364
Here’s how much Valve pays its staff — and how few people it employs
(www.theverge.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
That's exactly it, Devs have to accept Steam's cut because it's essentially the only place you can sell things. It makes logical sense, but do you not see why this is a disadvantageous position for the Devs to be put in?
This would be a fine analogy, if there weren't a single digit amount of storefronts. Steam and EGS are more equivalent to supermarkets. Sure the odd person is going to go to speciality stores on occasion, but the vast majority of sales are done through supermarkets. Steam is a supermarket competing against speciality stores. The only other real supermarket in town is EGS and as you've discussed, it's such a dumpster fire no one shops there.
I'm not disagreeing that Steam deserves its position, it does for sure. But we live in a world where it has no meaningful competition, and one of the ways it exercises its position is by maintaining their 30% cut. A cut which was established by stores that had to manage the logistics for real physical copies of the games.
My point is that there isn't a reason that Steam has such a high cut, other than it wants more money, and has the market saturation to command more money