Not OC, duh.
this post was submitted on 01 May 2026
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30% of your gross income for advertising and hosting is a scam. It's a scam when Apple does it, when Google does it, and yes, when Steam does it.
There's a reason Gabe can afford that yacht without breaking a sweat.
Just because Steam is the best of the software monopolies doesn't exclude it from the group.
You really think you can independently afford high speed localized 24/7 file hosting all over the world for potentially millions of downloads for less than 30% of your sell price?
Steam games can be cheap because steam offers all the expensive things cheaply. No one is going to download your game off of a shady MEGA link. No one is going to go to fucknuts.biz.co.uk.nz to your shady site straight from squarespace templates to then crash your filehost by trying to download your game at the same time as 500 other people. No one is going to trust you with their bank details and crypto is a scam and paypal also takes a high cut.
If your goal is to do gaming more than a thankless, pay free hobby you need:
Marketing
Trust
Payment Provider
Accounting (tax is different in every country, and you have to account for that in every country you sell your game to)
Global CDN
And ease of use.
Unless your game is so incredibly niche AND so incredibly good that you can get away with shunning all of those things, you will need those to make enough money to even make a minimum wage salary after a year. Starsector and dwarf fortress are the only ones that come to mind, and the latter went to steam after Tarn decided to actually go full time and needed a real income to cover hosting and salary that couldn't be found in donations.
Data centers are expensive. And yes profit is built in to steam's cut because they know most players aren't going to repeatedly download any given game over the lifetime of their steam account. But doing it yourself means either you do not offer repeat download to players, or you run out of money in two years because people stop buying the game but people will still download it again and again.
Absolutely, yes, 1000%. And why does your download need to be local? Have you heard of The Internet?
You're not really making an argument against a monopoly when you say it can't be done without Steam.
It can't be done without MONEY.
...So to educate you, locally hosted servers, which all CDNs use, allow for greater download speeds and less overall network strain and complexity, which reduces the chance for failed downloads via lost packets.
Every single download and major content service you have used in the last 15 years has used this, and this is why your downloads rarely if ever say 'download failed' like they did pre-2005.
This is also very expensive, hosting a server in every major country/download area and then replicating files across those disparate servers is expensive.
Let's say you want to host your 2GB game, and only that, in the US and Europe. Well the US is a giant place but the core infrastructure is good enough that you can get away with a single location, so that's two servers. Each will probably be $50/month or so per 500GB traffic (since it's just file hosting we don't care about stats, but you're not getting above 10Mbps for less than that at that traffic limit).
That's 250 times that can download your game. In America. And 250 in Europe. Let's say you get the ideal sales numbers and 500 people buy your game.
If you're selling your game for $5, that is one download per person for their lifetime that you can afford(assuming 30% or less goes to hosting) If you increase your price to $7.20 you hit that 30% cap but those 500 people can download it any time for a year. Or, if we assume we get 6,000 people (the theoretical maximum number of people that can download your game at that price) you can have a salary of $25,920.
But lets be honest, most indie games off steam never make it to 6,000 sales. And the ones that do take years of basically hosting for free as a passion project.
So make your game cost... $21? Well you've cut off any chance of anyone outside of the US and Europe of ever buying your game, but you can now host for 3 years for those 6,000 sales and you'd even have a decent enough salary to pay tax... which for a small business in the US will take another 3rd of your costs, and you still haven't paid for marketing or your payment provider fees or their taxes or sales tax or VAT for Europe....
Or. You pay steam that 30%. They handle hosting, which already cost you 30%, and everything else, and the admin overhead of selling to 190 countries like calculating (and already paying out of your cut) tax.
Do you stack your dishwasher like this?
Download speed is highly relative to latency (bandwidth/delay product). If you have global users and you actually want them to download dozens (if not more) of gigs of data, then yea...they should be distributed.
Fuck for as much hate as cloudflare and akamai (and Amazon and Google and all the others too, but CDN is their bread and butter) get, the internet could not be nearly as fast and efficient if not for CDNs and their massively scalable infrastructure.
Unless you think we should all go back to hosting websites off of an old Pentium in the garage. Which...okay yeah we should do that too, but it's not at all functional for game distribution.
Tell that to my USB stick.
Saying its 30% of gross income for advertising is pretty disingenuous. They also handle the distribution and payment systems which is very much not insignificant along with other more insignificant things.
I have serious issues with some aspects of Steam,and if its creating billionaires theres obviously a problem. But taking a cut of game sales isnt those issues. We can argue about the exact % that would be reasonable, bc some amount definitely is. But thats not the actual issues with the platform.