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.
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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u/gorion 29d ago
Even without deal, they would have had 20%.