this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
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They basically take away most of the profit margin of games created by studios. 30% is a huge cut for a virtual storefront. A single medium studios usually employ more people than steam as a whole.
Don't Sony, MS and Nintendo take the same 30% cut from third-party games sold on their platforms?
It doesn't really seem to be publicly verifiable, but if this article is to be believed, then yes. Would be kind of weird if they wouldn't either, since selling games is their business too, and they have to compete with Steam / PC.
Whataboutism. The fact that someone is a POS doesn't justify you being one. But if you really want to compare, they all have major studios under their wing and thousands of employees (sub 300 for steam). Epic also only takes 12%, and GOG let's you actually own your games, DRM free (your steam library dies with you). I'm not defending any of these stores, just pointing out that steam isn't the good guy gamers think they are. They care about profit, that's it, yet any critisism is met with an army of gamers ready to give their life for capitalist selfish business.
That is not a whataboutism. The claim was "30% is a huge cut for a virtual storefront". The only way to qualify that comparison is to look at other virtual storefronts for games. If you have other cases of comparison to give apart from Sony, MS, and Nintendo, I'm open to look at them. Epic, so far, is a bit of a standout with its pricing.
Yeah let's ignore Epic, just because .
And let's also ignore the kid gambling epidemic created by Valve.
And let's ignore the fact that you don't own your steam games, but people have send death treath to Ubisoft for saying the same.
BTW, Sony, MS and Nintendo all suck, but at least they create jobs for devs.
People have sent me death threats for not liking the new Star Wars who gives a fuck?! Why do i keep seeing people use “death threats” against a major corporate entity as proof of anything? So fucking what? Oh they got death threats? OH WELCOME TO THE INTERNET?
Epic made it very clear from the start they were trying to undercut Steam, not by being better, but by paying out developers to create exclusive games for the Epic store, something extremely hated on PC. Even on Steam you can still sell your games elsewhere too.
Steam also controls the larger markets share of PC gaming. Of course they're going to have to price themselves competitively. Because why would you pay more for a platform that has way less users and a bad reputation?
You can actually just pay an almost 0% cut by delivering directly to your customers, but that's exactly why you use a storefront to sell your game. You go where the customers are, and they are at Steam.
Let's ask actual developers.
You're link doesn't make any sens. It doesn't change anything, they all have massive studios with thousand of employees, while steam has sub 300 employees.
BTW I ACTUALLY worked with 3 studios in Montreal over the past 15 years. One had a quite successful game but they had to close anyway because they couldn't secure funding for the following project. Meanwhile steam made hundreds of thousand of the game.
But I get it, you dont care really about games and devs, you care about convenience. Expect a major enshitification of games because IA shit will soon be the only way to make this industry profitable.
Unfortunately for your bad faith argument, I make games myself. And this kind of behaviour is absolutely detestable if you ask me. Engaging with people like this presenting yourself as someone in the industry is actively doing damage to game developers' reputations. You aren't automatically right for having been part in making a game once.
PC developers don't work for Steam, they work for themselves or for a publisher. And the same massive studios that make games for consoles make them for PC too. Feel free to provide some actual stats that aren't just your personal feeling on the topic rather than just saying "nuh-uh" while running off with the goalpost.
What does that has to do with anything?
I'll let you figure it out yourself. Hint: maybe a company that made 17 billions in a singlke year selling others people works could offer a bit more of the profit to those who actually created the product.
I mean, yeah, I would also like to live in a socialist world. However, we're not, so we need to judge companies on a grade of existing world, not on a grade of luxury gay space communist one. And in our capitalist reality, it's really unreasonable from a capital to not go for more capital. We also don't judge companies by revenue per employee, at all, it's not a thing that we do in a capitalist society. We sometimes congratulate them on winning at capitalism if the ratio is particularly high like in this case.
That aside, Steam is a product and a service, and 30% is very reasonable market rate for products and services they produce.
They’d be public if they only cared about profit. It might be 99.9% of what they care about but private businesses do have things they do that aren’t as profitable but they do them to make something better. Or because they want to see it in the world.