Because it's the industry standard, and because they offer a lot of value to customers for free that other platforms charge for extra (on top of their own 30%).
What I find amusing is how different the position is for some GAF posters depending on which company they are talking about.
If [insert plastic box manufacturer] does something blatantly anti-consumer, it's "good business" and "I would do the same". When Valve charges the same everyone else does while providing more services and features, that's an outrage.
For other companies, acting purely profit-motivated is seen as normal and acceptable. But Valve is expected to act like a charity even when they are the most consumer-friendly of the bunch.
What I find amusing is how different the position is for some GAF posters depending on which company they are talking about.
If [insert plastic box manufacturer] does something blatantly anti-consumer, it's "good business" and "I would do the same". When Valve charges the same everyone else does while providing more services and features, that's an outrage.
For other companies, acting purely profit-motivated is seen as normal and acceptable. But Valve is expected to act like a charity even when they are the most consumer-friendly of the bunch.
Stump always with the excellent posts in these threads.They handle:
- Credit card processing, including payment processing for every payment processor in every country
- Historically, giving you literally hundreds of thousands of front page impressions -- not sure if they still guarantee this but historically they did; I know they currently guarantee tons of patch update impressions on the front page
- Unlimited keys for external sales which they take 0% on
- All handling of refunds and chargebacks
- A marketplace for item content, which they only take 10% on
- A marketplace for trading cards, which are free for developers, where each sale they take 10% on
- Custom art and promotion in major sale events
- Hosting every download and redownload, all patches and patch downloads, all costs associated with patch certification
- Hosting preloads
- Closed beta tests and interactive branching for deployment
- Cloud saves and storage for all your users in perpetuity
- Coupons and targeted user contacts
- A pretty effective anti-cheat system, yours for free
- A community discussion forum and an unlimited supply of free labour to moderate it if you need it
- Purchase support in every major language
- Steam Days
- Matchmaking
- Leaderboards
- Several engine tech stacks, including the major tech stack for VR, completely free
- An audience of 100 million users
Of course you might say you can do without some of these and roll your own for some of these (also, when you discontinue your roll-your-own service 3 years from now because you can't afford it, I hope you enjoy an unending torrent of complaints for your customers because you demanded not to have to pay 30%). But the idea that "lol if u add up mastercard and my cdn costs steam ain't worth 30%" is stupid as hell.
The monopoly / monopsony arguments seem totally incoherent; maybe 6 or 7 of the the 10 biggest games on PC aren't on Steam at all.