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EU fines Apple $568m for deterring third-party payment methods on App Store
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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Hating on Apple for their 30% cut is popular.
Hating on Google for their 30% cut is popular.
Hating on Microfot, Sony, and Nintendo for their cuts is popular.
But somehow hating on Steam for their 30% cut is going too far.
Steam reduced their cut to 20% for the biggest publishers, let's see any of the others do that. They also allow other stores on the steam deck. They also allow steam keys and shouldn't demand MFN pricing.
Their cut is worth it to users for the same reasons as an iOS and Android user might say, except when it comes to switching platforms, your steam games can come with you to rival platforms and not just friendly ones.
Epic charges 12%, but they're somehow the villain.
Not really, they're the villain for doing exclusives. Steam never did exclusives, at least not with 3rd party devs.
That's exactly what Steam Greenlight was before they stopped all curation of games.
Curation and encouraging PC ports when the store was relatively new != exclusives.
Steam Greenlight was a program where independent games without a publisher could release games on Steam, but it was absolutely exclusive. They couldn't sell their game elsewhere.
Literally the first game released on the program was a free Total Conversion mod that you could download anywhere else for free, but if you wanted to get it installed through Steam, you paid them for the privilege.
The dev made money from at least the iOS, Android and Steam Greenlight versions. They also offered it for free.
https://www.giantbomb.com/articles/mcpixel-embraced-piracy-lived-to-tell-the-tale/1100-4366/
I was slightly wrong about the order. I was actually talking about Black Mesa, which was in the same initial batch of 10 games.
Perhaps that's because Steam doesn't seem to be trying very hard to "lock in" developers to their platform. Devs are free to sell their PC games on Gog or Epic or whatever. Steam is popular because it's a good platform. This freedom for developers or customers mostly does not exist on mobile or on consoles, except for the EUs efforts here.
Even their "console" the Steam Deck can, relatively easily, run games from other stores. I'm not saying a 30% cut should be considered fair but they do seem to take a different approach to digital sales than the other large players.
Yeah it’s arguable that Steam is a monopoly but somehow billion dollar publishers can’t create a store to sell their own products without fucking it up with annoying bullshit. Pay the 30% to protect you from yourselves.
Yeah, Steam is pretty much a monopoly. But I haven't seen what I'd call monopolistic practices from them. It's just that everyone else appears to fall flat on their faces when trying to make a competing product.
It's weird because steam isn't even that amazing at what it does and even some of the features I like can be tempremental or downright buggy at times.
Once I saw the power of Steam on Linux, I knew no other company could touch them.
Valve is a private company owned by someone who is passionate about games and so unlike other companies with investors, they leave short term money on the table to make the best product for gamers. If its ownership model ever changes it will speedrun enshittification for the same reason other storefronts suck
Steam isn’t a monopoly.
The PC is an open platform, you can use any game store or launcher you want - unlike the iPhone, Android (without sideloading), PlayStation, switch, or Xbox.
My Samsung phone comes with an alternative android app store pre-installed.
Ya, but I also installed fdroid pretty easily without the system blocking me.
Yeah the comments about Steam being a monopoly are weird to me. Steam has a huge market share, but they don't own the whole market and they don't try to prevent you from buying your games elsewhere. Proton even works on non-steam games. I've used it to play WoW private servers on Linux.
If Valve isn't a pro-consumer company, then I don't know what company could possibly fit the criteria. They're not perfect, but they've earned the trust they have. I'll trust Valve until they give me a reason not to.
Microsoft, Apple, Exxon, Meta, Amazon, JP Morgan or Saudi Aramco are the most powerful corporations in the world. They are empires more powerful than many nations. Their CEOs always travel with armed men. They have the personal phone number of Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.
It's healthy to scrutinize them. Steam is a problem, but Valve is nowhere near as powerful.
I'd like to see a game developer chiming in but as a user, 30% cut by Steam feels justified.
They have helped me discover and buy many games that I wouldn't have even heard of otherwise. Compare that to Google Play Store which is full of dogshit shovelware and Pay2Win games.
And sometimes I've even bought Steam keys via Fanatical bundles, where I chose which games to buy by looking at their Steam store pages. Steam got nothing from these transactions as far as I know.
This is without getting into other useful stuff like guides and forums hosted by Steam which I can look at whenever I get stuck. Or Steam workshop which allows users to easily mod the games.
Call me a fanboy but I'm tired of this 'what about Steam' comments.
Ask Sony, Microsoft, Google, and Nintendo to improve their stores instead.
Fair, but there is an argument to be made about how hosting things are now cheaper than ever, by a huge margin. When 1GB used to cost 1 dollar, they had 30% cut. Now when that's 0.01 not 1, 100x the difference (while games have gotten like what, 10x bigger?), it's still 30%.
But you know what is the most damning argument against their cut? Steam earns more money per employee than next 3 companies combined and Gabe is buying fleet of yachts and multiple submarines, not even getting into real estate, while indie devs are going broke one after another. That cut might make a major difference for devs, but at this point Gabe has already too much money and won't suffer from having less of it, which is really not consumer or developer friendly thing to do, basically hoarding riches like other billionaires
I mentioned few other things beside hosting though. The discovery algorithm, for example.
100% this. At least epic tried to make a value proposition for developers but developers can just make more from steam. Having said that, steam/valve had a hand in the always online gaming situation which we have all just come to accept. I buy from Gog where I can
Steam gets a pass because they actually offer buyer protection, refunds if it doesn’t work, refunds under certain requirements which can be waved under certain circumstances, removal of day one season passes, refunds for dlc that gets delayed too long for example.
If an actual competitor gave a shit about things that matter to actual players than they have a shot. Epic Game Store is a joke because no one wants a store that only focuses on what corporations want. GOG is good but just doesn’t market itself well, seriously outside of launching CDPR games I don’t see it at all.
Getting companies to offer their games on platforms that offer a higher margin is easy. Getting players over to a platform that offers less protections and features is not going to happen.
GOG's biggest problem is also their greatest asset: no DRM.
I was denied a refund for a broken game on Steam Deck just last winter. I had never played or even installed it, but I had purchased it and let it sit in my backlog too long before trying.
By comparison, I can’t recall a single time I’ve been denied a refund request from the iPhone App Store. They’ve also never sold me software that couldn’t run on the hardware they also sold me.
I understand how it’s my fault according to steam’s ToS, but it still doesn’t seem right to me.
When you ask for a refund under Steam's 2h/14d policy, it's Steam offering the refund. Past that, the request is passed on the developer
At least that's how I've heard it described, idk for sure
I'm less mad at Steam and Google because there are clear, simple ways to avoid their cuts.
I have no basis to say whether they're providing a service worth the 30% charge. I'm also less mad at Steam than at Google because they're being less shady about trying to push people into their store too.
It would be more comparable if Apple, Microsoft (Xbox), Nintendo, or Sony allowed anyone to make a third party game launcher but they just keep sucking.
You get value from Steam for paying that.
What value do you get from Apple for paying the Apple tax? A higher price for a phone that could cost 500€ less?
As a Linux gamer, valve making proton has launched gaming on linux into the stratosphere.
Steam is not the only means of distribution anywhere, and you can often buy the same game both from Steam and directly.
It's too early to hate it.
(Well, I mean, I want a FreeBSD native Steam client with native Proton and all infrastructure, but I can understand that it's a small percentage, even if not that different from Linux support.)
The difference is availability of choice. On apple phones, Xbox, Nintendo, and PlayStation you are locked into a single source of software. On a PC there are myriad of game stores you can choose from. Sometimes you can even buy the software directly from the developer. Usually people are upset when this choice is taken away (for example epic exclusive games). Nobody would bat an eye if a developer offered their game on epic or their own platform with a ~20% discount compared to steam. But it is up to the developers to make their game available on any of the PC game stores.
In conclusion, steam is not a platform holder, they could charge whatever they wanted. If the markup was too high, you could simply choose to buy your games elsewhere. For most people, this 30% is worth it for the features and buyer protection that steam offers compared to other platforms.
I agree that the 30% cut is too much. The only reason I give them a pass is because Steam is really good (at least, as a user). But I still want them to lower it.
For a dev those 30% are very much worth it because Steam has tons of customers and very good recommendation algorithms, you gain more in additional sales than what you lose from the cut. Could they do with less probably but they're not extorting devs. There's a reason why Epic had to do stuff like guarantee sales and provide huge advances to get anyone onto their excuse for a platform.
I get why people like steam. But as a steam hater, if GabeN ever dies and the kids or whoever is heirs are decide to sell to VCs or private equity. That 30% will be just as oppressive as anyone else’s.
I hate it 🙂