this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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Except that's also a lie. Steam does keep a higher percentage of the sales price for itself than Epic does, but it also allows people to activate game keys without taking any money. Steam only makes money from games sold on Steam itself. So developers can sell games through other stores and even through their own website, and keep up to 100% of the sales price. Effectively, this means that Steam takes roughly the same amount of money that Epic does, or in some cases even less probably.
Not to mention— the value for that 30% on platform + 0% off platform cut for steam is insane. The payment processing, storage, hosting, worldwide routing and caching, multiplayer sdks and integrations, and dozens of other publisher / developer available tools are worth every single penny to have valve handling for you.
The value is there and so is the install base.
They don't get a cut from keys, yes, but the magnitude of all this is an assumption for which I haven't seen a credible source yet.
Without putting these amounts in perspective, "that's a lie" is quite a bold statement.
This isn't public data unfortunately, devs with a game on both platforms are the only ones who can tell us where they earn more. However, I did once read an article that claimed the effective cut from Steam is about half what it says on the tin IF the devs (or their publisher) put in enough effort themselves. Because that's who decides this, Steam doesn't have and doesn't want any control over this.