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this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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Speaking of game prices, something that absolutely, desperately needs to change is the ludicrous 30% cut that Steam takes on every sale. Every single sale.
This might have been reasonable back in 2009 when the selection of games was limited to a few hundred AAA titles, but today the overwhelming market share of all PC game sales, Indie or otherwise, all goes over Steam.
Valve would still be making gigantic profits at just 15%. They can put the platform in maintenance mode and it would continue generating money indefinitely.
The rate has been grandfathered in from retailers. Today, with the absence of physical distribution and high degree of automation, there is zero legitimate reason for it to still be at this rate.
This is not really true. The steam price is what sets the market price and the developer just pockets a bit more money if you buy it elsewhere. They do not drop the price on other stores due to agreements with steam similar to the Amazon "most favored nation" clause.
Steam's high cut is inflating the price of games right now but is at least delivering a good service in return. Once Gabe kicks the bucket though you'll be longing for GFWL over what steam will have become.
I'm only speaking with an element of vagueness as I can't know the exact details of the private agreements and because Valve users subtler methods than the example of Amazon.
We can see some of the contours from the active lawsuits regarding the situation
If distribution costs drop in a competitive market there will be eventually be a corresponding drop in price. Games are not a commodity so you would likely see price drops on some games inside saturated niches while more unique games could retain a higher price.
Not really speaking about the consumers but it has a big impact on Indie developers, and I care about those too.
A partly counter, many devs wouldn't have had a chance at reaching "this is my career now" without steam either. Games like Terraria, stardew, gmod, all would not have sold nearly as well without steam.
As a kid/teen, my dad was much more willing to buy from the same service (steam, amazon, fuckin' runescape, whatever) then let me put his cc into minecraft(.)net. My friend grabbed nubby's number factory because he knows he can throw 2 hours into it and get a refund easily (and is definitely keeping it). Even now, I'm much more willing to buy from steam/itch then go to the devs directly, because then its all in one place that I can see. (Vintagestory is a decent example, having to go grab the updates manually, because they had to recreate a distribution system, was annoying.)
Definitely not saying 30% is fair, but 70% of $1,000,000 is better then 90% of $1,000, or $10,000, or $100,000. Taking the hit is worth it for most devs, especially if they can kick start their development credibility. Ultimately, as someone who wants to make some games, the biggest hurdle isn't taking the 30% hit on future sales, its justifying "investing" my current savings on a project that might not make it to steam, or itch, or my friends at all.
The system sucks, it especially sucks when the "solution" is downloading yet another piece of software and supporting the fortnite factory.
Honestly, every indie dev I see speak on the matter said that the 30% is easily worth it for how much benefits the steam ecosystem offers. Beyond just the storefront (which is better than average on discoverability), you also have systems to easily set regional pricing, APIs for multiplayer integration, friends, invites, achievements, etc.
Of course it would be better if it was lower, but 30% is not unreasonable for how much steams facilitates your work.
While I agree that Steam's 30% cut is unreasonable, games are not generally cheaper outside of Steam, especially AAA titles. Even on platforms with a lower store cut, such as Epic Games or direct publisher stores, AAA games being priced lower is very rare. So i don't think steam reducing their cut would have an impact on game price.
Depending on where in the world you live and what’s going on with currencies right now, a PS5 disc in the shops can be a little bit cheaper than on the various digital platforms.
steamfront
:kelly:
The only reason they'd lower their cut would be if they thought they could make more money that way. That'd take something massive, like a total market crash or an actual capable competitor getting a bunch of exclusives. The former might happen at some point, but the latter will never happen going by Epic's store which is I'd say the best-case scenario for a competitor (having an infinite free money hose).
Honestly I think it should be proportional or a tiered system based on sold copies not revenue e.g tiers based on 100k/250k/500k/1mil/5mil+ sales would be fair. The vast incredible majority of indie devs don't sell more than 100k copies. 1mil copies is already a decent studio and anything more than 5mil is a major AAA title and fuck them.
I do think its ok for Steam to get a large cut from these AAA devs, keeping in mind Steam has pretty much taken over as "official" social platforms for many games with only Reddit and Discord being viable but not always reliable platforms.
Second point is the Steam workshop does provide real value and once again its something not just AAA devs but almost everyone have become dependent on. Of course there is Nexus which is still a heavy weight in old communities e.g Bethesda/TES but these tend to be outliers. Most importantly though, even if the user would prefer third party mods the fact is Steam workshop integration is very simple and reliable.