Memes

I have listened to a ton of game developer talks over the years. Some of the old indie devs that have given talks basically all welcomed steam because it meant that they didn't have to deal with all of the stuff that steam does themselves. Before people started buying games through steam, doing an acceptable level of DRM, distribution, payments, refunds, etc. was all hand-rolled, for each company.

You can still do that yourself. Why do people stick with steam with the supposedly onerous 30% cut? It's because steam provides a valuable service. Now the people that build games don't have to deal as much with the things that aren't building games.

In my opinion, a platform like Steam was bound to emerge at some point. Let's thank our fucking stars that the company that "won" is not beholden to any shareholder and is run by a gamer that understands what people who love video games needed.

If you think that the 30% cut is too high, there's nothing stopping you from building all the infrastructure yourself. And there are plenty of companies that have done so, like Epic and, until recently, Sony.

But I would say unless you are a team building AAA games and making millions and millions a year, where the savings you can realize outweigh the cost of rolling your own infrastructure, steam is kind of a good deal.