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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • No harm meant. I do think Steam is the golden example of a big business done right. All I’m saying is that there’s room for improvement.

    However do we know their full PNL/balance sheet?

    We can make an educated guess. Amazon’s S3 charges roughly $0.025 per GB, so an 100GB game would cost $2.50 for Steam to upload to a user. For a $30 game, that’s around ~8.5% or just over 3 downloads before it’s unprofitable.

    Obviously Valve isn’t paying consumer level S3 prices, and obviously users can download multiple times. But I would be extremely surprised if they didn’t make a rather large margin on each sale



  • You’re welcome <3 You seem like a kind person, and those people are easily taken advantage of. I don’t like seeing people lose that kindness because they forget to put themselves first.

    This person you’re dealing with could have any number of good and valid excuses for their behaviour. But it’s still straight up abusive, and could equally stem from a harmful and malicious place. Unless you know for sure, the best you can do is not antagonise them.

    An official report would be valid in your situation. But I wouldn’t get involved any further. Just save her messages and any evidence you have of her behaviour, on the off chance it does escalate and you or another coworker need to protect yourselves



  • You pay less because you get less. I’m selling a product. The last thing I’m going to cheap out in is sales. I’m not going to see great sales from the EGS because A)Nobody uses it

    That’s exactly it, Devs have to accept Steam’s cut because it’s essentially the only place you can sell things. It makes logical sense, but do you not see why this is a disadvantageous position for the Devs to be put in?

    It’s like trying to sell your hand made Combs. The gas station on the corner is happy to take only 20% of the profit. They’re all over the place and accessible. But you really want to sell it at the boutique shops because they have more comb-seeking customers.

    This would be a fine analogy, if there weren’t a single digit amount of storefronts. Steam and EGS are more equivalent to supermarkets. Sure the odd person is going to go to speciality stores on occasion, but the vast majority of sales are done through supermarkets. Steam is a supermarket competing against speciality stores. The only other real supermarket in town is EGS and as you’ve discussed, it’s such a dumpster fire no one shops there.

    I’m not disagreeing that Steam deserves its position, it does for sure. But we live in a world where it has no meaningful competition, and one of the ways it exercises its position is by maintaining their 30% cut. A cut which was established by stores that had to manage the logistics for real physical copies of the games.

    My point is that there isn’t a reason that Steam has such a high cut, other than it wants more money, and has the market saturation to command more money


  • Taking a different and hopefully more productive stance than the other guy, I just want to explore people’s thoughts.

    People already have built these alternatives. Itch.io, EGS, Humble Store, Microsoft Store, GOG. These platforms exist, but they struggle to achieve the full market dominance that Steam has as the “default” platform, meaning Devs are borderline forced to accept the 30% cut if they have any hope of making sales.

    As shown by Steam’s huge profits, they certainly take a higher cut than they have to, and they can definitely stomach a smaller cut


  • I get what a lot of you guys are saying about Starmer and the Labour government not being as left wing as Corbyn. I would also like someone who would use this majority to implement some really hardcore leftist policies.

    But please can we just take a step back and look at what he wants to do:

    • Massive amounts of NHS funding

    • Nationalised green energy

    • Tax private schools

    • Allow regulators to hit company executives with criminal charges

    • Nationalise the railways

    • Increase the minimum wage to a living wage

    • Free school meals

    I don’t know about you, but that seems at the very least, left of center. Sure, he’s not making drastic sweeping changes right off the bat. But this country needs an era of stability, whilst we make small but consistent steps in the right direction, and that’s what Starmer will give us