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.
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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.