Knowing Steam players are hoarders explains why you give Valve that 30%
32 comments
·July 9, 2025umvi
milesvp
I think you may even be missing a lot of things we completely take for granted today. I saw a talk by a long time RPG indie dev a few years ago. Said 30 years ago, he needed a full time employee to do all the things he gets for using steam. Things like distribution, customer support, returns. Said he was more than happy to pay 30% at his volumes to not have to have that head count.
edit: Oh, and payment... I think it was Jeff Vogal's talk I'm thinking of.
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024944/Failing-to-Fail-The-Sp...
atomicnumber3
A big part of the 30% is that people generally believe steam will not fuck them over. While everyone HATES literally all other launchers and walled gardens because they know EA et al want to fuck them over as hard as they possibly can, at every opportunity.
0cf8612b2e1e
It also helps that the other launchers are terrible. There must be some hidden complexity of which I am unaware, because I do not understand. As a rule, slow to launch, memory hogs, unresponsive, etc.
This for a local application that has a library of…10k items in the entire store? The inventory could comfortably be processed inside Excel and yet the launchers struggle.
pathartl
This is a crazy reductionist view of databases.
cowthulhu
I disagree with the statement "The reason game developers are willing to give Valve 30% of their revenue is because the Steam marketplace is packed with super gamers who throw money at games they have no intention of playing."
I believe the actual reason is that Steam has a near monopoly on PC game distribution, and you'll get a lot of hate from consumers if you distribute on competing platforms (Epic) but not Steam.
Taking it a step further - 30% of revenue seems absurdly high for what Steam offers (see the app store for a similar racket), and I hope Valve faces much stiffer competition in the future so they're forced to bring down their cut.
ASalazarMX
30% is outrageous, seeing how profitable app stores are. If Steam charged, say, 10%, it could be the Netflix of videogames because making your own store to get a piece of the pie wouldn't make financial sense.
Maybe 15% if you employ enough people for support or audits. At 10.8 billion profit in 2024 with less than 500 employees, it seems like a racket.
falcor84
I like Epic and GOG and have no issues using them for exclusives, but the reason I prefer to go to Steam is because of the player reviews, which the other platforms don't have. I don't know how much moderation costs and whether that justifies their higher percentage, but as a user, they gained my trust in a way that the other platforms haven't.
cowthulhu
I think the moderation is almost all automated, Valve has was too few employees to do much manual moderation.
Totally agree Steam is a great platform, I just hope for more competition from other great platforms.
octaane
A big contributor to this, to me, is that this metric is skewed. People buying 7 games for 15 bucks as some humble bundle or other package deal isn't the same as buying 7 AAA games that all cost 60-70 bucks.
0cf8612b2e1e
Big boon of the gaming backlog- I never need to buy AAA games at full price. I have more than enough entertainment, I can ignore new games for a year where they will suddenly be half the price, possibly fixed some bugs, etc.
My maximum new game price is $20 and I would need a compelling argument to break it.
zdp7
This is a big factor. I typically only play two of the games I get from Humble Choice. Probably hundreds more in all the other humble bundles/megabundles. And lastly, I have 'unplayed' games that I have played, but the time in steam doesn't reflect it
Apreche
I used to do this in the early days, then I learned my lesson. I have an ironclad policy that has saved me so much.
Do not buy a game, (unless it is literally $0) unless you are going to install it and seriously play it at that exact instant. No FOMO about deep discounts is allowed. If a game is $1 today, it will be $1 again in the future.
neuroelectron
"Horders" being people who prefer to keep things they paid for as opposed to suckers who pay for the same artificially scarce resources over and over.
vjk800
Steam sales are an important piece of this. I always buy a bunch of games from Steam sales, knowing full well that I'm not going to play all of them. The things is, I don't know which games I might feel like playing in the future, so I get several. I don't buy them when I actually want to play them, because then they won't be on sale.
rjh29
99% of the time those games remain unplayed forever though. I just wishlist games I immediately want to play, and buy them and play them once they go on sale, immediately.
watwut
not all that many people buy 100 games just to play one. And if you take more realistic ratio, it actually starts making sense.
PaulHoule
True about games in general. I've got plenty of XBOX games I haven't played and my $5 a month Pro discount at Gamestop has motivated me to get some random cheap Japanese games for a PS4 that I bought to use as a Plex client.
It was a running gag in the Neptunia series (from a time and place where Steam wasn't so big) that every gamer had a big backlog. It's true about clothes. Even people who are pretty frugal buy clothes they never wind up wearing.
I must admit though that I bought a Steam Deck instead of a Nintendo Switch precisely because I had a big backlog of Steam games which I could play instead of buying new games for the Switch. I played through Persona 5 Royal and now I'm enjoying Death End Re:Quest which might be a trash game to you but it scratches my itch.
glimshe
I'm frugal and I can't think of a time I bought clothes I didn't end up wearing them.
Back in the 80s when games were expensive, a backlog was unthinkable. Sure, I did but games I didn't play much because I didn't like them, but there was no such thing of an unopened, unplayed game for me
Cerium
There is backlog, and then there is engaging in the four quadrants of hobby interaction[1].
bigyabai
I'll never forget my first time playing Persona 5. Bought a secondhand PS3 disc for $20, I heard decently good things about the English localization, figured it was time to play a JRPG again. I knew I was being suckered-in, but my PS3 wasn't getting used for anything else.
Boy, what a mistake. Great game - but Persona 5 is one of those game that makes you understand why your backlog exists. If I spent 120 hours grinding VN scenes and RPG encounters in every $60 game I played, my backlog would never end. Finishing the game and seeing Royal announced with expanded content a few months later felt a bit like this: https://tenor.com/view/saul-goodman-trash-can-gif-25675857
PaulHoule
My son and I talk a lot about "How can the game industry get out of its doldrums" and the Persona series is a great example of what's wrong with it when it is at its very best.
For one thing, the game does not make you make any hard choices when it comes to the VN content. It is so freakin' long that playing it on New Game Plus is unthinkable so you feel compelled to max out everyone's social rank in one run, which isn't that hard but makes a long game even longer.
I have the same complaint which I have with most turn-based games (a genre I love because I really enjoy having a big party) in that there are many mechanics, such as status effects, buffs and debuffs, that really don't matter. It doesn't have the feeling that a different resource is scarce (money, SP, items) at different times in the game or that different things make the game hard at different times. There are plenty of turn-based games that do something interesting (where you make a deck and get 3 random action cards, where you have to be careful not to cast healing spells on your enemies or attacks on your friends, where a lot of your scaling comes from customizing combos in Neptunia, where you knockback enemies and they carom like pool balls in DER:Q) but you can make an AAA game that doesn't add anything to FF7 and gamers and game reviewers will accept it.
An answer we've been chewing on is an anti-Persona answer in the sense of a much shorter (30m-12h) game where you really do need to make multiple playthroughs with or without NGP to really experience it all.
darth_avocado
I give valve 30% because steam will occasionally get me a good game for $4.99 but for some reason, the GameStop (read all other online and physical retailers) store near my house wouldn’t sell me a pre owned copy of a 5 year old game for anything less than $20.
royal__
The sales are definitely a huge draw. I don't know of any other product that can get marked down over 50% semi-regularly like video games can. It makes it feel like an incredible value, in comparison to everything else we spend money on. Not to mention, there are many games that will get marked down to less than 5 dollars that you could easily spend hundreds of hours in. Terraria is a good example.
999900000999
It also gives me excellent Linux support.
I don't buy PC games if they aren't on Steam.
gwbas1c
> We make a brief stop by an older article from Simon Carless that analysed Steam collections and found the median player on there has 51.5% of their collection unplayed. The take-home message?
How many of those are free samples? Bundles?
gharman
Any (non?)digital media? I would be surprised not to see this exact dynamic on BJJ Fanatics. So easy to pick up instructionals with the constant stream of sales and discounts. Not so easy to spend the hours it takes to watch and digest one of those.
Also, in my limited experience the 30% also goes towards lots of other valuable features like access to the automatic marketing/recommendation engine. By launching your title on Steam, people will see your title in the "More like this" recommendation bars that appear at the bottom of each page. And if you like certain genres of games, Steam will just directly recommend you more titles of that genre on the home page.
I launched a steam demo of my programming game last month (you can find it in my HN profile if you are curious), and without having to do any marketing of my own built up about 1000 wishlists in a month just thanks to getting traffic from similar but more well known titles like Exapunks.