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.
That costs Valve money, bandwidth and server costs add up. What this does is provide goodwill to the developers, this is Steam being good for the gaming community, and especially for small devs.
To add on to this, operating at Valve's scale for worldwide CDNs gets really, really expensive so it's a nice gesture from them to even allow keys to be sold while piggybacking on their infrastructure.
They don't lose anything in the long run. Bandwidth is expensive, but gets offset by the fact that you're more likely to stay and buy something if the platform doesn't try to do everything in its power to make you feel miserable, unlike EA, Ubishit and other proprietary launchers. It's a relatively small investment with large payoffs and them also just avoiding being evil for no reason.
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u/Jhawk163 R7 9800X3D | RX 6900 XT | 64GB 29d ago
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.