We don’t know how much it costs for their servers but I doubt it’s anywhere near what they charge devs. Gaben having an 11bn dollar net worth kind of points to that.

The biggest problem is that it isn’t up to devs since steam has market dominance. Not putting your game on steam is basically suicide, they have close to 90% of the PC market…

Selling it won’t stop it. They set up the whole machine and instead of breaking it, they sell it off so they can keep their image and the profits.

700$ goes a long way in terms of frozen foods. I get making a full meal is difficult but it isn’t hard to put chicken nuggets in the oven. For 700$ a week, you can even get the fancy “healthy” frozen meals. This is just pure stupidity.

I saw a few pictures floating around. One of the docs mentions two brothers and a third guy with specific first names and someone pulled up court documents showing they were arrested a week before the files with them in it were released.

I haven’t really seen it hit the news so idk, my guess is they might get a sweetheart deal as well.

Retail needs a location to store and sell their product. They need employees as well. One small Walmart has as many employees as steam does. Retails also buys the product in bulk, there is a bigger risk involved if it doesn’t sell or even sells slowly.

Huge difference imo.

Ya, I misread it and I’m way off. It’s 4bn. Epic also made a lot less, my stats are not for gross revenue but generated revenue before they split it with the devs. Amateur hour over here (me, not you).

I went off in my other comment and was a bit of a dick throughout the convo. It just feels like someone is being robbed here. 4bn is a lot of money and, from the wolffire lawsuit leak, they have less than 100 people working on steam full time.

I’m not reading the Google summary.

Okay, but your stats are still wrong? (Edit: so are some of mine though, disregard me being a dick here). Using AI wasn’t my point.

If so then Epic should have caught up by now, no?

Is making 1 000 million in a year with something like 5% not catching up? Do you think any of these billion dollar stores are running at cost?

Please back that up.

Having a vampire sucking up 30% of your revenue does affect a company but quantifying it would mean some pretty in depth studies and getting information from bankrupt companies. I do know most devs don’t like it. https://gdconf.com/article/gdc-state-of-the-industry-most-devs-feel-steam-s-30-cut-isn-t-justified-many-prefer-10-15/

And yes, all those points you mention are happening, but having a huge chunk of your profits taken like that obviously aggravates it.

What does that 30% pay for? Do you know?

I know it pays for Gabens yacht fleet worth 1.5 billion lol. We do have rough numbers. We know their employees count and revenue, and that they are making an estimated 11 million per employee from an article by the financial Times. That doesn’t include data atorage but I doubt the cost of offering downloads is anywhere near there revenue.

I own more computer games on disc from physical stores than I do from steam.

Stores don’t even stock physical discs for PC Games. How many of those are from the past 5 years? Last year had 95% of games sold digitally (PC and consoles). https://twicethebits.com/2025/06/19/the-shift-to-digital-gaming-why-physical-sales-are-declining/

But I do not trust the developer who originally brought the lawsuit

What dev? This is about a UK lawsuit on behalf of UK gamers. I can’t find anything about a devs involvement.

Nobody is suing Nintendo, PlayStation, or Microsoft over this.

PlayStation is getting sued for it, the trial is for March. This is specifically about the 30% (https://www.catribunal.org.uk/cases/15277722-alex-neill-class-representative-limited). (https://woodsford.com/woodsford-funded-5bn-class-action-against-sony-playstation-gets-go-ahead-in-uk-competition-appeal-tribunal/) .

I want to point out that this is pure whataboutism, just like the OP. But what about epic, but what about nintendo. All of them deserve to get sued.

I also never said

Then the proper response would be “yes, steam does deserve to get sued, epics behavior doesn’t even have anything to do with the subject, but they also deserve to get sued”. Like what’s your point then? Why make a bullet point of things steam does well if you aren’t trying to imply that they are “good enough to be allowed to abuse”.

I feel like you scanned right over half of what I did say.

We are both writing walls of text.

Steams revenue was 16b (edit: it’s 4b) in 2025, epics was 1b in 2024. At least click the links instead of pasting what the Google summary tells you. You are mixing up epics store revenue with their unreal engine revenue.

The fact is any game store front is a money printing machine mostly because of the rampant price fixing, hard to enter markets and abuse from those that hold the lion share of that market (Steam, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo).

That money is being sucked out of the companies that are actually making games, and is leading to a reduction in quality, layoffs and bankruptcies.

For regulation, we could easily have limits on the percentage store fronts are allowed to demand for digital media, but each time there’s a lawsuit, a bunch of idiots loudly fight it. Lawmakers aren’t going to enact laws that go against what the lobbyist want, especially if the majority of the population have been instructed that the boot is for their benefit.

Your list of pros and cons doesn’t matter, every player being compared is bad. It’s just a defense in favor of Gabens yacht fleet at this point. Exclaiming that steam shouldn’t change because you like their product, even though it’s clearly having an impact, is the same as defending Amazon because drop shipping is easier than going to the store.

Fyi, I use both, I literally own a steam deck and the sd card came from Amazon. Defending their practices is just fucking weak though.

“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shit myself, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”

Everyone does the moment steam gets sued by consumers. It’s like the bar is set by epic or something and we can’t expect better things from any of them because of it.

Steam isn’t being sued by Sweeny, they are being sued on behalf of 14 million UK gamers.

Also, epic has an estimated 3% to 7% of the market share (not 42 which makes no sense with steam having the other 80%), yet they should be regulated as well. If you stopped bootlicking for half a second, you would realise that this isn’t about who’s the worst but the fact that they are all bad (except itch, bless them).

Your enjoyment of their product doesn’t mean it isn’t having a serious and negative impact on the industry. Amazon is really convenient too, can you defend them next please?

The lawsuit - filed at the Competition Appeal Tribunal in London - alleges Valve “forces” game publishers to sign up to conditions which prevents them from selling their titles earlier or for less on rival platforms.

It claims that as Valve requires users to buy all additional content through Steam, if they’ve bought the initial game through the platform it is essentially “locking in” users to continue making purchases there.

This, Ms Shotbolt argues, has enabled Steam to charge an “excessive commission of up to 30%”, making UK consumers pay too much for purchasing PC games and add-on content.

The case is what is known as a collective action claim, which means that one person goes to court on behalf of a much larger group of people.

In this instance, it has been brought on behalf of up to 14 million people in the United Kingdom who bought games or additional content through Steam or other platforms since 2018.

The claim is backed by legal firm Milberg London LLP, which brings group action cases against large companies.

A separate consumer action case, filed in August 2024, has been brought against Valve in the US.

From another article because this one has half the info and reads like it was commissioned by steam. The effects of a company go further than your enjoyment of their product. I’m seeing a lot of people lick the boot just because it tastes sweet.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2g1md0l23o

Okay, you seem to be missing the point.

It isn’t about the effect on you but the effect on the industry as a whole. That’s why they are similar.

Amazon and Airbnb both dominate the market. They both have a better product than their competitors. Exactly like steam, they abuse their position and have a long term negative impact on their respective scenes.

The article above is literally about how hard the gaming industry is having it. You would have a good product in any case, because the lion’s share of the money being made isn’t going to making steam better but going to filthy rich people like Gaben.

They have like 100 employees (the financial Times estimates they made about 11 million per employee in 2021), steam probably only needs to charge less then 1% to cover it’s current expenses and salaries. All that money is being taken from devs (less games for us, more bankrupt studios) and being given to the top dogs (Gaben to buy boats).

I don’t think there’s much more to say. You seem to be really enthusiastic about supporting a billionaire’s money extraction machine and can’t understand that the effects of a company go further than your enjoyment of their product. You are defending the boot because it’s fluffy and soft.

https://archive.ph/dmHDP (FT article)

You can say the same thing about Amazon and Airbnb. None of them are bad products and they are all convenient, but they are having a negative impact. You don’t directly feel it but the devs do and in the end, it does mean less quality and overall games for us.

I’m not calling for a boycott here but the minimum would be calling them out on it.

“Price fixing happens, it’s a normal part of a healthy market”

Doesn’t make it right or legal. Stop defending billionaires please.

Everyone’s fine with staying in their lane and charging the standard percentage. Keeping the status quo to maximize profits isn’t competing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_fixing

There’s only a handful of companies and the smallest one (itch.io) takes between 0% and 10%. The companies that “couldn’t deal with it” are Microsoft (for Xbox, they actually take 12% on PC), Nintendo, Sony.

Look up what a soft monopoly is. In any case, they have market dominance and are abusing it. Steam is currently dealing with more than one anti trust lawsuit, including a 900$ million one in the UK.

It’s weird seeing people defend billionaires and their money sucking machine. You could defend Airbnb or Amazon with that same kind of energy and arguments. They haven’t lost a single monopoly lawsuit either.

30% is a disgusting cut for a few gb of data on a virtual store front. It’s having a negative impact on devs, and it only helps makes rich people richer. You don’t get a networth of 9 to 11 billion by being fair and having consumers at heart. Steam and Gaben aren’t your friends, they actively treat you and the industry as a bag of money to be exploited. They just have a really good marketing team.

By not competing with them. Gaben has 1.5 billion dollars worth of yachts. Steam doesn’t need to be taking 30% and only does so because everyone else does. I guess big companies colluding, each with a billionaire at the helm, is kind of the law of the market tbh but it’s not “the best”.

Steam is the best thing to happen to Gaben. It’s better than the other options as a product but the bar is really low and steam takes advantage just as much as the other players. The soft monopoly going on is clearly having an effect imo.

30% like the rest.