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this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2025
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We are so used to billionaires being obnoxious assholes that one that isn't obnoxious about their billions feels like one of the good ones, I guess.
He made his money (like any other billionaire) by overcharging and underpaying. He wastes his money on useless bullshit like any other billionaire. But he's not obnoxious about it, which causes people to just ignore the part about billionaires that's actually bad (the way they became billionaires).
I agree mostly, but Valve employees are reportedly paid an incredible amount of money compared to the market average, so underpaying would probably only refer to the hefty (but industry standard) 30% cut of game sales they take from game publishers.
I've been told over and over again that Valve needs that 30% and they can't possibly do all that they do with a lower margin. Clearly hosting some files, hosting a forum, processing payments, etc is about ONE THIRD of all the talent and effort that goes into creating a game.
Lol yep they're an extremely wealthy company with that 30%. But it seems like almost every other storefront operates under those margins for digital sales (not just in gaming). I do value the cloud saves, I think those would actually add up a bit for their storage requirements as well as hosting all of the game files in presumably many locations globally.
15%, they'd still be a multibillion dollar company
I bet I, myself, with my current hardware could store ALL of the cloud save files with redundancy.
Save files are usually some type of text. All of the text on Wikipedia comes out to about 24 GB.
True that text is small files, but some Skyrim saves are easily in the dozens of MB for example. I'm sure you multiply that by millions and it adds up. Surely them needing to store many copies of the game files themselves is a larger file size footprint for them though.
What are you betting? Paradox save files even compressed are quite large.
Epic only takes 12%, and they too have cloud saves.
If they could take 15% while being a multibillion dollar company, then taking 30% is by definition overcharging.
And that many others also overcharge doesn't change that fact.
To be fair, epic is losing money trying to gain users from steam. They weren't profitable even before they lowered their cut.
I'm pretty sure valve could go lower than 30%, but I doubt they could go as low as 12% and still remain profitable.
I'm not disagreeing. Epic's 12% would still be hugely profitable for Valve.
I think the underpaying would be not having nearly as many employees as similar sized companies. They could have several divisions producing games while also developing their hardware and software. He has been happy to make changes at a slower pace while their store keeps taking large cuts of each sale.
I suppose so, but maybe they don't want to grow too large. Microsoft absolutely devouring studios the last few years has not produced any truly great games. Valve clearly know how to make a good game still, when they want to.
More developers doesn't always means faster shipping of products, but it can lead to disconnected and soulless releases.
Valve only release something new when it makes sense to or they have an innovation that means it makes sense to.
They don't really work at a slow pace in my opinion, it's just you may not always see constant changes in one part of their products all the time because of how the engineers work (freedom to work on whatever).
Probably for the best they aren't hiring thousands of people to pump out random stuff that is only there to make money. They make stuff that makes sense.
They could pay their employees double. Or even quadruple.
But they don't because Gabe needs another yacht.
I don't think its necessarily how much he pays his employees. The larger issue is that the tax rate at the top isn't high enough.
It's all of it. He takes too much for the services he offers. He gives too little to his employees. He isn't taxed enough for what remains.
It makes sense that people can earn a few multiples over the median for working hard and maybe also for taking risks.
It makes no sense that people can earn a million time as much as the median by not working hard and never facing actual risks.
He charged less than others and pays better than others.
Valve also can't take much of a lower cut on game sales because their current cut is the market average and valve would get in legal trouble for monopoly practices and unfair competition because they're already so much more popular than the few competitors they have. What Gabe could do is give money away and be like alteuistic.
How come Epic can charge 12% then? I believe there was some thresholds at some numbers of sales also even for steam? Like if you sold a million you pay 20% or something?
Because epic isn't the market leader, by a large margin.
So that means they operate under a different law which was the point of my question? Doubt.
Epic is in no position or standing to compete against valve. To be a monopoly, you have to actually own an overwhelming portion of the market you're in.
Because EGS offers roughly 5% of the services Steam does, and Epic is still spending a shitload of money keeping EGS going at loss.
I think you are missing the point of my question. Why would valve get in legal trouble if they charged less? Both EGS and steam is stored, no? They should be bound by the same laws. Afaik there are no special laws just because you are the market leader.
I think you maybe need to take a second look at this post- you seem to be substituting random words at places and it makes it difficult to tell what you're trying to say.
Yes, sorry auto correct got me this time and english is not my native language while writing in a hurry. I should spend more time to try and be throughout in my writing. I don't know the laws but from what I read from the previous message is that valve can't do what epic does because that would be unfair and create a monopoly. To me this sounds very strange as depending on your position in the market you would abide by different laws? If epic would gain a lot more people and players, would they also need to charge more per game then?
I figured it was something like that, no big.
To answer your question, the idea there is that the average market take is 30%- valve takes 30%, apple, google, microsoft, sony, nintendo, etc etc all take 30%. Physical publishers take more, but for eshops, 30% is 'standard.'
EGS does 12%, but they:
The concern for Steam is that, as market leader, they have a lot of advantages that other companies cannot or would not have- Perhaps Valve, because of their immense size and economies of scale, could get away with 12% and still making a profit, but they don't for two reasons:
2 seems a bit paradoxial, but the idea here is that Valve doesn't want to use it's market position in a way that prevents other, smaller companies from being able to compete, because that is a monopoly. Valve wants to be market leader, NOT a monopoly, because that is obviously illegal.
So it's safer for them to stay at the 'market average' that other companies CAN compete with, and obviously they benefit anyway, because there's really no gain for them to lower their own percentage. THey could get accused of monopoly abuse, they lower their take, and doing so wouldn't gain them any market share.
Perfectly explained. Thank you.
Has Epic become profitable yet? I vaguely remember the plan being for it to become profitable later, and that it was living off Fortnite money.
Steam could just charge at most 20% then though, I don't remember what the thresholds/conditions for different costs like 30% and 18% are.