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We don’t know how much it costs for their servers but I doubt it’s anywhere near what they charge devs. Gaben having an 11bn dollar net worth kind of points to that.
The biggest problem is that it isn’t up to devs since steam has market dominance. Not putting your game on steam is basically suicide, they have close to 90% of the PC market…
Ya, I misread it and I’m way off. It’s 4bn. Epic also made a lot less, my stats are not for gross revenue but generated revenue before they split it with the devs. Amateur hour over here (me, not you).
I went off in my other comment and was a bit of a dick throughout the convo. It just feels like someone is being robbed here. 4bn is a lot of money and, from the wolffire lawsuit leak, they have less than 100 people working on steam full time.
I’m not reading the Google summary.
Okay, but your stats are still wrong? (Edit: so are some of mine though, disregard me being a dick here). Using AI wasn’t my point.
If so then Epic should have caught up by now, no?
Is making 1 000 million in a year with something like 5% not catching up? Do you think any of these billion dollar stores are running at cost?
Please back that up.
Having a vampire sucking up 30% of your revenue does affect a company but quantifying it would mean some pretty in depth studies and getting information from bankrupt companies. I do know most devs don’t like it. https://gdconf.com/article/gdc-state-of-the-industry-most-devs-feel-steam-s-30-cut-isn-t-justified-many-prefer-10-15/
And yes, all those points you mention are happening, but having a huge chunk of your profits taken like that obviously aggravates it.
What does that 30% pay for? Do you know?
I know it pays for Gabens yacht fleet worth 1.5 billion lol. We do have rough numbers. We know their employees count and revenue, and that they are making an estimated 11 million per employee from an article by the financial Times. That doesn’t include data atorage but I doubt the cost of offering downloads is anywhere near there revenue.
I own more computer games on disc from physical stores than I do from steam.
Stores don’t even stock physical discs for PC Games. How many of those are from the past 5 years? Last year had 95% of games sold digitally (PC and consoles). https://twicethebits.com/2025/06/19/the-shift-to-digital-gaming-why-physical-sales-are-declining/
But I do not trust the developer who originally brought the lawsuit
What dev? This is about a UK lawsuit on behalf of UK gamers. I can’t find anything about a devs involvement.
Nobody is suing Nintendo, PlayStation, or Microsoft over this.
PlayStation is getting sued for it, the trial is for March. This is specifically about the 30% (https://www.catribunal.org.uk/cases/15277722-alex-neill-class-representative-limited). (https://woodsford.com/woodsford-funded-5bn-class-action-against-sony-playstation-gets-go-ahead-in-uk-competition-appeal-tribunal/) .
I want to point out that this is pure whataboutism, just like the OP. But what about epic, but what about nintendo. All of them deserve to get sued.
I also never said
Then the proper response would be “yes, steam does deserve to get sued, epics behavior doesn’t even have anything to do with the subject, but they also deserve to get sued”. Like what’s your point then? Why make a bullet point of things steam does well if you aren’t trying to imply that they are “good enough to be allowed to abuse”.
I feel like you scanned right over half of what I did say.
We are both writing walls of text.
Steams revenue was 16b (edit: it’s 4b) in 2025, epics was 1b in 2024. At least click the links instead of pasting what the Google summary tells you. You are mixing up epics store revenue with their unreal engine revenue.
The fact is any game store front is a money printing machine mostly because of the rampant price fixing, hard to enter markets and abuse from those that hold the lion share of that market (Steam, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo).
That money is being sucked out of the companies that are actually making games, and is leading to a reduction in quality, layoffs and bankruptcies.
For regulation, we could easily have limits on the percentage store fronts are allowed to demand for digital media, but each time there’s a lawsuit, a bunch of idiots loudly fight it. Lawmakers aren’t going to enact laws that go against what the lobbyist want, especially if the majority of the population have been instructed that the boot is for their benefit.
Your list of pros and cons doesn’t matter, every player being compared is bad. It’s just a defense in favor of Gabens yacht fleet at this point. Exclaiming that steam shouldn’t change because you like their product, even though it’s clearly having an impact, is the same as defending Amazon because drop shipping is easier than going to the store.
Fyi, I use both, I literally own a steam deck and the sd card came from Amazon. Defending their practices is just fucking weak though.
Steam isn’t being sued by Sweeny, they are being sued on behalf of 14 million UK gamers.
Also, epic has an estimated 3% to 7% of the market share (not 42 which makes no sense with steam having the other 80%), yet they should be regulated as well. If you stopped bootlicking for half a second, you would realise that this isn’t about who’s the worst but the fact that they are all bad (except itch, bless them).
Your enjoyment of their product doesn’t mean it isn’t having a serious and negative impact on the industry. Amazon is really convenient too, can you defend them next please?
Okay, you seem to be missing the point.
It isn’t about the effect on you but the effect on the industry as a whole. That’s why they are similar.
Amazon and Airbnb both dominate the market. They both have a better product than their competitors. Exactly like steam, they abuse their position and have a long term negative impact on their respective scenes.
The article above is literally about how hard the gaming industry is having it. You would have a good product in any case, because the lion’s share of the money being made isn’t going to making steam better but going to filthy rich people like Gaben.
They have like 100 employees (the financial Times estimates they made about 11 million per employee in 2021), steam probably only needs to charge less then 1% to cover it’s current expenses and salaries. All that money is being taken from devs (less games for us, more bankrupt studios) and being given to the top dogs (Gaben to buy boats).
I don’t think there’s much more to say. You seem to be really enthusiastic about supporting a billionaire’s money extraction machine and can’t understand that the effects of a company go further than your enjoyment of their product. You are defending the boot because it’s fluffy and soft.
https://archive.ph/dmHDP (FT article)
You can say the same thing about Amazon and Airbnb. None of them are bad products and they are all convenient, but they are having a negative impact. You don’t directly feel it but the devs do and in the end, it does mean less quality and overall games for us.
I’m not calling for a boycott here but the minimum would be calling them out on it.
Everyone’s fine with staying in their lane and charging the standard percentage. Keeping the status quo to maximize profits isn’t competing.
There’s only a handful of companies and the smallest one (itch.io) takes between 0% and 10%. The companies that “couldn’t deal with it” are Microsoft (for Xbox, they actually take 12% on PC), Nintendo, Sony.
Look up what a soft monopoly is. In any case, they have market dominance and are abusing it. Steam is currently dealing with more than one anti trust lawsuit, including a 900$ million one in the UK.
It’s weird seeing people defend billionaires and their money sucking machine. You could defend Airbnb or Amazon with that same kind of energy and arguments. They haven’t lost a single monopoly lawsuit either.
30% is a disgusting cut for a few gb of data on a virtual store front. It’s having a negative impact on devs, and it only helps makes rich people richer. You don’t get a networth of 9 to 11 billion by being fair and having consumers at heart. Steam and Gaben aren’t your friends, they actively treat you and the industry as a bag of money to be exploited. They just have a really good marketing team.
Tbh, they cancelled the prince of Persia remake. I don’t think we know what the other games were. I know it’s a popular franchise but I hate remakes, they always end up being a cash grab. Open world is kind of their bread and butter but it’s been mostly shit, so if they focus on the quality aspect, it might turn it around.
I don’t really dig live service but r6 siege was one so maybe we can get another gem or two like it.
Bruh, stable diffusion was trained on billions of images, with their owners spanning the globe. My work has about 300 employees all living in one city and it still take a few separate teams with multiple people each to handle it.
You’re simply an idiot if you think it isn’t a nightmare imo. Think before you speak please.
Take a napkin and do some math on how much you think each image is worth and what kind of budget a company would need to put out a model. Ignore the logistics completely.
Google doesn’t mind paying that price because they can recoup it with the monopoly it gives them. You guys are basically begging for a handful of companies to have it all, begging for walled gardens. Legit bootlicking.
I’m saying they stopped owning it the moment they put it on the big websites and signed away their work by clicking the box at the end of the ToS. I don’t think it’s right, just how it is.
I see two choices:
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Scrapping isn’t considered theft and we all get easy access to these new tools.
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It’s considered theft and the new tools end up behind censored subscription models while shutter stock makes a shit load of money.
Paying every artists what they are worth is a logistical nightmare because of the amount of data needed. It simply won’t happen and isn’t a realistic scenario. It sucks but sticking your head in the sand and giving a soft monopoly to google and openai only helps google and openai.
No. DeviantArt, Universal, Disney, Shutterstock, Instagram and friends are the juggernauts. Artists already gave it all away.
There isn’t a scenario where individual artists get a piece of that money. Legislation, if it comes, will protect data aggregators, record companies and Hollywood, with the aim of killing open source.
Google paid 60$ million for Reddit’s data and I still haven’t received my dollar. Google would also love it if training a model costs so much only they could afford to build a legal one.
I’m mostly thinking of indie devs and how it can let small teams do more. I think some of these tools are a real boon to the industry, it’s quickly becoming trivial to included animated cut scenes for example. I think the human and inventive part can still shine with competent devs.
I’m not advocating for shovelware here or games that are 90% AI, but a lot of teams that can’t afford certain dedicated positions would probably benefit from using it in some parts of their game.
If it isn’t noticable and gives us a better game, I’m more than willing to ignore the copyright companies constant wailing.
In the Office’s view, training a generative AI foundation model on a large and diverse dataset will often be transformative. The process converts a massive collection of training examples into a statistical model that can generate a wide range of outputs across a diverse array of new situations. It is hard to compare individual works in the training data—for example, copies of The Big Sleep in various languages—with a resulting language model capable of translating emails, correcting grammar, or answering natural language questions about 20th-century literature, without perceiving a transformation.
You can read the whole doc. The part above is cherry picked. I haven’t read through the whole thing but at a glance, the doc basically explains how it depends. If the model is trained specifically to output one piece content, it wouldn’t be acceptable.
The waters are muddy but holy fuck does taking the copyright juggernauts side sound bloody stupid.
By data aggregators, I strictly mean websites like Reddit, Shutterstock, deviant Art, etc. Giving them the keys would bring up the cost of building a state of the art model so that any open sourcing would be literally impossible. These models already cost in the low millions to develop.
Take video generation for instance, almost all the data is owned by YouTube and Hollywood. Google wanted to charge 300$ a month to use it but instead, we have free models that can run on high end consumer hardware.
Scraping has been accepted for a long time and making it illegal would be disastrous. It would make the entry price for any kind of computer vision software or search engine incredibly high, not just gen AI.
I’d love to have laws that forced everything made with public data to be open source but that is not what copyright companies, AI companies and the media are pushing for. They don’t want to help artists, they want to help themselves. They want to be able to dictate the price of entry which suits them and the big AI companies as well.
I’m all for laws to regulate data centers and manufacturing, but again, that’s not what is being pushed for. Most anti-AI peeps seem the be helping the enemy a lot more then they realize.
transformative use or transformation is a type of fair use that builds on a copyrighted work in a different manner or for a different purpose from the original, and thus does not infringe its holder’s copyright.
You can use a book to train an AI model, you can’t sell a translation just because you used AI to translate it. These are two different things.
Collage is transformative, and it uses copyrighted pictures to make completely new works of art. It’s the same principle.
It’s also important to understand that it’s a tool. You can create copyright infringing content with word, google translate or photoshop as well. The training of the model itself doesn’t infringe on current copyright laws.
I guess it’s easy to win an argument if you put extreme views in everyone’s mouth and argue against that.
I doubt anyone thinks AI has more value then human made. Most are just being pragmatic, knowing that AI isn’t going away and most indie teams don’t have the budget for a dedicated texture guy. There is simply more to gain then to lose, and applauding copyright companies and data aggregators doesn’t solve the issues but just gives a handful of companies a monopoly when they push legislation with the help of your fervent support.
Transformers, turok and mecha Godzilla come to mind. Not post apocalyptic per say but saying Sony owns robo dinos in a post apocalyptic future sounds fool hardy.
This is in no way good for us, the consumers. If it was Nintendo doing it, everyone be would be livid.
I’ve played a lot of good games that were blatant ripoffs. Companies shouldn’t own concepts, fuck Sony.
These are two different things. You don’t need to let valve sell loot boxes to stop new York from implementing mass surveillance.