this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2025
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Steam is a video game digital distribution service by Valve.
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They're a private company, so the data is not available, but we can estimate. GameStop, which IIRC is only US based, not global, has total expenses of about $2b/y. Valve, meanwhile, spends $221m paying employees in their gaming division, which is larger than the Steam division (that we don't have data for).
As you can see, the cost of operating Steam is significantly lower than operating physical stores. That's obvious to anyone, but for some reason I had to prove it to you.
They have to include them anyway, because almost no game is sold exclusively on Steam. The only features they don't have to include are features for the customer, so that's not relevant. The features relevant to developers are access to market (which is the same as physical retail) and DRM, which they have to include anyway if it's available outside of Steam. Just for reference though, Denuvo is about $100k/y, which is close to the cost of 1 employee.
My god, you people are so frustrating. I said Steam provides a good service. I only said their profit margins are significantly higher than physical retail (which is obvious), and you act like I'm saying people should avoid it. You're so dramatic. You people are against anyone saying anything besides Valve should make more money. It's crazy.