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In 2018 a group of Valve staff tried to figure out just how efficient they were being—and found they were making more money per head than Apple, Facebook, and nearly every tech giant out there (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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[+] -48 points 2 years ago (3 children)

Let's not describe this as "paying valve three bucks" because that's not accurate and is misleading.

It's paying valve 30% of your revenue.

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  • [–] 52 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    They didn't frame it as "paying valve three bucks". They said "paying valve 3 bucks on my 10 dollar game". The phrase "paying pennies on the dollar" comes to mind as a common idiom for saying you're paying a small fraction of the total, and neither literally means nor implies paying actual pennies.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It is misleading. It is 30% of the entire revenue of the game. And it is objective whether Valve deserves 30% of that revenue. It's also true that games aren't locked to the Steam platform and can absolutely make money outside of Valve's influence. History has shown though that it is less profitable then being inside the Steam ecosystem.

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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Except that Steam allow their keys to be sold on other platforms and don't take a cut on those. So it is 30% on the key sold on steam, but 0% on the other storefront.

    So there is no reason to not go on steam because it doesn't restrict you to steam.

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  • [+] -14 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    You still need Steam on your computer to install it which means if your computer no longer supports Steam you are out of luck.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    If your computer doesn’t support Steam, there’s really no reason to install Steam, because better chance than not your computer doesn’t support almost any game you’d want to play on Steam.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago*

    There are still plenty of stubborn people that cling to Windows 7, Steam dropped support a few months back when they upgraded the... Electron version, I believe? Had something to do with chrome/chromium removing win 7 support.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    It is not a great trend, but you need a launcher anyway today be it Steam, Origin or any other launchers.

    Only GOG offers DRM free games but it is not the norm.

    Some games on steam are DRM free, meaning that you can run the game without opening Steam.

    I'd rather have physical copies of my games, but it doesn't exist anymore unless you pirate it.

    With that said, Steam is the most convenient and feature complete and that is why it is so widespread. Epic games with their money printer Fortnite could not reproduce a fraction of Steam dev tools and functionality.

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