Despite facing increased competition in the space, not least from the Epic Games Store, Valve’s platform is synonymous with PC gaming. The service is estimated to have made $10.8 billion in revenue during 2024, a new record for the Half-Life giant. Since it entered the PC distribution space back in 2018, the rival Epic Games Store has been making headway – and $1.09 billion last year – but Steam is still undeniably dominant within the space.
Valve earns a large part of its money from taking a 20-30% cut of sales revenue from developers and publishers. Despite other storefronts opening with lower overheads, Steam has stuck with taking this slice of sales revenue, and in doing so, it has been argued that Valve is unfairly taking a decent chunk of the profits of developers and publishers.
This might change, depending on how an ongoing class-action lawsuit initiated by Wolfire Games goes, but for the time being, Valve is making money hand over fist selling games on Steam. The platform boasts over 132 million users, so it’s perfectly reasonable that developers and publishers feel they have to use Steam – and give away a slice of their revenue – in order to reach the largest audience possible.
So is the issue that Valve kicks you off the platform if you sell your game cheaper somewhere else? That does seem a little troublesome. I don’t think Apple or Sony has those restrictions? Apple takes 30% as well, right?
Only if you are selling a steam key elsewhere, they ask you to treat them equivalently but that doesn’t mean you can’t do sales for your products on other platforms.
It’s a little weird cause it would be like buying an apple app on android to use on apple but apple doesn’t get the 30% anymore so they ask you to at least price it about the same so people don’t avoid buying from them completely.
Okay so if Steam takes 30% and Itch takes 5% then the same game could be sold for approx $64 on Steam and $47 on Itch and the developer would take the same-ish amount home? But if they priced them the same they would make more money from Itch 🤑
And if you sell Steam keys separately then the user would still go to Steam to download and Steam would make sure that it goes to one person’s library and a bunch of other jazz.