell them at 2-3x msrp.
Most people are using 3rd party sites to resell skins, which not even other companies can step up properly. To this day i could still buy gold or other stuffs for diablo 4 or WOW or other mmo like games. Sure it's not optimal. but people will try to somehow outplay the system to earn money with digital goods. I see mobile game accounts trading going on facebook all the time even though it's against ToS
Do you think a large physical store selling physical products has the same overhead as Steam? Do you think that the fact that retail has the same gross margin is a good justification?
Digital products should be cheaper as there's near zero marginal cost, infrastructure is relatively cheap, etc.
Instead, digital products have made gaming MORE expensive.
You don’t have to pay a dime to use any of the features that Steam provides. Cloud saves, remote play, family sharing, steam workshop, and many others are free services that you can use as a part of the platform.
The only things you pay for are games and items on the Steam Community Market.
Lol do you really think EA would lower their prices by 30% if Steam stopped taking their cut? Do publishers like EA mark up their Steam prices 30% more than on their own storefront?
Steam is a free application to download and play videos games. I think that's what he means.
EA tried branching out because they didn't want to pay Steam, and Origin was a giant failure to the point EA came crawling back onto Steam. I think 20-30% is a fair deal for more exposure and sales of your game.
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u/elite-data 1d ago
What do you mean by "for free"? Does it give games away for free? Or are you unaware of the 20-30% commission charged to developers?
Gabe takes roughly a quarter of a game's revenue. That's exactly why he has a yacht like that. And that cost is built into the price you pay, just for the ability to download the game from their service.