That's art for you. Music, fine art etc I'd guess is even more lopsided.
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2026
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Sales tend to be proportional to the marketing budget. You see this in every entertainment media. Movies and Music, in particular, will have marketing budgets equal or in excess of the actual production costs.
It isn't simply that 1% of the games make 110% of the money. It's that 1% of the games get a marketing allowance at all, while the majority of indie projects and first round game offerings just get spat out into the void with little more than a whisper.
And what percent of the "games that barely make anything" are asset flips and zero-effort slop? Like, "percent of new games that are trash" is going to be very high when the barrier to entry is "pay Valve $100 once". This is a total junk statistic.
Like, store A where you can buy 100 good games and 1000 asset flips will score 10x better on this un-metric than store B where you can buy 10000 good games and a million asset flips. And yet nobody would ever argue that store A is a better store.
And yet nobody would ever argue that store A is a better store.
I would argue it. Store B is just Amazon. They're the most successful retailer on the planet.
I don't know if you consider them "asset flips" or not. But the number of anime/furry porn "puzzle" games released every single day, has to be throwing off the numbers.
An asset flip imo is anything where it's basically identical to another game but with different art assets
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(12 replies)
I don't see how that is "steam" economy.
That's just economy when you try to sell anything, specially anything art related.
If you made any art and try to sell it in any store the most probably amount of money made is the same number in every currency.
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(6 replies)
That seems like a good distribution for digital art and entertainment.
Hey op, I see a lot of your arguments in the comments.
I have a challenge.
Name 5 things Valve could implement to change this that would not be to the detriment of indie devs.
This is not a joke. You have opinions. I want to hear them.
I'm also curious (since I see you pushing a decentralized market place in the comments), how you think a decentralized marketplace would function and what would be better about it.
I mean, they could start with not asking 30% of the revenue when you sell less than a million or so units.
It costs a LOT to build a global cdn with the uptime steam has. That 30% is totally justified as a platform fee imo
Especially now with cloud storage and software development costs being so high.
I mean I see your point for sure, but I also see why consistency matters too. Why would valve "punish" someone for doing well? Those big titles are also great for revenue on their side too so honestly selling more units would be even more justifiable to lower the revenue split (from a business perspective on valves side)
Idk. Just thinking out loud I guess.
That 30% is totally justified as a platform fee imo
and yet everybody hates on Apple's 30% cut...
Why would valve "punish" someone for doing well?
maybe it could be like how rich people are taxed more? (at least if rich people paid their taxes in the first place)
I don't personally hate on Apple's 30%. I hate on Apple's predatory licensing practices which demand an upfront expenditure before the first unit sells at all.
Would a decentralized version of Steam do that?
Is that 30% the bulk of Valve's profit?
What do Indie developers get in exchange for Valve's 30% cut on Steam that they don't get elsewhere that charges 30% or charges less of a percentage?
So could physical retailers, so how's that working out?
I'm not going to say they can't do that. It's not a bad suggestion but it seems to be suggested continually in a vacuum without considering other factors.
Decentralized
Imagine paying $60 for a game and then finding out the torrent is dead.
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