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this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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He earned his money. Who cares how many yatchs he decided to buy with it?
Yeah... earned...
How do you do fellow temporarily embarrassed billionaire?
Yeah man, totally a billionaire over here scratching together coins for a lucy. You caught me.
No one earns a billion dollars.
Yawn
I do, that's why I said something.
And nobody has "earned" that much wealth. Absolutely no one.
You've got bigger issues if all you care about someone is their monetary wealth.
I don't think anything I said implies that it's all I care about friend, and I'd say you don't care enough.
LMAO tell me you are not a dev without telling me.
Steam does a shitton for devs, the 30% is literally only for sales through their storefront, I can get any amount of keys and resell them wherever I want and give valve nothing, and they'll still host all my shit, check ownership, handle copy sharing in family libraries, handle patching and beta tests, all for a one time fee that is even refunded if you ever get past a certain amount of copies sold.
You have no idea what the fuck you're talking about.
If you're a game dev, then you should also know how valuable every service steam gives is, if you're just "a dev" then it's not really relevant beyond understanding how much setting up all of that infrastructure would cost in terms of time, effort, marketing to actually get discoverability, and actual server costs once you need to scale.
Either way you should know enough to get that 30% is absolutely worth it.
They could, but why would they when 30% is fair still? You are not entitled to setting other people's asking price, and they are entitled to setting the cost of their own labour.
If anyone is greedy here it's you, demanding to have a say in how much is a fair rate for someone else's time and skill.
Is that downvote the number of games you've released?
You stated your opinion as a fact, and qualified it by saying you're a game dev.
Back up that claim. Shouldn't be hard to do.
Let's not, and both know you haven't made any games.
Ok, fantasy game dev lmao
And the goalposts go flying.
Who the fuck cares if valve is cute and cuddly? Who even wants that in a marketplace other than morons who think they can take advantage of someone else's kindness?
Valve is a company, their job is to make money for the people who own it.
Selflessness would literally be a downgrade, I want Valve to have every damn cent they earned.
They're not the only game in town, they are the best game in town, and at every turn they make an effort not to become a monopoly, either, because they know the good will of their customer base is more important than attempts at short term spikes in company revenue, which is only possible because they are a privately held company.
So yeah, are they cuddly and nice? No, fuck no, but they are extremely effective while providing a service that puts every other provider in their field to shame, so why the fuck would I want them to change?
How's the bile, you seething commie clown?
And I'm sure you live on one of the many successful communist countries in the world today.
Oh, wait.
Well at least you have high self esteem.
The masses*
* the portion of them that is not in a gulag, is not disappeared, doesn't have its rights curtailed due to social credit decline for disagreeing with the regime, wasn't purposefully starved to death during the holodomor, and so forth.
And don't get me started on the evils of the circus performers who propagandise for them from the comfort of their liberal democracies.
There is a reason communism is treated with equal acrimony to nazism in every former soviet satellite state, m8.
What games do you have on steam/gog/epic?
If this was true steam would have failed from the start. Instead, the service actually does offer a ton of benefits to both users and developers/publishers including distribution of sales, updates, additional features like forums, friends, and other things that have varying levels of positive or negative benefits to different people. That isn't even mentioning Proton or the steam deck, just what it between the makers of the games and the people who play them.
Lootboxes are bullshit, sure. He should have spread out the benefits more to the employees as well. But the 30% cut for 'nothing' is incorrect.
Steam has been coasting on the fact that everyone shoots themselves in the foot, sure, but you should look into the unparalleled level of "free" (30% cut) marketing support Steam gives to developers. On no other platform could developers end up with the visibility they achieve on Steam with nothing more than very strategic timing and good social media presence. It's still insanely hard, but the fact that it's even possible to compete with zero marketing budget against AAA companies speaks volumes.
You only get that "marketing" if your game is already popular. So the 99% of games not getting that visibility are paying the same as those free that are.
Blatantly untrue, as update visibility rounds are one of several marketing tools Steam gives you that can put your game on the front page for free, regardless of popularity.
Kitfox Games has published a guide (one among many you can find on the internet) on how to successfully market a game with no advertising budget. While their existing audience definitely helped, and as they mention, it takes a significant amount of time and effort, they do not spend actual money on sponsorships or advertising. This would not be a viable strategy on any other storefront, save maybe Epic, though Epic still gives fewer tools than Steam.
It's not untrue. Most games never get that exposure. You have to be popular within a certain time frame to get any chance at showing up. You can try to game it, sure, but most will fail to achieve that
I'm not saying it isn't insanely hard (actually I mentioned that fact twice), I'm just trying to point out that Steam gives developers more tools for visibility than any storefront that exists, with most storefronts giving no tools whatsoever. Any game with no marketing budget selling enough to support a multiple-person development team, when they have to compete directly with AAA games, is impressive for both the developer and the platform.
If you want to advocate for improvements and change, you can't just ignore the positive things that already exist.
~Also you clearly didn't read the page about the update visibility rounds, because those have nothing to do with popularity and are completely randomized regarding who among the recently-updated games gets a spot on the front page. In fact, your game gets rotated off that spot once you've gotten 1 million impressions.~