this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2024
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You mean the game devs they provide CDN at no additional costs, networking features a dev environment that is far more comfortable than any competitor and various additional revenue streams (such as trading cards and items)?
It's still stealing if the profit is this extremely high. Of course a successful business includes providing a useful product. But if you make so much more money per employee than any other company, that means the amount you're charging is disproportional. They could change Steam fees to 5% and still be extremely profitable. They choose not to because of greed.
This is not me condemning them by the way, I think their greed and what they do with the money available to them is still mostly better than what other people do, but it's still greed.
I define all excessive profit as stealing. In an ideal world everyone would be earning roughly the same. (Or no earning being necessary at all, but I don't want to go into every detail)
It isn't 30% profit. It's a 30% charge. Servers, broadband connections, etc... are expensive. Those numbers may be pulled out of someone's ass, so I don't know their veracity, but 30% might not be too much.
This is a thread about how Valve makes over 8 billion dollars despite basically all their revenue coming from an in-game store that sells other people's content. Of course its too much.
Do they bank 8 billion dollars or does 8 billion dollars make its way from our hands to theirs. There is a difference. How much of that 8 billion goes to managing infrastructure?
In fact:
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/547025/steam-game-sales-revenue/
To be clear, I agree that the way our model works is broken. Wall street and infinite profit gains can only work so long until the system collapses, and Steam is a part of this. Some of the statements made here are just not factual and I feel the need to be pedantic, because I don't believe that spreading misinformation will help anything. Attack CEO pay disparity or something useful and true.
Edit: I woke up and answered you without fully reading your post. Apologies, I didn't answer you point, because I was on a soap box. The point still stands that the revenue they make could very well be going to infrastructure costs, necessitating a charge for using their store that is on everyone's computer. If all you have is potato servers then what quality will the store front be?
I stand my last paragraph in the above, especially the last sentence.