Here’s the thing. There are other places. Epic, Amazon Gaming, Origin/Battlenet/Ubi, itch, Microsoft store, gog…
Most suck at discoverability or they don’t have the variety of Steam. Some are shitty by design (Origin, Ubi, Battlenet) - intended to only get you to play their games. Others like itch aren’t built for scaling out to deliver thousands of big games.
This isn’t a thing like Apple’s walled garden, I feel like this is Steam out performing the competition.
Steam quite literally provides almost everything you could ever need too, it’s so much more than a storefront. It’s genuinely mind blowing just how many services steam offers, I don’t think anybody, including valve employees knows about every function and service it offers tbh.
I would have killed for Steam Input alone back in the day when I was using xpadder to sloppily translate controller inputs to keyboard keys so the game would recognize it
Does steam provide a good service? Sure. Is it worth the 30% cut they take? Absolutely not. Gamers don’t realize the amount of money valve is making off them. What we need is a good old fashioned bill at every purchase detailing how much money these rent seeking stores are extracting from you.
I don’t want the 90 services and bloated platform steam offers, I want to play my game and pay the developers.
30% is industry standard, everybody but Epic charges that and also Steam is not just a flat 30% many devs and pubs pay less.
I agree 30% is high for every storefront besides Steam and and arguably GoG. The sheer range of services and support for both players and devs is exponentially above literally everything else, you are not just paying for a storefront with steam like you are literally everywhere else.
As for GoG, I’ll let them slide on 30% because of how much effort and resources they put into preservation as well as their “customer is the administrator of their purchases” attitude.
Is it worth the 30% cut they take? Absolutely not. Gamers don’t realize the amount of money valve is making off them.
The same cut that is industry standard and they could ABSOLUTELY jack up by abusing their market position and choose not to? Especially given how much extra infrastructure they supply for that 30% vs literally anyone else?
When the competition (excluding any stores operating at a loss to build marketshare) is charging both developers and gamers more, they’re less bothered about Steam taking 20-30%. Consoles charge 30%, have extra fees, take a cut of third party keys (or restrict them altogether) and require a mandatory subscription for online play/cloud saves, while disallowing third party stores on their hardware.
Nothing is stopping a dev from putting a game on Steam for the exposure, then putting it for sale DRM free somewhere else so they don’t have to pay the 30% cut on those sales (I assume they’d have to at least charge the same as the Steam one, though). I bet the Steam version would make them far more money even with the cut.
95% of the players on pc are on steam, if you don’t publish your game there you’re just shooting yourself in the foot - this has very little to do with the quality of the service valve provides and everything to do about their monopoly on the market. Would devs like to pay a smaller cut to valve? Sure, but it’s just the cost of doing business, you go where your customers are.
Customers flock to valve because it’s more than a storefront. It eliminates the needs for everything else, no need for discord, forums, lfg pages, recording software, controller mapping software, 3rd party mod hosting, mod managers, etc etc etc. look at how much further Valve has pushed Linux and Linux support in gaming than anyone imagined possible. Look at their return policy, absolutely no other storefront is that consumer friendly.
30% is industry standard, get mad at the storefronts that are just storefronts as well as steam or you’re just sounding like Tim Sweeney on another unhinged nepo baby rant.
It was an industry standard, that’s been changing for a while, just take a look at how much fire google and apple are taking over their stores.
but valve are good and kind and shit rainbows so they deserve money
Valve is a corporation, it might be less bad than the rest, but at the end of the day gabe is still sifting mai thais on his 500 million dollars yacht.
It’s not like GoG or EGS are better stores that can’t get traffic.
In fact, if anyone actually put enough money and created a store with better moderation, people would be more than happy to use it. It’s just that there is none. Not because they lack users, but features.
Epic does somewhere around 12% and the end user still pays the same so if you think that extra 18% would come back your way rather then going to a devs pockets? Hoo boy.
Also, Steam charges the industry standard rate iirc, same as google, apple, etc. While we can complain about that rate (last paragraph in mind: To what end?) its not as though Valve is doing anything extra greedy.
Epic does somewhere around 12% and the end user still pays the same so if you think that extra 18% would come back your way rather then going to a devs pockets? Hoo boy.
And most of the time that extra doesn’t even go to the devs, the publishers keep it. So you’re not even helping the devs for the most part.
Besides, Steam won’t even take a single cent from Steam keys sold outside of their storefront. Devs are free to sell their games on stores like Humble or Fanatical at whatever price they deem fit.
Steam initally launched in 2003 as a updater/server browser for Valve games like counterstrike, half life, and team fortress classic. Apple music came out earlier that year, which isn’t a 1:1 relation but likely influenced things wrt download pricing.
Steam didn’t have its first third party game til late 2005 which puts the chance for it to standardize a rate for game downloads right around the timeframe of xbox live and psn launching (late 2005, mid 2006 respectively), so I wouldn’t be shocked if word got around the industry about that stuff, though that’s just me making reasonable logical deductions (People love opening their big fat mouths, lot of folks in the same circles, etc.) rather then anything solid.
If any of those games on Epic are also sold in steam, then the (nonsale) price cannot be lower than the steam price because of steam’s TOS.
Also the “industry standard” was arbitrarily chosen to match the cut that brick and mortar stores usually operate at… Despite there being very different costs related.
But yes, steam is being just as greedy as all the other big walled gardens. People complain about that rate across the board, not just about steam.
That’s simply not true. They aren’t supposed to generate steam keys and then sell them at a lower price at other stores. Which is completely fair, as you can generate keys for free, but the game would still be using steams servers and services. But you can absolutely sell a game for cheaper on other store fronts if it isn’t using steams backend.
After looking into that more I’ve yet to see any hard evidence of valve threatening to delist devs for selling cheaper elsewhere. And presumably, so have the courts, because otherwise that seems like it would be a slam dunk case. I’ll believe it when I see it, but just going on word of mouth doesn’t convince me.
We all know it’s less. You can stop being smarmy about that.
That’s how online stores are destroying retail, despite charging equivalent prices. But I do not have access to a specific private corporation’s operating costs, any more than you do.
Might be unpopular, but I think it’s a fair cut. They provide a Plattform to anyone, and indiegames regularly outperform AAA. You don’t need huge publishers to succeed if your game is fun. I don’t think that would be possible with epic at the top.
Then you have the option to buy from epic who take a lower cut. I prefer Steam because of the convenience and features it offers.
Until another storefront can supersede steams features then I don’t see a reason to switch
Epic you get flash banged even when grabbing free games… Their UI is over a decade old. GOG’s UI is frustrating to navigate. I love the deals and free promotions on steam, and the UI.
As the other user said, you may be surprised! I swapped to CachyOS in January and it’s been rock solid. I play games like Hitman, Last Epoch, and a bunch of indie games without any issues.
I agree. That’s not what this is about though. This is about Valve using their market dominance to force price parity, supposedly to “protect consumers” (which is bullshit and doesn’t make sense). Yes, they’re the better storefront. I’d be willing to pay a little more to use it.
That’s one way the competition can compete though. They can’t make as good of a product, but they can make a cheaper one. They should be able to charge less, and make less profit per sale. Valve has ensured no developer can do this though by threatening removal if it’s cheaper anywhere else, and you can’t afford to not be on Steam. This would be good for consumers as it’d drive Valve to compete, either with an even better product or by lowering prices. There’s no way consumers lose, and I don’t get why people rush to fight for Valve on this.
MSRP is manufacturer suggested retail price. It is not an enforced price. For example, stores have started selling physical Nintendo games below MSRP as Nintendo has started selling digital copies at a lower price than physical MSRP. (This is also what would likely happen if games are sold cheaper. They’d compete the price down.)
I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of a case of MSRP being enforced. I don’t think it’s reasonably possible. It means no sales, for example. A retailer buys a product, and then they stock it at whatever price they decide. The manufacturer doesn’t control it at this point.
Edit: Also, MSRP is very different. It’s from the manufacturer, not another store. The equivalent is Walmart telling a product creator to enforce an MSRP or they won’t carry their product, not a manufacturer enforcing one on their own, assuming that happens.
I don’t know why people come here, act like other people are wrong, and haven’t done the bare minimum to look into the case. It’s literally what this case is about. It’s even in the article for this post.
Edit: Why am I being downvoted. Click the link! I’m sorry that it’s against the mega-corporation that you like. They make a great product, but stop defending them for literally anything they do. I can’t believe people on Lemmy, of all places, still do this shit. Maybe it’s astroturfing? That’s the only thing that makes sense.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
No Let’s Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates.
(Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources.
If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
Here’s the thing. There are other places. Epic, Amazon Gaming, Origin/Battlenet/Ubi, itch, Microsoft store, gog…
Most suck at discoverability or they don’t have the variety of Steam. Some are shitty by design (Origin, Ubi, Battlenet) - intended to only get you to play their games. Others like itch aren’t built for scaling out to deliver thousands of big games.
This isn’t a thing like Apple’s walled garden, I feel like this is Steam out performing the competition.
Steam quite literally provides almost everything you could ever need too, it’s so much more than a storefront. It’s genuinely mind blowing just how many services steam offers, I don’t think anybody, including valve employees knows about every function and service it offers tbh.
I would have killed for Steam Input alone back in the day when I was using xpadder to sloppily translate controller inputs to keyboard keys so the game would recognize it
Does steam provide a good service? Sure. Is it worth the 30% cut they take? Absolutely not. Gamers don’t realize the amount of money valve is making off them. What we need is a good old fashioned bill at every purchase detailing how much money these rent seeking stores are extracting from you.
I don’t want the 90 services and bloated platform steam offers, I want to play my game and pay the developers.
30% is industry standard, everybody but Epic charges that and also Steam is not just a flat 30% many devs and pubs pay less.
I agree 30% is high for every storefront besides Steam and and arguably GoG. The sheer range of services and support for both players and devs is exponentially above literally everything else, you are not just paying for a storefront with steam like you are literally everywhere else.
As for GoG, I’ll let them slide on 30% because of how much effort and resources they put into preservation as well as their “customer is the administrator of their purchases” attitude.
The same cut that is industry standard and they could ABSOLUTELY jack up by abusing their market position and choose not to? Especially given how much extra infrastructure they supply for that 30% vs literally anyone else?
When the competition (excluding any stores operating at a loss to build marketshare) is charging both developers and gamers more, they’re less bothered about Steam taking 20-30%. Consoles charge 30%, have extra fees, take a cut of third party keys (or restrict them altogether) and require a mandatory subscription for online play/cloud saves, while disallowing third party stores on their hardware.
Nothing is stopping a dev from putting a game on Steam for the exposure, then putting it for sale DRM free somewhere else so they don’t have to pay the 30% cut on those sales (I assume they’d have to at least charge the same as the Steam one, though). I bet the Steam version would make them far more money even with the cut.
It’s absolutely worth the cut they take. Ask every developer and publisher.
It’s hard getting recognized outside Steam.
It’s hard getting recognized on steam too.
Try going to any other platform and tell me how much better it is.
95% of the players on pc are on steam, if you don’t publish your game there you’re just shooting yourself in the foot - this has very little to do with the quality of the service valve provides and everything to do about their monopoly on the market. Would devs like to pay a smaller cut to valve? Sure, but it’s just the cost of doing business, you go where your customers are.
Customers flock to valve because it’s more than a storefront. It eliminates the needs for everything else, no need for discord, forums, lfg pages, recording software, controller mapping software, 3rd party mod hosting, mod managers, etc etc etc. look at how much further Valve has pushed Linux and Linux support in gaming than anyone imagined possible. Look at their return policy, absolutely no other storefront is that consumer friendly.
30% is industry standard, get mad at the storefronts that are just storefronts as well as steam or you’re just sounding like Tim Sweeney on another unhinged nepo baby rant.
It was an industry standard, that’s been changing for a while, just take a look at how much fire google and apple are taking over their stores.
Valve is a corporation, it might be less bad than the rest, but at the end of the day gabe is still sifting mai thais on his 500 million dollars yacht.
Because they provide a lot of value.
It’s not like GoG or EGS are better stores that can’t get traffic.
In fact, if anyone actually put enough money and created a store with better moderation, people would be more than happy to use it. It’s just that there is none. Not because they lack users, but features.
Epic does somewhere around 12% and the end user still pays the same so if you think that extra 18% would come back your way rather then going to a devs pockets? Hoo boy.
Also, Steam charges the industry standard rate iirc, same as google, apple, etc. While we can complain about that rate (last paragraph in mind: To what end?) its not as though Valve is doing anything extra greedy.
And most of the time that extra doesn’t even go to the devs, the publishers keep it. So you’re not even helping the devs for the most part.
Besides, Steam won’t even take a single cent from Steam keys sold outside of their storefront. Devs are free to sell their games on stores like Humble or Fanatical at whatever price they deem fit.
Steam charges the industry standard rate… That Steam set originally decades ago.
Steam initally launched in 2003 as a updater/server browser for Valve games like counterstrike, half life, and team fortress classic. Apple music came out earlier that year, which isn’t a 1:1 relation but likely influenced things wrt download pricing.
Steam didn’t have its first third party game til late 2005 which puts the chance for it to standardize a rate for game downloads right around the timeframe of xbox live and psn launching (late 2005, mid 2006 respectively), so I wouldn’t be shocked if word got around the industry about that stuff, though that’s just me making reasonable logical deductions (People love opening their big fat mouths, lot of folks in the same circles, etc.) rather then anything solid.
If any of those games on Epic are also sold in steam, then the (nonsale) price cannot be lower than the steam price because of steam’s TOS.
Also the “industry standard” was arbitrarily chosen to match the cut that brick and mortar stores usually operate at… Despite there being very different costs related.
But yes, steam is being just as greedy as all the other big walled gardens. People complain about that rate across the board, not just about steam.
That’s simply not true. They aren’t supposed to generate steam keys and then sell them at a lower price at other stores. Which is completely fair, as you can generate keys for free, but the game would still be using steams servers and services. But you can absolutely sell a game for cheaper on other store fronts if it isn’t using steams backend.
It IS true. They’ve threatened to delist developers who wanted to sell on non-steam key sites at lower prices.
There’s a ongoing class action lawsuit (which is already 2+ years old), started by Wolfire games, for exactly this scenario.
After looking into that more I’ve yet to see any hard evidence of valve threatening to delist devs for selling cheaper elsewhere. And presumably, so have the courts, because otherwise that seems like it would be a slam dunk case. I’ll believe it when I see it, but just going on word of mouth doesn’t convince me.
How different?
How likely is it that it just so happens to exactly match brick and mortar stores?
So you don’t know?
We all know it’s less. You can stop being smarmy about that.
That’s how online stores are destroying retail, despite charging equivalent prices. But I do not have access to a specific private corporation’s operating costs, any more than you do.
Might be unpopular, but I think it’s a fair cut. They provide a Plattform to anyone, and indiegames regularly outperform AAA. You don’t need huge publishers to succeed if your game is fun. I don’t think that would be possible with epic at the top.
Then you have the option to buy from epic who take a lower cut. I prefer Steam because of the convenience and features it offers. Until another storefront can supersede steams features then I don’t see a reason to switch
Epic you get flash banged even when grabbing free games… Their UI is over a decade old. GOG’s UI is frustrating to navigate. I love the deals and free promotions on steam, and the UI.
And don’t forget GOG fucking still doesn’t have a native Linux client.
Because they pretty much said “It isn’t worth the effort for just a handful of nerds”. They’re supposedly on it now, though.
I didn’t know that, I am still on Windows 10. Most of my games won’t work on linux.
As the other user said, you may be surprised! I swapped to CachyOS in January and it’s been rock solid. I play games like Hitman, Last Epoch, and a bunch of indie games without any issues.
You might be surprised, unless you exclusively play multiplayer games with anti-cheat.
I agree. That’s not what this is about though. This is about Valve using their market dominance to force price parity, supposedly to “protect consumers” (which is bullshit and doesn’t make sense). Yes, they’re the better storefront. I’d be willing to pay a little more to use it.
That’s one way the competition can compete though. They can’t make as good of a product, but they can make a cheaper one. They should be able to charge less, and make less profit per sale. Valve has ensured no developer can do this though by threatening removal if it’s cheaper anywhere else, and you can’t afford to not be on Steam. This would be good for consumers as it’d drive Valve to compete, either with an even better product or by lowering prices. There’s no way consumers lose, and I don’t get why people rush to fight for Valve on this.
So like most stores? What do you think MSRP is? A lot of places will pull their product from stores who undercut pricing outside of occasional sales.
MSRP is manufacturer suggested retail price. It is not an enforced price. For example, stores have started selling physical Nintendo games below MSRP as Nintendo has started selling digital copies at a lower price than physical MSRP. (This is also what would likely happen if games are sold cheaper. They’d compete the price down.)
I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of a case of MSRP being enforced. I don’t think it’s reasonably possible. It means no sales, for example. A retailer buys a product, and then they stock it at whatever price they decide. The manufacturer doesn’t control it at this point.
Edit: Also, MSRP is very different. It’s from the manufacturer, not another store. The equivalent is Walmart telling a product creator to enforce an MSRP or they won’t carry their product, not a manufacturer enforcing one on their own, assuming that happens.
Looked into this, found a source: https://steamyouoweus.co.uk/faqs/ points made by @[email protected] are legit.
I did a quick scroll on that site, but couldn’t find any sources or evidence about Valve actually doing this
I don’t know why people come here, act like other people are wrong, and haven’t done the bare minimum to look into the case. It’s literally what this case is about. It’s even in the article for this post.
https://www.create.ac.uk/blog/2025/07/01/parity-and-power-steams-antitrust-reckoning-in-wolfire-v-valve/
Edit: Why am I being downvoted. Click the link! I’m sorry that it’s against the mega-corporation that you like. They make a great product, but stop defending them for literally anything they do. I can’t believe people on Lemmy, of all places, still do this shit. Maybe it’s astroturfing? That’s the only thing that makes sense.