84
Steam is basically a PC gaming monopoly, so why isn’t anyone mad?
(www.digitaltrends.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2026
84 points (100.0% liked)
Gaming
34613 readers
402 users here now
From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!
Please Note: Gaming memes are permitted to be posted on Meme Mondays, but will otherwise be removed in an effort to allow other discussions to take place.
See also Gaming's sister community Tabletop Gaming.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
They take 30% of all PC game sales. If that isn't abusing their position, idk what is.
They allow devs to sell on other platforms and provide them steam keys for free, bypassing that commission.
Retailers demanded a piece to put games in their stores as well. There has always been a price paid for going to market using someone else for it.
I see this point come up all the time when it comes to Steam, but I have yet to see anyone really propose an alternative. How much should it cost to host your game on Steam? It obviously can't be free because of hosting costs, and you're also paying for marketing and discoverability, so what's a good price for it?
Until recently, 30% was the industry standard for large software stores. Google is apparently lowering its cut after losing their recent battle with Epic, so it's possible that the industry standard changes. I'd hope that Valve adjusts with it.
Valve's cost of hosting is pennies. They're one of the most profitable companies in the US. They could lower that number to 5% and still have plenty of margin, I'd bet.
You'd make that bet, but I wouldn't. And only one of us is guaranteed to have money walking out of the casino
Surely you can't mean this literally. They host downloads of hundreds of GB that get served to tens of millions of users. The bandwidth costs alone are going to be insanely high, putting aside the storage costs as well.
But anyway, I'd love to see them lower it to 5%. I think if they can afford to do that, they should take the lead.
I guess they meant "pennies per game sale", in which case 30% could be quite a generous cut. But, of course, buyers can download the game many times, and forever, so it's really hard to measure what's a fair cut.
To me, it's not a monopoly because Steam doesn't require exclusivity, and there are other stores (including physical a stores).
You lost 60% when selling physical media in stores, 30% was an amazing deal when steam launched
what a funny and in this context ironic typo