72% of Devs Believe Steam Has a Monopoly on PC Games, According to Study

Agreed. The Steam platform has so much value for developers and yet they still complain about the 30%.

To put into perspective, when Epic only takes 15%. They themselves admitted that is not a sustainable thing. EGS is constantly losing money. So now I invite everyone to gauge just how "big" the EGS is. How many "features" they offer etc. This platform in so much smaller than Steam and even they state that a 15% cut is not sustainable to keep the light on.

Judging just how big the Steam platform is, do people honestly think Valve could be forced into reducing their cut to this proposed 15%? When this little hobbyshop that is EGS cannot make it work. Why would it work for a much much larger and therefore more expensive platform?

I am furthermore given to understand when you distribute on Steam you are free to run your own store front. You are free to create your own Steam keys for your games and sell them in your shop which is supposedly have a 0% cut for Valve. Of course then you would have to run your own store with all the effort and cost that go along with it. Or you simply put it on Steam. A storefront visited by millions of paying customers. Which handles everything. From purchase/refund/CDN for Downloading and updating the game binaries/communityhub to directly engage with the customers if you wish

In the end, the only way they are forced to use steam is because that is where the customers are. and since there are alternatives around, these customers could very well shop some place else. but they dont. they shop where they get the best experience. and if that is on steam, thats where they go.

If "developers" were really honest they would all disclose just how much they sold on Steam vs any other digital store front in case they distribute their offerings to any store that will let them. Just because you get 4 sales on Epic vs 4 million sales on Steam does mean Steam is a monopoly. It just means Epic is a steaming pile and given the chance the customer goes to the better option.

Maybe Steam and Apple deserved to obtain a partial monopoly but now they can just sit and relax and take 30% to copy/paste games/apps to each user that wants them.

So yes, 30% is high and unjust to the games creators who are doing the 2025 work.

No other service actually saturates my download speed. That's probably an expensive luxury that could be cut. Even netflix with their CDNs in every city tries to minimize bandwith and it results in terrible video quality-if it can even deliver it at all.

Steam getting a 30% cut is certainly less objectional that Apple getting 30% because they've locked other people out of selling on iPhones.

On the other hand, that Steam taking as big a cut as Apple can claim because of their unfortunate practices isn't great.

Generally, the smallest indie creators, who aren't really likely to benefit from organic discovery on Steam, seem to priority selling on itch, which, by default, only takes a 10%, despite doing all the work you mention.

That Steam seems to have a marketplace monopoly based on network effects, and this allows them to claw money from all but the largest and smallest game developers is not something they have a strong right to claim to morally, and something society would benefit from doing away with. It appears that 72% of game devs feel that way too.

So, to answer your question, for me, two thirds of Steam's revenue seem unfair.

I would love for steam to offer even the complement: Only distribution & SSO services, so I can have fast downloads and quick non-replayable-auth for games I buy/subscribe elsewhere (not subject to steam peculiarities about squeezing out maximum price for each region by purchasing power).

Of course, that would need to have a wildly different fee schedule than when they carry major legal & reputational risks plus more significant customer support volume.

>Steam is the most dominant because of their ... insane price crashes

Are steam deals really better than on other platforms? They might have better deals compared to brick and mortar retailers but publishers generally have price parity across various digital storefronts (eg. epic vs steam), so attributing low prices to steam doesn't really make much sense. If anything steam is actually more expensive if you factor in authorized keystores (eg. greenmangaming), which are occasionally cheaper.

> How much do you think they should take?

A 15–20% fee would be much fairer in my opinion. They’d still be making plenty of money while letting developers keep more of what they earn through their hard work. At the very least, they should differentiate between big players and smaller indie developers.

If you don't try,you will never know.

Do you have a source for that? I only know this [1] site laying out distribution of Steam keys

[1] https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

I didn't.

I asked where are these basic features. Two separate parts to my comment.

The user hostile comes from Tim Sweeneys Twitter account where he openly mocks users who ask questions.

Do you really think that? All Steam users are buying games in Steam instead if getting them for free on Epic Games Store because they have a library on Steam, not because Steam is a better product?

Yeah,they also force you on a very crappy OS which they decided not to support.

I used to buy on GOG, but open source support and portable pc made a huge difference

It's pretty close to one. Having all your games in a single digital library along with cloud saves and achievements for those games in a single place is a real benefit that would lead to a monopoly.

>Amazon sold products at a loss for years in order to capture market share

Selling at a loss on a cost of goods sold basis, or the entire business as a whole? I'm aware of the latter but not the former. The latter also isn't obvious "abuse", because it would include all sorts of market entrants, including eg. intel trying to enter the GPU space and making a loss because of R&D.

Indie game development largely owes its existence to Steam. I know I would spend a lot less on indie games if I had to buy them from their own websites or, god forbid, through an awful laggy "app store" run by Ubisoft or Microsoft.

Indie games pay for discoverabiliy (don't know if that's a word). To be clear, I mostly use GoG when I can, unless it's a multiplayer game with bad lobby/MP support (Firaxis/paradox basically)

> With Epic the first million you make is free.

That's Epic using its money from other markets for loss leader schemes in order to grab market share. It's a very classic move (same as free games), and it's always detrimental to the market and customers in the long run.

It's not a good thing, epic games is a garbage company. That they're actively losing money to prop up their store should tell you how bad of a thing it is if it ever succeeds.

I'd love for the cut to be smaller, but it is absolutely not a "death sentence." With traditional consoles (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft consoles, and those before them), the barrier to entry is very high. If you are an indie, it is practically necessary to work with a publisher to get on those platforms. The publishers demand their own cut (in addition to Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft), and as they are running a business, they only take on games that they expect will make a profit. In that environment, weird little developers making weird little games will almost always be shut down before they can even see the light of day. I think it is a little easier in the modern day (you don't need a blessed dev kit to make a console game, for example), but I think the barrier is still not trivial.

The PC games space has always been more open. If you had a weird game you wanted to share, you could share a disc with your friends or make it available on your website. But, again, if you wanted to make some decent money, you probably needed a marketing department and to have a boxed copy on store shelves (which, again, means working with a publisher). With a few exceptions, hardly anyone would ever find your game otherwise.

With modern-day Steam, an indie dev needs only to pay $100 to put a game on Steam (and I believe that $100 is refunded if the game crosses a certain threshold of sales). Discoverability is still a challenge, but just by existing on Steam, an indie game has a chance to make a bit of money. Steam itself has some discoverability features that can boost the visibility of even quirky little titles. The indie dev needs to do their own work, of course, to get visibility, but they don't need to have major resources behind them to get that visibility. They don't necessarily even need to host a website anymore - the game has a page on the Internet through Steam after all. The indie dev can direct anyone who will listen to them to go there.

All that said, I do agree that Steam is practically a monopoly. If Steam decided they hate you for some reason, then that's it. You almost certainly do not have a viable path forward for selling your PC game simply because they have such dominance (see the recent controversy where major payment processors suddenly decided they would not facilitate the sale of lewd games, and Steam reacted by pulling any game that seemed to fall into that category. Although, even in that case, the harmful monopoly tactics are coming from different actors in a different industry). For the time being, I just think they are kind of a benevolent dictator.

High prices are a sign of their competitors failing to compete. Are they using their standing to make competing with them harder, somehow? For example, they dont do Amazon style prohibitions of selling the product cheaper elsewhere.

To be clear, I don't think Valve has abused their position at all. I was merely musing on how they could. Which would operate on a similar concept as Apple did: "my users will stay in my ecosystem almost regardless of what I do."

> To have the same profit, Spotify has to charge $13/mo when apple music charges $10/mo

Last I checked as long as an App Store is not handling subscriptions Apple doesn’t take a cut. Did that change?