Hacker News has dozens if not hundreds of threads about people complaining about bandwidth costs on their static blog going viral and getting inundated with views. Some games taking up 100+ Gb and getting millions of downloads for week’s can’t be cheap.
This is a thread about steam charging a 30% cut and people asking about what costs they could possibly have?
If Steam didn’t take a cut then they would not be able to pay for bandwidth. And even a 100 mb indie game downloaded a million times is still a lot of bandwidth times that by tens of thousands of games and it’s more than just games, screenshots, saves, mods, forum posts, video trailers, patches, etc.
A one time sale of a 4 dollar game that could support 100 gb worth of mods with being able to delete, download, and reinstall dozens of times has ongoing costs.
Selling on your own website, yes, you should be able to cover sending your own exe 100gb or not with each sale.
>Selling on your own website, yes, you should be able to cover sending your own exe 100gb or not with each sale.
I think the point was that if you were hosting independently, your video game isn't going to be 100+ GB. You will handle the costs or build it into the price of the game.
Dunno how thin margins Valve operates on, but I think they can survive on less than 30%, especially since they offer lower rates to AAA studios.
Oh I was agreeing that Steam provides value, and supporting it with the suggestion that if they didn't people would opt out and just sell games without Steam.
Is it a great way to get publicity? No. Is it a perfectly reasonable way to sell a game? Yes.