this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
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A Boring Dystopia
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Valve’s fee is more than earned however. Steam as a storefront is highly trusted by users, it has a rock solid reputation that is hard to come by. As a distributor they take a one time fee for each copy sold, then they manage all of the costs from users downloading and downloading again for as long as the platform exists from that one time fee. Meanwhile if a developer were to do that themselves then they pay each time a user wants to download that game.
Sure the developers lose a bit more money than if they sold on another platform. But the higher up front cost to access the larger platform is a very worthwhile trade as can be seen by developers continually coming back.
Maybe. I'm not a game dev, so Im not sure I can say for sure. But it still remains that there isn't much of a choice for game devs and Valve holds most of the cards. That level of centralization of power isn't good, earned or otherwise. It's evident that at least some devs aren't happy how much of a cut Valve is taking.
I'm not sure this is exactly right. They'd have to buy and maintain their own servers, or rent them from a cloud provider, but it wouldnt necessarily be a charge for every download. But maybe I'm being pedantic -- you're right that it costs some amount of money to store data and keep computers up.
I think probably from a game dev perspective, the issue here is Valve takes far more of a cut than whatever value they add to the experience itself. If you're a team that just spent years of work on a game, the one-third cut Valve takes is just not proportional considering the amount of dev work, and is therefore considered extractive. Does that make sense?
I'm trying not to cast too much moral judgement here because we live in a capitalist system and corporations are going to seek profit in whatever way possible, and we are all indoctrinated into it, but from a perspective critical to that system, Valve are not good.
From a gamer perspective theyre a fucking godsend lmaooo
You're drinking all the tech bro Kool-Aid that the lawyers and paid bots/shills have thrown out there on the internet. Valve has threatened the market dominance of large tech companies and there's been a ton of negative press pushed for them lately.
There's lots of platforms to release your game online Minecraft famously didn't go on steam and it's one of the largest games of all time.
You can self-publish as a solo Dev and make one of the largest games of all time without steam. Tell me how that's a monopoly.
You got fortnite out here on the epic game store. Also one of the largest games of all time no steam, no valve. Tell me that's a monopoly.
You've got itch.io, Gog, Microsoft game store, epic game store, and there's always the option to skip the PC market and go straight to consoles if you wanted. You have choices as a developer. Steam is just simply the best fucking one.
Listen, I'd be happy to talk about my perspective more, but why would I when you begin your response with
Just totally rude.