Seriously? You don't need to be a fucking expert to calculate that they expenses can't be too much. They only host the game files on their servers and some relatively low quality videos, which are probably their biggest expenses other than workforce and R&D. 30% for that is fucking robbery, yes Steam is an excellent service but it's still annoying that they're ripping off developers, especially indie ones
You actually need to be a fucking expert to calculate their expenses.
Do you know how much it costs to host 1 gb file on the cloud? Do you know how robust and rescilient their architecture is? How about coms to support voice chat, online gameplay and all of the rest of steam works? Do you know how much they spend in payment processing?
All of this in a global scale.
It's not only hosting files, my friend. When was the last time Steam had downtime? Even Facebook has downtime every know and again and you could say "they are only hosting a website".
Even if they are taking a large piece of the pie, what's the problem? Do you think publishers would pass down the savings to the consumers? Because if they were, games would be consistently cheaper on EGS or their own stores in the case of EA and Ubi and guess what, they are not all the time.
If Sweeney was interested in competing he would be investing in the store. He prefers to invest in giving away games hoping libraries would become large enough that people would be willing to go and play on their platform and abandon critical features like refunds, gifting games and reviews. Instead he rather money hats for temporary exclusives, sues companies and bitches on social media.
I mean, as consumers we get to spend our money where we want to but companies' profit split and expenses should not be one of our concerns. They only are in people's mouths because Sweeney brought that topic to the table as if it was more important to consumers than an online store cart (which they were lacking back then). At least in my opinion it is not more important.
It's fucking 2024 and I still can't gift V-Bucks to my children on any platform. How consumer friendly is that?