A new Dutch class action has been filed against Valve Corporation, the company behind Steam. The case is brought by the Stichting Consumenten Competition Claims (CCC), which has launched the proceedings under the name GameClaim. The foundation acts on behalf of all Dutch PC gamers who have purchased games through Steam or other PC distribution platforms since 2013, IGN Benelux reports.
Stop defending billionaires, the infrastructure costs are a small fraction of the fees they charge
Seeing as Epic is losing money with a 12% cut, and Steam actually goes down to 20% if you sell enough units, your case doesn’t seem particularly good.
Also, Valve is funneling a ton of money into Linux gaming, especially into open source software. That’s infrastructure. And some of it is infrastructure that won’t go away if Valve goes bankrupt or enshittifies.
Also, you’re backing up someone who’s unironically parroting propaganda from a monopolist (Tim Sweeney). Get over yourself.
The comparison to Epic (with a massively lower sales volume) is a bad one, because Valve’s sales volume is so much higher. Once you have a store up and running, the marginal cost of additional units sold in software is extremely low, so most sales are close to 30% of pure profit for Valve.
The entire Apple App Store costs $100 million a year to run, with revenue recently hitting $1.4 trillion, an infrastructure to revenue ratio of a fraction of a percent. That makes their 30% vig even more unconscionable than Valve’s obscene rake.