> They also take an absurd cut of developer income
30%-20% is by no means "absurd", given the incredible value that Steam provides to developers: content delivery, payment processing, cloud saves, ratings, game tags, social integration, wishlisting and sale notification, search indexing, game discovery, a bunch of incredibly useful APIs including networking and input, Linux compatibility, and many, many other things.
In fact, 30% of revenue is well under what it would cost me to implement all of the features that I want from Steam as a developer, unless I somehow won the jackpot and ended up selling millions of copies (in which case I would end up only paying 20% of revenue anyway).
> and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want. (Selling on Steam? Valve takes 30%
Which you already mentioned, while somehow conveniently omitting the fact that the cut decreases to 20% if your revenue is high enough.
> and forces you to moderate the forums on your listing page that you cannot opt out of
This is the single possibly objectionable thing here.
> They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.
~~Allegations~~ mean nothing. Are there successful lawsuits?
> Valve has done some cool stuff, but let's not lionize them too much.
Valve is incomparably better than every other major game distribution platform, which is the comparison that we're making. You are very intentionally making manipulative and dishonest points to try to paint Valve as worst than it is. Which makes sense, because you're a throwaway account.
> They also take an absurd cut of developer income
30%-20% is by no means "absurd", given the incredible value that Steam provides to developers: content delivery, payment processing, cloud saves, ratings, game tags, social integration, wishlisting and sale notification, search indexing, game discovery, a bunch of incredibly useful APIs including networking and input, Linux compatibility, and many, many other things.
In fact, 30% of revenue is well under what it would cost me to implement all of the features that I want from Steam as a developer, unless I somehow won the jackpot and ended up selling millions of copies (in which case I would end up only paying 20% of revenue anyway).
> and saddle devs with costs that they don't always want. (Selling on Steam? Valve takes 30%
Which you already mentioned, while somehow conveniently omitting the fact that the cut decreases to 20% if your revenue is high enough.
> and forces you to moderate the forums on your listing page that you cannot opt out of
This is the single possibly objectionable thing here.
> They also have an internal culture that's been fairly regularly criticized as being pretty uncomfortable for women and minorities.
~~Allegations~~ mean nothing. Are there successful lawsuits?
> Valve has done some cool stuff, but let's not lionize them too much.
Valve is incomparably better than every other major game distribution platform, which is the comparison that we're making. You are very intentionally making manipulative and dishonest points to try to paint Valve as worst than it is. Which makes sense, because you're a throwaway account.