If the final price doesn't change based on the storefront cut, then as a consumer, I don't care.
https://www.wolfire.com/blog/2021/05/Regarding-the-Valve-cla...
That's still higher than what seems reasonable for a simple store front, but they aren't as bad as Valve or Apple.
Note that Valve is a relatively small company with only a few hundred employees, but with one of the most extreme revenue-per-employee ratios in the world, estimated at $19 million per employee:
https://upptic.com/valve-structure-employment-numbers-revenu...
That's orders of magnitude higher than companies like Apple, Elsevier or Nintendo. Steam is basically free money for Valve. Valve is extracting huge rents (around 6.5 billion yearly revenue) for negligible expenses (only 79 people working on Steam).
Based on what? Your arbitrary standards. I still don't understand what's wrong with 30% for everything Steam provides as a platform. It's perfectly acceptable. It's not making indie developers poorer. It helping to ensure Valve can focus on the things that matter to them and do things like invest in Steam Input, Proton, SteamOS, and Steam Deck/Machine/Controller/Frame/etc. And it's still significantly better than the times when your only option was brick and mortar, where you maybe got 10-30% as the developer.
Every other digital storefront does far less and still takes 15-30%. Why is Valve the big boogey man and everybody else is free to charge whatever they want on developers while doing fuck all for anybody but themselves?
Based on a strongly and persistently imbalanced ratio of revenue to expenses, which indicates a form of market inefficiency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_rent#Monopoly_rent (the mentioned network effects are basically what drives Steam rents)
> I still don't understand what's wrong with 30% for everything Steam provides as a platform. It's perfectly acceptable. It's not making indie developers poorer.
Of course it makes them poorer if a big chunk of what you pay for their games goes to Valve.
> It helping to ensure Valve can focus on the things that matter to them and do things like invest
But they basically aren't doing that. If a company has an extreme revenue-to-expense ratio, it means they are hardly investing any of their revenue. They only have a few hundred employees while making around 6.5 billion per year.
> Every other digital storefront does far less and still takes 15-30%. Why is Valve the big boogey man
Well, Microsoft seems to do 12-15% in the Microsoft Store. And I fully agree Apple is significantly worse than Valve with iOS, because there is no way to circumvent the 30% fee in iOS; indeed, it wouldn't even be possible to offer a software like Steam on iOS. (But it should also be noted that Apple has a much lower revenue-per-employee ratio than Valve, indicating that they reinvest a lot more of their revenue.)
None of them dethroned steam, so 30% is still the cost to access the steam user base.
If tens of billions can't overcome this "inefficiency" then it sure seems like there might be more to the story than economics 101.
The fact is that Steam has an incredibly loyal _userbase_ and you won't convince them to leave unless steam betrays their trust, which they haven't.
The trust in any competitor is nearly 0 compared with Steam which has been a platform people have loved and used for over a decade now with basically 0 issues. No corporate missteps.
Arguably the biggest controversy is the latest way they made CS2 loot boxes less valuable, popping the insane bubble in the skins market. That's still ultimately good for the average gamer and I expect they'll come out smelling like roses.
Yes, network effects, as discussed in the Wikipedia article linked above. It's the reason why Facebook or Twitter are so hard to replace, or eBay, or Amazon. In these cases larger platforms benefit from the fact that everyone else is already there, which makes switching hard. That doesn't mean they are inherently better though. They can even be significantly worse than alternatives, apart from network effects.
Are you sure?
Please, compare that with Amazon and AWS, spot the difference
Let's break down what you actually get for that 30% with Microsoft/Sony
- $120/yr (xbox) or $80/yr (ps) subscription fee
- Price subsidized console
- Friends system, voice chat/messages
- Online store/publishing regional pricing and associated locks
- Store for MTX
- Cloud based game saves
- Trophies/achivements and other player related goal setting
- CDN to distribute your game
- Remote play e.g. using your console to stream to your PC/Phone
- First class controller support
Steam gives you all of the above with literally 0 cost to the consumer aside from purchasing your game. The fact that anyone even pretends like this is a valid argument is a joke.
Since PC is an open platform, the proper comparison would be other PC store fronts which are substantially cheaper than Steam. Unfortunately there is no incentive for users to switch, as Valve apparently contractually forbids games to be sold at a lower price outside Steam.
Furthermore, is it not Valves right to say if you wish to offer the same product at a lower price, we reserve the right not to sell your product anymore. Keep in mind in most cases when a game is not freely purchased through steam anymore you can still download the game from the CDN, you can also still use all of the online features for the game. You just cannot purchase a new copy
I really don't understand why price parity requirement is a bad thing. If you want to take a bigger slice of the pie you can eat up the infrastructure costs yourself or take your business elsewhere, EOS, Xbox, PlayStation store ect
"There are only a few hundred people working at Valve, with 79 working on Steam, but they are making 6.5 billion USD yearly. That's extreme. One of the highest revenues per employee ratios in the world. They are spending almost nothing. The 30% are almost pure profit."
You are absolutely right. that is far too much money and to which I simply ask the question why no other serious competition? Companies have poured millions into this and always miss the first stop gap of consumer rights first meaning any attempt they have to eat away at the market share fails so hard its actually embarrassing. Anyone arguing against the current system is just arguing against capitalism.
Out of all the companies in the gamer space hardware/software Valve are the only one who actually care for their customers and have regularly extended rights that go well beyond the legal minimum requirement, this is just a fraction of a reason why they have been and will continue to be first class in the gaming space
I hate the iOS store because it’s full of ad-riddled slop. Steam isn’t remotely close to that. If I find a game on there, even if it’s bad, someone clearly spent time and love making it.