It’s not an unreasonable cut, the reason they’re successful is they provide such a good service that any time someone thinks “well I don’t wanna pay that 30% cut, I’ll just do it myself” they fail. That 30% is for all the million features that benefit both devs and players which nobody wants to build an alternative for.
It’s not an unreasonable cut, the reason they’re successful is they provide such a good service that any time someone thinks “well I don’t wanna pay that 30% cut, I’ll just do it myself” they fail. That 30% is for all the million features that benefit both devs and players which nobody wants to build an alternative for.
I mean it is unreasonable in that this sort of thing should be publicly owned and operated infrastructure, rather than a digital walled garden for the master who owns it to make obscene profits from
part of what you describe is people “not wanting to build” an alternative, but part of it is also that 1) building an alternative means dealing with breaking into what is effectively a monopoly, and you can see how successful that’s been for Origin/Epic/whatever, who seem to be slowly gaining steam but that’s only after years of literally giving away free $60 games just to get people to download their launcher and 2) having alternatives ultimately degrades the quality for everyone because instead of having one integrated service you now have all these competitors with all their varying (or missing) features and just the general hassle of having to keep up with what’s on any of them
building an alternative means dealing with breaking into what is effectively a monopoly, and you can see how successful that’s been for Origin/Epic/whatever
Yeah it’s not successful for Origin or Epic because their idea of breaking a monopoly is to strongarm their own pseudo-monopoly by bringing Console Wars to the PC, which is one of the dumbest ideas possible. If Origin or Epic ever made their service good instead of just walling off exclusive games and forcing users to use their obviously terrible software (a move which creates the most negative possible feelings toward your company) they would be a lot more successful.
Okay, if that’s true then just don’t put the game on steam and don’t pay a 30% cut. Hell, put the game on steam and then also sell it for less money on your own website to try to funnel sales there. There’s literally nothing stopping any of that.
Devs use Steam because it kicks ass and it’s well worth the cut.
There’s a very important detail that is missing here, namely that Steam has a clause where you cannot list your game elsewhere for less than you list it on Steam. Many indie games are published to Itch.io and Steam, but Valve forces them to list both at the same price, meaning thay since most gamers use Steam they will automatically choose the version that invisibly only gives the devs 70% of the revenue. Sure Valve does have lots of nice features, but those features could be duplicated over time by one of Valve’s competitors. The problem is that to get a competing platform off of the ground, you need to entice people with lower prices since you can’t compete on features. Valve uses its monopoly status to make this impossible.
There’s a very important detail that is missing here, namely that Steam has a clause where you cannot list your game elsewhere for less than you list it on Steam.
Epic Game Store has pretty much succeeded with their weekly free (often quite good!) games. I’ve even bought a few things from them. Unfortunately they fucked up royally and EGS is an unusable slow piece of shit. Really an indictment of modern software engineering practices but they need to ether than entire thing and rewrite it from scratch. Steam is much more performant. Still, EGS shows that it is possible to break in as long as you have a boatload of cash to burn. However, Valve has started to run up the score by making their own their hardware; using EGS on steam deck is a pain.
My understanding is that you cannot sell steam keys to your game at lower than steam prices (since they can’t/don’t take their cut from directly selling those keys). If you had a direct download from your website or from itch you’d be fine to sell that cheaper.
It’s been a little while since I’ve read in detail about this so I’m open to being wrong about it.
Come on, I’m sure you understand that just because they provide a real service does not mean we can’t be critical of rent-extracting bullshit, and the failure of other attempts does not simply happen in a vacuum of perfect meritocracy but instead in the smothering shadow of a pre-existing monopoly.
I was doubtful of people complaining about g*mer communists becoming capitalist apologists when it’s their preferred monopolistic extraction operation, but people really do forget everything they know better than sometimes.
I mean I feel like it would be better for you to explain how it is similar to rent extraction.
Landlords are people who had nothing to do with the construction of the home and are providing no service. They don’t deserve to be paid because they aren’t doing anything. And you can’t just decide not to pay them and go somewhere else, because you have to live in a house.
None of this is remotely similar to Steam in any way. You don’t have to put your game on Steam if you don’t want to pay them, and if you do put your game on Steam and pay them it’s because you want the service they are providing. Everything that is bad about a landlord is something that doesn’t apply here.
The fact that I don’t need to put a game on Steam to live in an immediate biological sense has no bearing on whether what they are doing is rent extraction or not, that’s just hot air sophistry in the direction of “game devs are really happy about this arrangement, actually” to sort of give a vibe that it’s good and not rent (which is bad , and therefore not this). Something being “merely” an income rather than directly the necessity that the income is used to pay for is completely irrelevant. You are seriously just using redditor arguments.
Epic and others also extract rent, this isn’t a claim about moral value but about economics. Moralism has no place in Marxism.
Additionally, modern landlords frequently do engage in some amount of labor, or are theoretically legally obliged to anyway (depending on the jurisdiction). For example, based on the terms of the tenancy, it is often up to them to get contractors in to do repairs, which for simplicity we can call a type of managerial labor, in the case that they don’t fix things themselves.
In many feudal societies, “landlord” was a somewhat different title that referred to people who owned land and allowed peasants to work on it in exchange for some amount of the harvest, which was rent. Free peasants, i.e. people who weren’t serfs, etc., could theoretically try to find some other way of getting food, including sometimes also owning tiny plots themselves or going to some other landlord, but ultimately their best option was often submitting to terrible exploitation by a landlord because that was their least bad choice.
Fundamentally, a huge amount of what most devs are paying their cut for is the mere privilege of being on a platform with such a huge userbase, meaning it usually is their best option to make money if they don’t already have a name for themselves (and sometimes even then). The amount they pay is undoubtedly tied to this fact, and that is rent extraction. Yes, many make use of patching and some make use of various online services, but it’s not like they can “opt out” of those being available to them, they aren’t services that are offered independently of the huge platform, and more games than you might expect do just fine with the old-fashioned patching approach that you see on websites like itch.
Have I given you enough material for you to now deign to enlighten me on the voluntary nature of the free market under this merit monopoly?
Point taken. Could we perhaps come to an agreement to not talk down to each other, in that case? See your earlier reply:
This feels like a severe misunderstanding of what rent is, why it’s bad, and what Steam is.
Which is terse, wildly hyperbolic (even if we assume I’m seriously wrong, it does not follow that more than one of those things is misunderstood), and asserting that I don’t know what fucking rent is, among other things.
If you see fit to curb what I’m sure you view as a minor affectation, then please proceed on the actual subject matter, unless you want me to rewrite my previous comment to be more suitable.
How is that not unreasonable? Your justification is literally just supply and demand.
The exact same justification an employer uses to exploit workers, your argument is “if game devs want better pay, why don’t they go set up their OWN company???”. Actual upbeared justification of technofeudalism.
Massively overcharging on commission, with anti-competitive practices, is kind of the definition of unreasonable in my books. Absolute HONKTONS of people - I’m amazed you emphasise ‘nobody’ in that sentence - want to build alternatives for it, but struggle because Steam has users locked in and deliberately have made it massively inconvenient to ever leave.
These would be interesting challenges in a world where capitalism still exists in half of countries, and socialism exists in a variety of progressed stages, but,
I imagine the company is nationalised by the country it’s headquartered/mostly managed in. Nationals/Allied socialist states get free/subsidised service (ie commissions and purchases), everyone else pays as usual. Efficiency savings for the socialist nations is a net benefit anyway, with the bonus that capitalist states subsidise it, job done.
I hated steam when it first rolled out because I knew it was going to become a monopoly once they ironed out the kinks. Not only was I right it paved the way for a bunch of garbage imitators. Anyway as always the answer is socialism.
Personally I think taking a 30 % cut from games sold on Steam is the reason, but their corporate structure is pretty cool too I guess
It’s not an unreasonable cut, the reason they’re successful is they provide such a good service that any time someone thinks “well I don’t wanna pay that 30% cut, I’ll just do it myself” they fail. That 30% is for all the million features that benefit both devs and players which nobody wants to build an alternative for.
It is an unreasonable cut because they are taking profit that should be going to the workers developing and marketing the games.
They could easily still be hugely profitable at 15% cut or even less.
I mean it is unreasonable in that this sort of thing should be publicly owned and operated infrastructure, rather than a digital walled garden for the master who owns it to make obscene profits from
part of what you describe is people “not wanting to build” an alternative, but part of it is also that 1) building an alternative means dealing with breaking into what is effectively a monopoly, and you can see how successful that’s been for Origin/Epic/whatever, who seem to be slowly gaining steam but that’s only after years of literally giving away free $60 games just to get people to download their launcher and 2) having alternatives ultimately degrades the quality for everyone because instead of having one integrated service you now have all these competitors with all their varying (or missing) features and just the general hassle of having to keep up with what’s on any of them
Yeah it’s not successful for Origin or Epic because their idea of breaking a monopoly is to strongarm their own pseudo-monopoly by bringing Console Wars to the PC, which is one of the dumbest ideas possible. If Origin or Epic ever made their service good instead of just walling off exclusive games and forcing users to use their obviously terrible software (a move which creates the most negative possible feelings toward your company) they would be a lot more successful.
I have seen so many extremely successful games that aren’t on steam though. Starsector immediately springs to mind. Minecraft was never on steam too.
I think genuinely good games do well without steam. I would not attribute success of a game to steam.
Okay, if that’s true then just don’t put the game on steam and don’t pay a 30% cut. Hell, put the game on steam and then also sell it for less money on your own website to try to funnel sales there. There’s literally nothing stopping any of that.
Devs use Steam because it kicks ass and it’s well worth the cut.
Nope, you can’t sell it for less outside of steam, you have to agree to price it the same before they let your game on steam
deleted by creator
There’s a very important detail that is missing here, namely that Steam has a clause where you cannot list your game elsewhere for less than you list it on Steam. Many indie games are published to Itch.io and Steam, but Valve forces them to list both at the same price, meaning thay since most gamers use Steam they will automatically choose the version that invisibly only gives the devs 70% of the revenue. Sure Valve does have lots of nice features, but those features could be duplicated over time by one of Valve’s competitors. The problem is that to get a competing platform off of the ground, you need to entice people with lower prices since you can’t compete on features. Valve uses its monopoly status to make this impossible.
Yeah as the other user said, this isn’t true.
Epic Game Store has pretty much succeeded with their weekly free (often quite good!) games. I’ve even bought a few things from them. Unfortunately they fucked up royally and EGS is an unusable slow piece of shit. Really an indictment of modern software engineering practices but they need to ether than entire thing and rewrite it from scratch. Steam is much more performant. Still, EGS shows that it is possible to break in as long as you have a boatload of cash to burn. However, Valve has started to run up the score by making their own their hardware; using EGS on steam deck is a pain.
My understanding is that you cannot sell steam keys to your game at lower than steam prices (since they can’t/don’t take their cut from directly selling those keys). If you had a direct download from your website or from itch you’d be fine to sell that cheaper.
It’s been a little while since I’ve read in detail about this so I’m open to being wrong about it.
What are you basing this on? Looking it up, e.g. here: https://www.create.ac.uk/blog/2025/07/01/parity-and-power-steams-antitrust-reckoning-in-wolfire-v-valve/ it looks like what the other user described in addition to some other underhand bullshit informally policing even discounts.
Just vague recollection of what I thought I had read. I guess I didn’t couch the statement enough
Come on, I’m sure you understand that just because they provide a real service does not mean we can’t be critical of rent-extracting bullshit, and the failure of other attempts does not simply happen in a vacuum of perfect meritocracy but instead in the smothering shadow of a pre-existing monopoly.
I was doubtful of people complaining about g*mer communists becoming capitalist apologists when it’s their preferred monopolistic extraction operation, but people really do forget everything they know better than sometimes.
This feels like a severe misunderstanding of what rent is, why it’s bad, and what Steam is.
If it ever becomes something you might deign to articulate, then please do correct my severe misunderstanding.
I mean I feel like it would be better for you to explain how it is similar to rent extraction.
Landlords are people who had nothing to do with the construction of the home and are providing no service. They don’t deserve to be paid because they aren’t doing anything. And you can’t just decide not to pay them and go somewhere else, because you have to live in a house.
None of this is remotely similar to Steam in any way. You don’t have to put your game on Steam if you don’t want to pay them, and if you do put your game on Steam and pay them it’s because you want the service they are providing. Everything that is bad about a landlord is something that doesn’t apply here.
The fact that I don’t need to put a game on Steam to live in an immediate biological sense has no bearing on whether what they are doing is rent extraction or not, that’s just hot air sophistry in the direction of “game devs are really happy about this arrangement, actually” to sort of give a vibe that it’s good
and not rent (which is bad 
, and therefore not this). Something being “merely” an income rather than directly the necessity that the income is used to pay for is completely irrelevant. You are seriously just using redditor arguments.
Epic and others also extract rent, this isn’t a claim about moral value but about economics. Moralism has no place in Marxism.
Additionally, modern landlords frequently do engage in some amount of labor, or are theoretically legally obliged to anyway (depending on the jurisdiction). For example, based on the terms of the tenancy, it is often up to them to get contractors in to do repairs, which for simplicity we can call a type of managerial labor, in the case that they don’t fix things themselves.
In many feudal societies, “landlord” was a somewhat different title that referred to people who owned land and allowed peasants to work on it in exchange for some amount of the harvest, which was rent. Free peasants, i.e. people who weren’t serfs, etc., could theoretically try to find some other way of getting food, including sometimes also owning tiny plots themselves or going to some other landlord, but ultimately their best option was often submitting to terrible exploitation by a landlord because that was their least bad choice.
Fundamentally, a huge amount of what most devs are paying their cut for is the mere privilege of being on a platform with such a huge userbase, meaning it usually is their best option to make money if they don’t already have a name for themselves (and sometimes even then). The amount they pay is undoubtedly tied to this fact, and that is rent extraction. Yes, many make use of patching and some make use of various online services, but it’s not like they can “opt out” of those being available to them, they aren’t services that are offered independently of the huge platform, and more games than you might expect do just fine with the old-fashioned patching approach that you see on websites like itch.
Have I given you enough material for you to now deign to enlighten me on the voluntary nature of the free market under this merit monopoly?
Why are you being such an asshole? I do not want to have a conversation with someone who is behaving like this.
Point taken. Could we perhaps come to an agreement to not talk down to each other, in that case? See your earlier reply:
Which is terse, wildly hyperbolic (even if we assume I’m seriously wrong, it does not follow that more than one of those things is misunderstood), and asserting that I don’t know what fucking rent is, among other things.
If you see fit to curb what I’m sure you view as a minor affectation, then please proceed on the actual subject matter, unless you want me to rewrite my previous comment to be more suitable.
How is that not unreasonable? Your justification is literally just supply and demand.
The exact same justification an employer uses to exploit workers, your argument is “if game devs want better pay, why don’t they go set up their OWN company???”. Actual upbeared justification of technofeudalism.
Massively overcharging on commission, with anti-competitive practices, is kind of the definition of unreasonable in my books. Absolute HONKTONS of people - I’m amazed you emphasise ‘nobody’ in that sentence - want to build alternatives for it, but struggle because Steam has users locked in and deliberately have made it massively inconvenient to ever leave.
All the more reason to nationalize Valve and make it better for players and devs.
What does nationalizing an internationally-used online service mean? Genuine question
well first we build a really big guillotine
It becomes sole ownership of the DPRK, I assumed
These would be interesting challenges in a world where capitalism still exists in half of countries, and socialism exists in a variety of progressed stages, but,
I imagine the company is nationalised by the country it’s headquartered/mostly managed in. Nationals/Allied socialist states get free/subsidised service (ie commissions and purchases), everyone else pays as usual. Efficiency savings for the socialist nations is a net benefit anyway, with the bonus that capitalist states subsidise it, job done.
I hated steam when it first rolled out because I knew it was going to become a monopoly once they ironed out the kinks. Not only was I right it paved the way for a bunch of garbage imitators. Anyway as always the answer is socialism.