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I'm not sure where I stand there. Steam is a great platform, but for purely capitalistic reasons. The only reason they aren't as bad as other platforms is because they're privately-owned and take the long view because they don't have to worry about the day-to-day fluctuations on stock value.
Gabe isn't your friend. He's a billionaire yacht-collector who makes the vast majority of his money by taking a massive cut from other company's products because of their virtual monopoly that exists because they launched an online marketplace in 2004.
Let’s be a bit fair, your local store selling a physical copy is also taking a cut of the other companies profits. The 30% valve charges would be just the same as GameStop/other store would be marking up the game from wholesale prices. (I still would rather have physical copies, but valve charging a percentage on each sale has always been a bs argument against them)
The store isn’t also making games.
Like how Apple gets to take 30% of Spotify subscriptions and they operate a competing music service. That’s where it becomes wrong.
Of course, Valve doesn’t make games either now, so maybe it’s a moot point.
I’m just talking about the talking point of them taking a cut of sales, it’s the exact same as a store adding markup. A store is adding way more than 30% on most physical goods. Data storage and bandwidth are fucking expensive and 30% honestly isn’t that much.
Deadlock would like a word
Gacha trash. Let me know when they're making Portal 3 or Half-Life 3. And really, it doesn't even have to be those franchises, but I mean, a single-player game that you pay for once and that's it, and it has puzzles that make you think. What they were known for before they started making money off other people's work and stopped creating wonderful things.
I mean, I know they still work on their gacha games.
Might seem like I'm moving goalposts and maybe I did, but I'm just nostalgic for when they made unforgettable games like Portal and Half-Life 2.
Okay, so you're just a nostalgic hater. Deadlock is a masterpiece.
30% makes sense for a physical store with high overhead, inventory, staffing, and other expenses.
Valve could take a 5% cut and still make a ton more than a retail store for the same product.
Open steam settings > Downloads, click the dropdown at the top. That whole dropdown menu? That's what their cut pays for. Rack space, network capacity, and storage, to deliver ALL games on steam efficiently, across the planet. That ain't cheap. And that's only part of what it pays for.
You know what it costs to run a retail store? And even in 2025 GameStop had 10 times as many retail store locations as Valve had employees.
And it's not like retail has no tech infrastructure expenses.
Each Valve employee also makes about what 10 GameStop employees do, salaries at Valve are often mid to high 6 digits.
Which is not to say that GameStop is cheap to run, but hey, neither is Steam.
I mean, sure. But I think you might be underestimating the infrastructure costs. They aren't just using a few 10GB switches. They also aren't just using a single data center to store and deliver games. Then, you have to consider all of the redundancies involved, the contractors, the data center contracts, etc. Even if they don't have their own DCs, AWS or Azure at this level is $$$$$$.
Storing, transferring, and hosting at this scale is not cheap by any means. It makes GameStop's tech infrastructure look like peanuts in comparison.
Grocery stores in my experience take on average 30-50% of the cut of anything they sell.
From working at one and managing orders/invoices.
It varies depending on the product, the profit margin on soda for example is often over 100%, other products such as milk would be negative (loss leaders), but in general, most non-junk food groceries usually have a single digit profit margin