I'd trust a group of employees doing this out of curiosity over, say, HR doing it.

Valve's 30% is high, sure. But you're not seeing the total cost of selling a game.

And yes, I've done this before.

Besides the user count, besides all other factors. Digital sales are kinda hard.

You need to offer the actual game. If you're selling an indie game that's a few hundred megs, well you get to go sign up for a service to deliver it. Could be as simple as a google drive link, but because this is business use you get to pay business prices.

Are they charging a flat rate per month, per gig? Per download? Some combinations?

Now there's updates and patches that need to be delivered. Same deal as before, but also now you need to handle the actual patching. Do you ship one big patch that checks for previous patches? Small individual patches that your users have to figure out what one they need?

Does your game have multiplayer? Well damn have fun with that.

What about support and refunds and GDPR stuff? Gotta factor all of that in too.

Now we get to do payment processing. You get to pay a company to accept payments on your behalf because you are NOT doing that yourself you WILL get stuck on inane and silly laws.

That's part of it. Paying steam 3 bucks on my 10 dollar game to handle ALL of that? Yeah that's fair. Could it be cheaper? Sure. a lot of things could. I don't spend months on a game and then cheap out on the most important part: sales.

My time is valuable and worth 30%

Man, Epic must be patting themselves on the back for all the money they paid getting people to believe 30% was outrageous, because it's paying massive dividends.

It may shock you to know that before Steam, your options were to fuck off or offer your product in a store where you would only get 30% of the profit, with the rest going to the publisher, the retailer, licensing, etc. These days it's closer to 50% for physical copies, and Apple/Nintendo/Sony/etc all standardized with Steam on you getting 70% for digital.

Don't like it? Pull a Valve and make your own alternative that's better. If you build it, they will come... which is why nobody uses EGS.

30% is more or less the standard. Not just in the games industry, but everywhere.

Steam does more to promote and support games than many other platforms out there. Epic does not have workshop and forum, Google Play does not promote games as good as Steam.

The efficiency is doing it so effectively that on an open platform competitors can create there own store, pay for AAA games to appear on their store, take the smallest of pay cuts, pass it on to the consumer, and still have customers prefer to pay more to be in the Steam ecosystem. I'm against monopolies but Valve's is absolutely efficient.

Did you know that almost every other marketplace out there (except that fucked up one) has the same 30% revenue split?

The whole debacle over it is artificial. It won't change much if it looked better to people who complain now. It won't remove Valve's ability to provide the best service.

There are other game marketplaces out there, but they're bad.

This isn't like the Apple App store where it's the only option on the platform. In fact, they've competed with Microsoft's store on some things. It's not even like Amazon where they strong-arm people selling things on the platform. Amazon does things like forbid anybody who sells on Amazon from selling the item at a lower price anywhere, including on their own site. I don't think Steam has any requirements like that. Steam's store has a huge market share because people like using Steam. AFAIK, Steam doesn't even do exclusivity deals, which suck for the consumer but are pretty standard for games, except with their own (Valve) games, and those are rare.

Not only does Steam have a user-friendly library and a user-friendly store, if you launch a game you bought on steam but that is published by a company with a shitty launcher / store / library (EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar), Steam goes a long way to neuter the shittiness of that launcher / store / library.

Maybe a 30% cut is too big. I don't know. It would be great if someone tried to compete with Steam while keeping the consumer-friendly approach Steam has. Maybe competition would reduce that 30% to something lower. But, most of the other game stores I know of have much less consumer-friendly approaches. The only one that's at all similar that I know of is GOG, and I do occasionally use them, especially for old games.

If the company were public the shareholders would say “great, now give the employees less and give us the difference”

I have heard that its not too hard to start your own project when working at valve.

Maybe it will turn into their next game, or a new steam feature or it will get canned.

You should dive down the rabbit hole. Valve does not have a workplace like anything you've seen before, and the pay is just as fucked.

EDIT: Down the rabbit hole we go

Non public should be more efficient from the labor cost savings of not having to file all the sec documents quarterly and legal costs of following public company regulations.