That 30% cut is also done on the Xbox and Playstation stores. I would assume Nintendo does the same thing.
It also sounds like Valve’s price parity agreement only applies to Steam keys. So, if a developer or publisher wanted to provide the game through their own storefront or on another third-party platform then they could charge whatever they wanted.
As for the 30% cut being excessive, I don’t know if it is or not, but storing data at the scale that Valve does costs a lot of money, not to mention the costs associated with ensuring the data’s integrity and distributing the data to their users all over the world at reasonable speeds. In all likelihood they are running multiple data centers on multiple continents with 100s of petabytes of storage each with some extremely high speed networking within the individual data centers, between the data centers, and out to the wider internet. Data hosting, especially for global availability, is damn expensive.
A Blu-ray can hold up to 128GB. Most games aren’t bigger than that, though some are. And including multiple discs to fit the entire game used to be standard practice, and could still easily be done.
This is for DRM, online install for a physical game has always been solely for DRM.
Bit late to respond, but as someone else pointed out, physical PC games are virtually nonexistent. Even the collector’s edition of Baldur’s Gate 3 I recently bought came as a steam key and a disk with the steam client installer and a few files for the game to make Steam think the game is installed and force an update. I was pretty disappointed by that.
And no, most people don’t have a blu-ray drive or any kind of optical media reader in their PCs these days.
As for whether or not disks that large are printed on by publishers, most physical PS5 games are printed in disks of that capacity as are 4K blu-ray releases of movies.
I wouldn’t say I’m new to Ubisoft, more that they haven’t released a game I’ve been interested in playing since Assassin’s Creed: Revelations.
As for day one patches being a necessity for games, I would argue that if a game has major game breaking bugs on final release (AKA launch day) then the game isn’t worth playing, much less spending money on.
If a game can’t even install on a system that meets its minimum requirements without needing a patch, then I’d say that’s a feature not a bug. Since it tells me that I should strongly reconsider purchasing anything from that publisher in the future.
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