It will be only be a matter of time that some publisher will whine about other games having forums while they wouldn't want one.
But I said that as a client, not as a dev. As a dev, I'd publish my game on Steam because it still gives lot of exposure, albeit less than before. But even so, 30% is completely nuts. When Discord announced that they're doing 30% too, I saw it as a stab in the back. They could've been a game changer... The sooner that 30% cartel breaks, the better for everyone.
That's really strange given developers on Steam can Opt-out of having forums and almost none do. I wonder if that's exactly what he said or if our friend Nathan Gayson paraphrased or took something out of context here.
Compared to what? Like I said earlier, payment processing alone will cost you 10% with file hosting (pay and download). To get more than tumbleweed rolling into your store you need marketing. Most companies in the US spend 15-25% of their revenues on marketing. So if you're running your own store, you'll spend 20-25% on payments and marketing to sell a quarter (at best) of what you sell on Steam for 30%. Steam knows it and most developers know it too.
To be a game changer they need to claim a chunk of market as their own. So far they have less than 1% and until that changes, even if they drop the rate to 5% it won't make any difference.
47 million DAUs, 90 million MAUs, the total number of accounts on Steam is probably hundreds of millions, but that's not really a relevant metric:
Alternatively, journos will tell you that using epic over steam or vice versa is a sign of gamer entitlement!
Problems with causality in your post. Steam is taking 30% because they have a monopoly and can change that number at will, all your reasoning is just fitting, but it's not the actual reason why they're taking 30%. It's not necessary to steal 30% from devs, for proof: see Epic. Don't rationalize or romanticize thievery. You're too in love with exploiters of other people's labor. Which, for an indie dev, is being a useful idiot.
It's not really the definition of monopoly, but let's not argue semantics. The reason they have a "monopoly" is because they are that good at what they do (and Epic's attempt to cater to developers shows why the others are so bad at it) not because the others aren't allowed to enter the market. Steam doesn't ask for exclusivity, doesn't charge for the keys, and lets you sell your game or Steam keys anywhere you want. I agree that Steam can easy charge 40 or even 50% and not a single developer would walk away because even at 50% they'd still sell more on Steam than anywhere else. It's a sad truth but truth often is.
See what now? Did I miss something and Epic now controls 15% of the market? Maybe even 25%? So far Epic has nothing but good intentions. As a developer I want to believe that Epic will do well and we'll sell tens of thousands of copies and pay only 12%, which would be fucking amazing, but I'm skeptical by nature and nothing I've heard so far sounds reassuring. No toxic forums, opt-out reviews, no community - it's not how one beats Steam at its own game.
If selling games on Steam were the only way to sell them, I'd agree with you. Fortunately, it's not. There are at least a few dozen of digital stores, so if one doesn't like Steam, one has a lot of options. However, Steam happened to be the best store and people want the best service for less. Why? Because it's nice to pay less.
If Steam is a "thieving monopolistic exploiter" for asking for 30% of the Sales profits even though they market and sell your product to one of the biggest worldwide games marketplaces, host, offer regional pricing, do all the finance stuff, offer community tools, cloud storage and Online/Matchmaking tools etc. for devs, then what would you call retail chains that got 30% or more of the sales before "Steam" and Digital Distribution was a thing? What about platform royalties to SONY/Microsoft/Nintendo of about ~20%? The promise of Digital Distribution from the beginning was that publishers and developers could achieve higher margins than the often only 30-50% of the Sales price in Retail.
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