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this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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Steam
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Steam is a video game digital distribution service by Valve.
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When you buy something at the store, did you know that in most cases the company selling probably saw less than half of what you paid? What if they don't have it in stock?
steam provides a ton of benefits at scale that would have probably eaten up more than 30% of the price for the game company, with the ability to instantly scale with no limitation if it picks up in popularity.
If I buy a single player game, more than likely, valve is making entirely profit on that 30%. The cost of the download is below a penny to valve. Yet they still get s third of that companies revenue.
Charge them for the services if you want. They aren't doing thst, they are taking 30% of an industries revenue for doing nearly nothing.
And Valve has other bills to pay, servers to run, employees to pay. Software to develop, did you think all of these great features Steam has were free to develop? Incidentally, remember when Valve released their in house animation software for free when people asked to buy it?
No, just that they cost substantially less than the insane profits they're making, and they could very easily afford to do all the same things with half the revenue, enabling actual developers to make more and better games.
You pay for the game once, whether you download it once or a million times. Valve gets the 30% once, because if you don't pay again, 30% of 0 is still 0. At least that's how percentages worked back in the day, who knows how it works now 🤣🤣