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Are people buying software through steam because they like the consolidated experience? Or because they trust it more than an exe from a random website? Or because steam already has their credit card info stored? Or because it's the only place to obtain certain games?

It's some combination of these things (and some others I haven't considered), and the value all of this added up, minus steam's downsides, is apparently worth an extra 30% if this cost is sufficiently hidden from the consumer.

Would people still pay a 30% fee if the store were forced to actually show the fee, and there were alternatives? I'm not so sure.

You're right that there's some value there, but it's probably closer to 3% than 30%.

There are alternatives, you can sell the software directly from your own website. Publishers have decided that the reach the store gives them is worth the 30%.

Fragmentation and walled gardens are a false dichotomy. Steam is actually a great example of this, there are many other stores (Humble Bundle, Fanatical, GMG, whatever) that sell you Steam keys so you can keep your game library in one comfortable place.

Yes Steam are still perfectly comfortable staying at 30% as I said it's clearly a market driven level.

Steam keys sold off steam do not give valve a cut.

Valve is definitely getting some kind of money out of the deal.

They are not

"Steam keys are meant to be a convenient tool for game developers to sell their game on other stores and at retail. Steam keys are free and can be activated by customers on Steam to grant a license to a product."

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

I'm a developer who uses Steamworks. Keys are free for us to generate and sell at will. Valve reserve the right to say no, but from what I can tell, their only policy is to not take the piss (selling millions of keys), and not to charge more to customers who buy directly from Steam.

I didn’t mean to say they are getting a direct cut as sibling commenters indicated, but Valve definitely is getting at least some kind of money indirectly out of them offering this.

I wonder what a user is worth to Steam?

They didn’t have to acquire the user themselves and now they have more eyeballs on their service. How many of these users buy a few things later and make waiving the fee worth it?

Steams not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.

nobody claimed otherwise, only that its trivial to sidestep the 30% fee, even if you wish to remain distributed by steam.

Right, they believe their store value is enough for them to compete with 0%.

> The idea that users would all be side loading apps and developers would be making far more money having their apps spread across 5+ different stores that would compete down to lower prices is delusional. If that were the case, why has this not happened on Windows or MacOS where side loading is actually the default yet Steam, GOG, etc still charge 30%?

That has happened. The majority of my 20,000 Steam games were acquired from outside of Steam.

For you. You don’t speak for the rest of the market though, and Steam comfortable holds its lead for good reason.

> You don’t speak for the rest of the market though

Do you?

> Steam comfortable holds its lead for good reason

Yes. One of those good reasons is that it allows people to purchase Steam games without buying them on Steam, thus avoiding having to subsidise Valve's 30% cut.

There's an absolutely gigantic ecosystem around buying Steam games from first-party (developer) and third-party (marketplace/bundle) sellers. I don't think you realise that it's a perfect example against the point you're making. There's enough competition from the ability to "side-load" games into Steam that it's very common to get some of the greatest games ever made for under a dollar, when their MSRP is up to two orders of magnitude higher.

You are in a teeny tiny minority. I made it clear I'm talking about the mass market. These arguments are made under the false presence (or delusion) that they are in the interests of the broad base of users who would get lower prices. They would not, we can see that clearly from the Android and PC games markets.

These arguments are being made by a tiny minority for the benefit of a small community of techies who already have platforms available to them that work they way you want and take advantage of it, like you do. It's like coupon clippers insisting on a law that all products sold must some with discount coupons.

> You are in a teeny tiny minority

Minority? Probably. Tiny? Absolutely not.

Here [0] is a breakdown of 70 popular Steam games by the source of purchase for their reviewers as of a year ago. About 28% of all Steam purchases happen outside of Steam itself, with Valve getting a 0% cut. Note that for many games a majority of reviewers did not purchase it on Steam itself.

0: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1ICv-UE4i651yMkpD...

Reviewers are a tiny minority of users and there's no reason to suspect they are typical.

Do you have better data sources that you're not sharing or are you just making things up and asserting it as fact?

Side note but what does one do with 20,000 games? Do you actually play this many?

Genuine curiosity, not trying to troll or anything.

I've 100% completed about 2500 of them, so I don't have a great completion rate but it's not like they're just there for show. I've probably played around 6000 total.

A very large number of them I would not have bought individually, but they came in a bundle with other games I wanted.

Maybe not a great completion rate respective to the amount of games you've got but probably (surely?) with respect to other gamers! If someone asked you to pick your favourite three...?

> If someone asked you to pick your favourite three...?

HyperRogue, Hollow Knight, and LOGistICAL.

Thanks!