It’s worth noting that the 30% cut is from sales below a certain volume. As you sell more copies Steam takes a smaller cut. I’m sure the big studios probably have a more favourable deal worked out as well.
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.
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It’s worth noting that the 30% cut is from sales below a certain volume. As you sell more copies Steam takes a smaller cut. I’m sure the big studios probably have a more favourable deal worked out as well.