Then developers can release games off steam, and some do.
‘There’s other services.’
But steam has many features people want and use that would add development costs if every dev had to make similar tools in house.
’ It takes a whole fucking lot of hypothetical work, which you imagine developers would have to do, to amount to the slice Steam takes right off the top.’
Your response to criticism of Steam was ‘there’s other services.’
That does absolutely nothing to deflect from criticism of Steam.
Praising their various features comes a little closer, but still doesn’t justify taking an entire third of every game’s revenue. It takes a whole fucking lot of hypothetical work, which you imagine developers would have to do, to amount to the slice Steam takes right off the top.
What Valve offers that makes companies put up with that is their de-facto monopoly presence. They can sell many copies through Steam - or they won’t sell many copies.
Valve could take a lot less and it wouldn’t kill them. Or PC gaming. Wouldn’t be whatever frothing insult you pretend it is, either. It’s just… less money. They’d still make a shitload of money. Just… less.
The number can be smaller and the sky wouldn’t fall.
The number right now is obscenely high. It’s the most they think they can get away with. And they can only get away with it because of their de-facto monopoly, which should end.
Continued use only proves this is a way to make money. Probably the best available way. But to suggest that, so long as people are doing it, there cannot possibly be problems, is obvious crap.
Especially when you add “and more.” Oh: so this isn’t the exact right amount, as decreed by mighty god himself? We can talk about the middleman’s cut, so long as the rent goes up?
Steam’s de-facto monopoly is so strong, Epic can’t break it. Epic made four billion dollars per year on one game. Epic licenses the engine for like half of all noteworthy games. Epic has the only platform not seizing one-third of all revenue from developers, and that platform throws free shit at customers in constant desperation. And they still can’t move the needle.
Monopoly doesn’t mean there’s zero competition. It means the competition does not matter.
PC gamers have alternatives to Steam the way that Android users have alternatives to Google Play. Yes, there are dozens. And that’s how many users each one has.
Seriously, it’s a four-player game. Not some MMO clusterfuck. Not an arena shooter bragging about 128 codblops on a single map, like it’s Stand On Nuketown. You need matchmaking - you want anticheat - you’ll do some DRM bullshit. Other than that you should want to offload bandwidth and latency to your players. They’re all on the same team!
Part of why Sony nowadays is a game company with a movie hobby is that discs were dirrrt cheap compared to cartridges. They’d fund any stupid bullshit people wanted to make, get finished cases on shelves, and know whether consumers loved it, before N64 developers had finished negotiating a production run. Their cost per disc was measured in cents and their manufacturing turnaround was measured in days. One of the slowest and riskiest aspects of game publishing suddenly cost next to nothing.
Digital distribution isn’t necessarily cheaper per-gigabyte… but there’s no mastering. There’s no lead time. There’s not even the concept of a production run, anymore. Developers can ship whatever they want, whenever they want, to whoever they want, essentially for free.