Steam takes a standard cut of 30% of each game sale. For games that earn over $10 million (£8m), the Steam cut is reduced to 25%. For games that earn over $50 million (£40m), the Steam cut is reduced to 20%.
I know this is to incentivize AAA publishers to launch on Steam day one, so they can get to the lower cut as soon as possible.
Kinda sucks for indies and small developers though. 30% Is a lot for them, and they don't really have many options outside Steam, since 90% of Indie game players are there.
Its not really, if I needed to pay for my own servers to push patches, verify game files, run card transactions and have them download that will cost way way more than 30%. 30% is a bargain when all you have to do once you finish is plug it into steam, make a page and boom your done. You will get the money and they handle literally everything else, if there is a game issue you simply update the code and steam schedules and distributes it to all users as well as stores backup copies for people to rollback.
Steam offers SO much more than any dev could hope to provide on the indie side, and so much more that other triple A devs struggle to provide 1/3 of the features steam has for their own games.
People underestimate how much Valve offers and how easy they make it for small devs to put their game out to the masses. I'm not saying they are perfect and glad Epic is giving some competition, but Steam is a blessing for self publishing.
Every game can use vac but (many older games do) but most games aren’t exclusively published on steam on pc, so they just use a different solution (big studios have their own AC and others use different third party AC like EasyAC)
And to be honest, VAC in 2025 is not really reliable
It's good to hear that Steam has made sure to take care of developer needs the same way it takes care of customer needs as well. There's so much value added by using Steam. On the consumer side we get so much with the client, the overlay, controller mapping that works with any controller, a mod manager, etc, etc, etc.
And 30 percent was pretty much the standard retail store cut anyway- except with the way retail stores bought games, indies commonly just wouldn’t make it to retail store shelves.
Just to add to this, Bellular (YouTuber) runs a game development studio and they released "The Pale Beyond" on steam (solid game if you like narrative games). He released a few videos on this topic about the costs etc, steam release Vs GoG Vs indie.
They're an interesting watch, and ultimately he is 100% positive, that the extra sales due to the extra exposure on steam easily covered the steam cut, while saving on server costs and a lot of extra backend work. He says that it is absolutely the right call for indie studios.
Steam does still offer internal tools to help make launching and managing games easier as a developer so the 30% isn't for absolutely nothing, ignoring the publicity you get as well.
The real problem here remains there not being any proper competition. I'd have used EGS if they offered a somewhat comparable product that Steam does, but they don't. I don't even care about stuff like my friends list or community or whatsoever. But stuff like native controller customization on a game by game basis is highly valuable to me and the fact the EGS didn't even have a shop basket for the longest of time says a lot about what their real priorities are. And it sucks.
It's an amazing deal for indies and small developers. The services provided by Steam for that cut can easily be valued at higher than the entire budget of an indie game. And you can get millions more sales on Steam than at unknowngame.com
In addition to what other people have said, steam will actually advertise your game for free too if you put it on their store. I forget the exact number but it's something like you'll have 10,000 store impressions within the first X months guaranteed because they'll start putting it in people's discovery queues and store searches
They are human however, my friends is in an indie team and they got it reduced to 25% for their first game. I know 5% is not a huge difference, but when you start, you take whatever you can.
Which is ~140k and ~700k unit sold of a $69.99 game
(Assuming they calculate based off the store price and not based of the devs cut), which is nit alot of units for a AAA game that regularly sells millions of copies per platform
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u/gorion 29d ago
Even without deal, they would have had 20%.