By charging 3% instead of 30%? Do you really think their servers cost $8.5b? Does the work to distribute a game and process payment equal 30% of the labor required to make a game?
A more advanced answer would be a cost plus profit model, so if it costs Valve $1 to transfer 1TB of data transfer (in terms of server costs), then charge $1.10 for 1TB. That’s obviously very difficult to calculate though I bet Valve has some internal metric of costs.
Valve today does the exact thing Unity was trying to do, charging a percent of revenue for providing infrastructure. Unity got raked over the coals for it.
Side note: Valve isn’t doing the thing Unity tried to do. Unity tried to charge you every time someone installs the game. And you’re not even hosting the game’s data on Unity’s servers.
Steam takes money when you purchase, then will let you download it for free, anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Completely different.
Back on topic: It would be really interesting to see the actual server and bandwidth costs for hosting and distributing all those games. There’s no way it’s super low, or any of the competition surely would have caught up by now.
By charging 3% instead of 30%? Do you really think their servers cost $8.5b? Does the work to distribute a game and process payment equal 30% of the labor required to make a game?
A more advanced answer would be a cost plus profit model, so if it costs Valve $1 to transfer 1TB of data transfer (in terms of server costs), then charge $1.10 for 1TB. That’s obviously very difficult to calculate though I bet Valve has some internal metric of costs.
Valve today does the exact thing Unity was trying to do, charging a percent of revenue for providing infrastructure. Unity got raked over the coals for it.
Unity was changing the rules after they were already set in place. Valve has never done such a move.
Imagine though if steam suddenly went to a flat fee per install instead of charging the 30% of the sale on their platform.
They would rightly be raked over the coals. But they won’t make such a dumb fucking move because it’s a dumb fucking move.
I’m not one for Corpos but as far as attacking them goes valve is certainly near the bottom of the list.
What a wild thing to assert without any reasoning.
Side note: Valve isn’t doing the thing Unity tried to do. Unity tried to charge you every time someone installs the game. And you’re not even hosting the game’s data on Unity’s servers.
Steam takes money when you purchase, then will let you download it for free, anytime, anywhere, and on any device. Completely different.
Back on topic: It would be really interesting to see the actual server and bandwidth costs for hosting and distributing all those games. There’s no way it’s super low, or any of the competition surely would have caught up by now.