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this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2026
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Yeah, sure.
Developers don't, though. If you don't release your game on Steam, you might as well not release it. They could have ended up with a lot worse than Steam though, so at least there's that.
Plenty of indie developers on itch.io
I would like to see their income breakdown between Steam and other platforms.
Difficult to measure. A lot, and I do mean a lot, of indie devs on itch.io will likely get the biggest sum of their income from Patreon subscriptions.
From what I've heard speaking to some of them, when it comes to succesful Patreons, even a Steam release is peanuts compared to how much money was made through Patreon.
Oh interesting. I hadn't really fought of patreon as a source for indie game developers. I think the only one I know of is chinchillas art.
But how exactly is that steams fault? What should they do to remedy that?
I'm not assigning blame on them, and it doesn't make sense that they would voluntarily do something to compromise their own business model, unless they fear regulatory oversight or serious competition (which, let's be honest, aren't happening) and decide to self-regulate instead.
Regardless, any change would come from outside factors.
What is their fault is using their monopoly status to charge 30% of sales for an online storefront. For many games, Steam's cut is the single largest expense.
If you're a developer of a game being sold on Steam, Gabe Newell's personal cut on the game that wasn't produced, published, or marketed by him or any company he owns is more than yours because he charges an unconscionable toll for the storefront.
If Steam charged 5% instead of 30% they'd still be making a killing, but since they have an an effective monopoly it doesn't matter.
30% is the standard cut for game sales across the industry. Epic has a smaller cut, but customers don't want to use it. As someone offering a product, you have to sell where your customers are. Steam COULD abuse their position by taking a higher than standard cut, but they choose not to. Steam isn't a bad guy here. They made a good platform that customers prefer, and have made no attempts to stop competitors from competing and despite having the market position to abuse it, still only charge the industry standard for selling on their platform. If anybody would bother actually trying to compete with them, then you might see the cut come down, but all their competition seems content to just whine instead of actually making a platform worth using.
It's the industry standard for online PC game sales because of them. They established that number when they were the first major player to the market. They don't get to blame the industry for a pricing scheme they invented.
This is the company that didn't offer refunds until they had to. They're the company that used to make indie developers get permission to launch games through them with exclusivity agreements (Steam Greenlight program). They cry foul when devs put in loot boxes, gacha mechanics, and other live service bullshit when they don't get a 30% cut.
They've been exactly as shitty as they can get away with. The only things that have allowed them to be less shitty are that they were first to the game and that they're privately-owned l, meaning they do what's in Gabe's long-term interest instead of having to drive the stock price up every quarter until they collapse or allergens with someone else.
When Steam launched, gamers were very upset because they didn't want to have to log into an online marketplace to play Half-Life 2. And now people get pissy when the games they want dont require you to give data and money to a billionaire who long ago stopped giving a fuck about gamers as anything other than a means to buy more yachts.
Industry standard for ALL game sales, not just PC. Steam did not invent this. PlayStation charges this. Xbox charges this. Retail in general charged this before Steam even existed.
But you're clearly unwilling to see anything but "Steam bad! RAH RAH RAH!" So I'm just gonna block your dumbass self now.
Xbox and Playstation developed the platforms the games are on and sold the consoles at a loss.
Retailers have physical overhead that gar exceeds Steam's cost per sale.
Steam doesn't have those reasons. They just wanted a bigger cut without incurring the expenses.
Steam maintains:
All of this stuff is free and bonus for devs. You pay a one-time fee to set up, which you get back if your game sells enough copies (it's a really low bar, unless the game is total gunk you're going to reach that threshold). Not to mention the costs involved in bringing your game to other devices it wasn't originally built for, allowing you to gain access to a larger share of the market (again, for free. It's even available to users using a competitor).
Steam provides not only a storefront with lots of features that devs can use, they also provide servers, backend support through different APIs and not to mention the insane amount of data users need each day. (Around 275 PETABYTES a day, or 100 exabytes a year) That kind of infrastructure is not cheap, and seeing as that was the industry standard (it's still what Google and apple get from their storefronts) I'd say that's pretty reasonable.
Also the 30% cut goes down to 25% after the first $10 million in revenue, then down to 20% after you reach $50 million. I do think they should put in a lower cut for independent developers who are releasing small games, until a certain revenue threshold is reached, but overall I would say it seems reasonable to me.
That 30% is industry standard, steam didn't even set it. You people are morons
Steam was the first major online games distribution platform. Who else would have set the standard?
That is also something that would allow a competitor to come in to outseat their dominance. In fact, charging 5% instead of 30% would make it much more difficult for competition to develop because it would be next to impossible for somebody to penetrate into the market by offering a lower rate that's only viable with huge volumes of sales. Usually, offering unsustainable prices is a way that a dominant player achieves a monopoly. If they have big cash reserves, they can run at a loss until their competition dies out.
They don't have to push Steam DRM on devs. They could just leave stuff open like on GOG... They could use a scaling model of fees based on the popularity one's games receive, since people have said the current levels are prohibitive for micro indie devs...
they don't push steam DRM...devs choose whether they want it or not
I know devs can choose; I didn't say "force," after all. But the fact that so very few games are DRM-free bugs me...
That not steams fault so why bring it up?
They encourage it, I'm sure.
So a hunch is all you got....
If you want to sell your product in a store, your product has to abide the stores rules. This is nothing new. You don't get to whine about how you can't sell enough anywhere else because customers prefer buying from the store, that's asinine.
Not true at all starsector is one of my favs and so is vintage story and before that Minecraft in its early days. Your just straight up wrong.
Yeah, but how did you learn about those games?
not through steam, whats your point relating to this question?
You did not answer the question. Developers that self publish are repying purely on word of mouth marketing. Its rarely successful. Minecraft is very rare exception.
No they're not, they're good games and didn't need steam to get recog ised by the comunity, Im failing to see your point.
I learn about vintage story from a very obscure video on youtube a few years ago. I never see any media talking about it. Lemmy is the only place i see people occasionally talking about it.
Idk what to tell you I found videos about it on YouTube and Iv found plenty.
Was that before or after you filled the algo with VS videos?
I found it via YouTube, steam had nothing to do with it. Your not making a point here and I'm not going to keep it up.
A great example is when Factorio was released onto steam.
Again youtube, I leaned about it from nerd cubed. I spend a lot of time on YouTube over the years and I find out about most off-steam games from there. Dwarf fortress is another that comes to mind.
Arent you special? But you dont represent the majority.
See, there it is. You just wanted to make an argument for the sake of it. Later trash.
My point is steam is a massive marketing platform. You finding it on youtube was luck.
YouTube is also a platform for marketing, it's where people hear about most trends nowadays, there and at other social medias
Neither of those games have released and at least one of them is planning a Steam release
Of course counterexamples exist (Fortnite probably being the biggest one), but it's true for the vast majority of releases