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Epic reduce their cut to 0% for the first $1 million in revenue for devs on the Epic Games Store
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this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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30% has been industry standard across any digital storefront until Epic found out they couldn't beat steam by just paying for exclusivity deals. Then they decided to go down this race to the bottom strategy.
Steam is good because of that 30%.
Firstly, data transfer and storage isn't free and is an ongoing cost for Steam even after purchase. How many times can you think that you installed a game, then deleted it and ultimately downloaded it again—Steam doesn't get any more money, but that costs them. They could have done all the limited number of downloads or transfer speed limiting shit that used to be more common.
The profit they make on top goes straight back into Valve. They are a private company without shareholders to please and pay dividends to. This has allowed them to keep reinvesting into Steam and making it the best experience for the consumer they can—they've been rewarded with a load of goodwill and market share following that. You can guarantee that we wouldn't have proton or the steam deck without the money valve made from steam sales.
Epic doing this is just another attempt to try and tempt developers to choose their store and not list on Steam. They have no interest in actually improving their offering, their only strategy is to try and find ways to put Steam users at a disadvantage and hope that people go "well I guess I'll go for it on epic if I have to". They don't have any problem getting companies to list their games on Epic, this is 100% about manipulating developers to not list on Steam.
GoG is the alternative to Steam, and offers something that benefits consumers to compete with Steam in DRM free games.
Friends don't let friends reward Epic for anti-consumer business practices.
Hey don't mistake that comment for a defense of Epic. I am a fan of Steam in general (in so far as I can be regarding "license selling" companies.) I think Gabe did many great things for game distribution. I'm working on an indie game myself and if it ever gets to the point that I can release it, it will be on Steam no doubt. I do dread the day Gabe has to pass on the torch though.
Simple just use short term oriented goals because that's what the company is focusing on. Steam was always long term oriented from the beginning Gabe said CD less gaming.
Didn't Steam essentially create the "standard" for 30% price point for digital distribution in the first place? While a 30% margin makes sense for physical retail, it's never made sense for digital distribution.
If they created the problem in the first place, then isn't that actually an issue?
I'd argue it makes more sense for digital distribution, once the sale has been made in a physical store, there's no ongoing cost for them.
A digital storefront has the ongoing cost of downloads and updates, as well as the distributed storage costs (Steam has many copies of games all over the world to mean downloads are quick)
Data transfer costs back in the mid 00s mean that every install of a game like HL2 cost them a dollar or so (A quick Google suggests they might have paid a couple of cents a gigabyte, but they may have had a better deal given the volume of data). If a user ever uninstalled and reinstalled more than a couple of times (a lot more common back then with the limited storage everyone had), and couple that with ongoing update transfer costs then most of the profit from a full price sale could easily be gone, let alone if the game was bought with a discount as is very common. If they never made any profit from the sales, Steam never makes it past its awkward years.
Data transfer is definitely cheaper these days, but then games are bigger and they probably spend a lot more on datacenter space than back in the day
A physical storefront has to deal with asset depreciation however. A product can sit on the shelf and reduce in value as it ages, there is no such thing with digital distribution.
Based on estimates, and various reports, leaks etc. since they aren't a public company... Steam makde an estimated $10.8 Billion in 2024. They made $780,000 per employee as of 2018 based on an internal report, more than nearly every other company on the planet. They're not spending anywhere near that on operations.
Surely the sales are an equivalent there? Both ultimately mean the total price goes down and the store's cut goes down accordingly.
Don't get me wrong, they're definitely profiting these days. $11bn is a massive amount of revenue* for a company with the number of staff they do. But Steam are going to have disproportionately high datacenter costs compared to most other companies. As a rough comparison: Watching an hour of netflix at HD quality is about 1GB of transfer or so, Call of Duty is something like a quarter of a terabyte. Someone who downloads call of duty once would have to watch 250h of netflix to cost them the same—and Netflix is funded by subscription.
Then remember they're likely paying their staff very well, I would not be surprised at all if well over half of their revenue just goes to operational costs before any reinvestment.
*Checked the figure was revenue and not profit.
The sheer data transfer happening is insanely costly and is not something people think about. Valve could certainly tweak their cut for small developers in sone way, but they arent just pocketing 30%.
Valve actively increase their cut for small developers and their entire business model is to keep staff to a minimum and costs aggressively low.
They are absolutely just pocketing 30%.
What they are doing with the 30% is anybody's guess, because they are a private company, so I don't know how much of it becomes new boats and knifes for Gabe and how much goes to VR HMDs and handhelds, but they are a VERY lean company that sure seems to like being cash-rich.
It would be impossible for them to pocket 30%
They apparently transfer approximately 50 exabytes a year.
Some napkin maths has that as costing around $5bn to do from a provider like AWS. Which is half their annual turnover not profit.
Now sure, they will not be spending that much on just data transfer, everyone in the industry knows you get bespoke deals with the cloud providers before the bill gets close to that—but they'll not get anything close to half price.
Then they need to pay for the actual storage costs
And the compute needed for running all of steam's API and web servers
And staff, which if they only have 80 of them, will be paid some of the best salaries in the industry.
If you think they're taking even half of that 30% as profit, I think you need to give this another look.
They don't need to take that 30% as profit for it to be high. They cost less to run than any other first party. We know this from their recent lawsuits. And no, they do not pay 5 billion for their traffic, but whatever they pay isn't higher than Sony or Nintendo, or at least not so much higher that it entirely drains their revenue.
And even if they paid your back of the napkin figure, best guess is they pulled ten billion in revenue last year. They don't tell anybody that, though, so it's all estimates, and considering the have the biggest distribution platform, the biggest game on that platform and a separate hardware business I'm going to say Valve is not about to buckle under the pressure of bandwidth costs anytime soon, even if they spread the cash around a bit.
Meanwhile, the developers using Valve's platform do have to pay salaries with a fraction of that revenue, sometimes to staff larger than Valve's. And for a number of them they also have to deal with server costs and general running costs on the back end.
I don't know Valve's operating costs. Nobody does. I know Gabe Newell is very rich. I know the few people working at Valve are very well paid. I know they run that ship as quiet and cheap as possible. And I know they take in just as much (or more) than other platforms with the same or higher costs and a similar or lower take.
So none of that flies.
No I know, I addressed that they don't actually pay that, but it will 100% be a figure in that magnitude. Remember Sony and Nintendo both charge subscription fees for their online services to offset these costs. Valve doesn't—they have to pay for it all out of that cut.
I'm also at no point insinuating they're struggling at all, I'm just trying to point out that their operational costs are definitely going to be a big chunk of that 30%, there's absolutely no way they're not.
I'm not saying the third party devs have it lucky or anything like that. Of course it would be great if they got a bigger cut, at the end of the day it's the product, but to pretend steam is adding zero value for the 30% taken is absurd.
Also remember regarding third party server costs, Valve provides a lot of the backend services as part of Steamworks for many games on the platform—it's another big draw for developers to the platform because they don't need to come up with a friend system, achievements or matchmaking if they don't want to.
I'm not pretending they're adding zero value, but they are taking zero risk and tying down everybody else to their ecosystem. If they are adding 30% of value, and I'm not saying they aren't, it is due to controlling 80% of the market. That's anticompetitive any way you slice it.
Steamworks is actually a great example of that MO. Is it good value to have it available as a dev? Sure! It is a console-style series of back-end services, which goes far more in-depth than any competitor and makes PC development more standardized and accessible, with a lower barrier to entry to platform-level functionality.
Is it also a way to make it more costly to be elsewhere? Yup. And with no hardware tie-in reason for that, it is crunching down the PC ecosystem to Steam plus friends, as opposed to a competitive, open landscape.
That, on my book, is not good on the aggregate. It would be just as bad if Xbox's much inferior attempt at the same thing Windows-wide was in that same position of power (like the Apple ecosystem is on Macs), but at least there you could argue that it's at the OS level and not tied in to your payment services and distribution platform.
I see what you're saying and there's definitely some merit to it, I'd be foolish to pretend they don't have a near-monopoly and that it doesn't afford them a position of power compared to their competitors.
But I think the key thing is that devs aren't forced to use Steam or Steamworks. There's nothing stopping someone like Epic from providing the exact same kind of services. The only thing they partly lack is the existing network effect, but Epic also has fortnight which provides the basis of that network for them. GoG is arguably in the worst position of the three in this regard, but many would put them in their personal 1st or 2nd place.
If Steam was truly stiflingly dominant to an anti-competitive degree, no one would have downloaded the Epic store to play fortnight in the first place—instead it's been one of the most successful games on the platform of that past decade.
Epic wants to hedge their potential dominance by paying to keep games off Steam and removing the choice from the consumer. The fact that given there's basically no barrier to entry and the average PC gamer still chooses to wait for a steam release is more indicative of inadequate competition rather than anti-competitive behaviour IMO.
(Cheers for the replies btw, this has been an interesting discussion)
Hey, you could say the same thing about Reddit or Twitter, and yet...
Not being forced to use a thing isn't nearly enough to bypass an anticompetitive environment, as Apple just learned the hard way this month again in a separate fight with Epic as well.
Paying for exclusives is absolutely not anticompetitive, by the way. Just the opposite. The idea of competition is you have different offerings in different places. I think the only reason people get so mad about it these days is Valve stepped so far away from making games as a matter of course that nobody thinks about their first party stuff as exclusive anymore (which, again, is another show of their mastery at PR-by-default).
I keep reminding people how mad the fanboys were when Final Fantasy or Metal Gear went multiplatform. Getting old in games and seeing opinions shift based on brand loyalty is wild.
I do appreciate the civil conversation as well, for the record. People get extremely emotional about this one, especially around here, in ways I find outright childish and very annoying. It's good to have somebody at least disagree politely and put some thought into it.
Paying for exclusives is 110% anti-competitive and anti-consumer.
Steam is dominant because of the service it provides, if Epic (or anyone else) actually made a compelling service, it could eat into Steam's market share. Instead they are throwing money at stopping games being sold on other platforms (which is anti-competitive) and giving the user no choice (which is anti-consumer).
You should tell Max they're being anticompetitive about The Last of Us and Netflix about Castlevania. Sony about Bloodborne, Jak & Daxter and Ratchet & Clank, Nintendo about Final Fantasy 1-6 and again Sony about 7-12.
I'm confused about whether you think Valve outright buying all the modding properties counts as paying for exclusives or not, but you may have to look into that one, too.
I have to say, the most cognitive dissonance about this argument was to see people flip out about Alan Wake II being an Epic exclusive, seemingly having entirely memory holed that Alan Wake 1 launched as an Xbox 360 exclusive and nobody even thought to complain.
I agree, I should. TV shows and movies should be accessible on multiple platforms, there's a reason they are the most pirated forms of media. I have huge issue with all console exclusives too. I admit it's not exactly the same if you own the studio/IP, but in an ideal world, them IPs would still exist elsewhere to give consumers more choice. So it's just another hurdle I'd like the industries to overcome. I couldn't give a shit about big corpo, only the consumers getting freedom of choice.
I just don't buy exclusives at all anymore, even if they are timed. I couldn't give a shit about triple A games either, which are usually the exclusives anyway. I'm not sure what the Alan Wake ramble is about, but I'm sure people complained about it, they always have.
Just because it exists in some form, doesn't make it okay to continue it. Bringing up examples of exclusivity in other mediums isn't a counter-argument.
I am genuinely confused to learn what you think a TV station does.
And we've gotten to the part where we learn that you somehow have an extremely hard opinion about a subject you don't care at all about and have very little awareness of.
Which is fine, but it'd save the rest of us a lot of time if you translated that lack of interest and awareness into something other than aggressively expressing a preference, because this was both time consuming and pointless.
I'm not going to continue a discussion where you just constantly deflect. So have a good day.
I haven't "deflected" anything. Pointing out things you like about Valve is entirely irrelevant to whether or not they hold a dominant position on the market. "I really like Halo" is not a counterargument to "Microsoft's dominance in the desktop OS space needs regulatory intervention". Those things are unrelated.
But hey, nobody forces you to talk to me. In fact, given what you've said in this conversation I'm postively puzzled about why you are talking about this, beyond the fact that you hang out in online spaces where "good guy Valve make Linux good" is a simplistic trope to build a sense of parasocial belonging around.
This is such a weird straw man argument. Yes those are all anticompetitve that they FORCE them not to release the game for other platforms.
Valve buying all the modding properties? What does this refer to? Also valve released their games on consoles too, I remember fondly playing the orange box (which BTW was like 5 games in one a fantastic value).
People did complain about console exclusives back then too, it wasn't as common because before it was understandable as it was prohibitively expensive or time consuming to port to other consoles, that's virtually not the case anymore (except Nintendo because their consoles always suck) and now it's just exclusive for exclusives sake.
Oh, yeah, there was a time when Valve teamed up with EA to make console ports back when Steam was a tenth of the userbase of the PS2 or a half of the 360, because business is business. You'll note they've stopped doing that. I mean, it's hard to tell because they don't make many games anymore, but there were no console ports for DOTA, CS2, Deadlock or Artifact, and no Meta or Playstation VR ports for Alyx, either. They sure seem less bothered by exclusives than their fanbase these days.
And no, it's not because they're competitive or online games. Their last set of ports was CS: GO.
My question about Valve buying mods is why it's fine for first party games to be exclusives but not third party games. Insomniac wasn't owned by Sony for most of their existence, but most of their games were platform exclusives, first for Sony consoles, then, once, for Xbox. Was it better or worse for their output to be exclusive before or after the purchase?
And the same goes to Valve onboarding mod teams as fully owned teams, although just as an extension there. Team Fortress and DOTA do not originate at Valve, or as proprietary or exclusive games. Is that fine?
I mean, I think it's fine. One could say it's iffy to use free labor from modders as a recruitment tool, but mods are mods and mods are cool, so hiring mod teams is a smart way to hire game teams. But I also think that hiring a third party dev team to make a game for your platform is a perfectly fine way to fill your platform with content, so who knows where you guys are drawing the line for what you consider acceptable ways to fund a game's development.
Apple is a different case I'd argue because until that lawsuit there was no legitimate way to install applications without using Apple's storefront—that's a much less defensible position IMO.
FWIW, my understanding is that many economists side on exclusivity contacts being by definition anti-competitive & anti-consumer in spirit if not strictly by law. The whole point of them is to remove the agency of the consumer and attempt to force their hand, after all. The whole Blizzard Activision acquisition by Microsoft was complicated predominantly by concerns of the exclusivity opportunities (mostly around CoD) following acquisition being anti-competitive.
You've got a good point about their first party games, but then no one is really giving epic grief about fortnite being a platform exclusive for them. People get annoyed about it more when they've paid third parties such as Square-Enix to not release on any other platform. It's not just on the PC either, I'm pretty sure Sony got a lot of flak for paid third party exclusives to keep them off Xbox a little while ago.
No, that's what I'm saying.
People were mad that exclusives were going multiplatform at the time. Metal Gear on Xbox sent some PS fans into fits of rage. Final Fantasy going from Nintendo to Sony and then going multiplatform pissed people off on every step of that process.
Inconsistency aside, there is a difference between paying a third party to make an exclusive title and buying the third party. The Xbox deal wasn't an exclusivity deal, it was an acquisition.
Let me put it this way, nobody in their right mind would claim that Netflix buying a show and putting it exclusively on Netflix is anticompetitive. The entire point of the platform is competing on content. If that still sounds implausible, roll it back a medium and think of TV stations. Again, nobody would get mad that a particular show airs specifically on a channel, even if most shows are made by production companies contracted, not owned, by the distribution channel.
Now, when the nerds were raging about exclusives I was on the camp that platform agnostic content is ideal, and I still agree with that sentiment. But it also seems pretty obvious that the notion that contracting out an exclusive from a third party studio is anticompetitive in a way that a first party release is not seems absurd. Why would it make more sense for The Last of Us or CounterStrike (especially CounterStrike, which was originally an indie mod acquired for a full release) to be exclusive than for Alan Wake II to be exclusive? Was it weirder that Ratchet & Clank Up You Arsenal was exclusive than for A Rift Apart to be exclusive just because Sony didn't own Insomniac for the first one but they did for the second?
Also killed physical media for PC games, carving out a near monopoly for themselves.
Eh, I would argue that the expansion of broadband internet and the increased expectation of instant gratification by consumers made it a perfect time for Steam's expansion. The death of physical media is a side effect of the ability to near instantly download anything you want.
Physical media died when games expanded beyond their capacity. Optical discs are physically fragile, they have a limited shelf life, they have to be reproduced by specialized equipment (not considering piracy here), they have to be physically transported to the customer, some regions are financially unviable (imagine the Helldivers 2 situation but with every game), and production has to end at some point. Having to set up a physical supplier also severely limits the ability of indie or solo developers to have any kind of success or even presence.
Those are issues we've had to look past because we didn't have anything better at the time.
The gaming industry is not immune to the Dreadnought effect. Magnetic tape has made punch cards obsolete. The optical disc and flash storage have made the magnetic tape obsolete. Now, digital distribution has made physical media obsolete, and people clamoring for its return are nostalgic for a world that doesn't exist anymore.
I liked physical discs when they were relevant, but I don't relish the idea of having to pray that Clair Obscur DVD #8 is not damaged when I have to transition to a new area.
By offering a far better experience for the vast majority of people. Like how DVDs killed VHS, where some people who couldn't afford to upgrade were left behind.
I don't think this is true. 20% was the standard, as I recall, not 30%. I think it has moved that way over time, though. And even that only made some sense while retailers were too powerful to compete with them on price. Storage and bandwidth are much cheaper than bricks and real estate and salaries.
This is a good thing, Steam's cut is too big, especially for a company with next to no staff that runs on a heavily Uber-ified model and produces very little and I an very tired of the fanboyism.
I agree that people should default to GoG when possible, though.
What valve produces is a user friendly platform. That's their value proposition and its worth many times its weight in gold
Thats worth 30% of the sale to me as a user. And is something epic and other publishers are completely unable to replicate. (I.e. no one in their right mind would ever trust epic to maintain such a position)
Valve sure does show how to run PR from the design level out and does this by putting the squeeze on developers rather than users whenever it can.
I am not ok with that. I would much prefer a user friendly platform that is investing on more than its position as a dominant market force and putting more of the revenue back into the space where games are made.
Oh, and on being DRM-free, too.
So I don't need to trust Epic for anything, but I also don't need to trust Valve with a monopoly. Which is, of course, why I default to GoG, as I said.
Lol in what way are they "putting the squeeze" on developers aside from the 30% cut?
Also your prior comment that valve does nothing else is hilarious, the steam deck, steamOS, Proton, the valve index.
They do SO MUCH more.
Automatic save cloud syncing, steam remote play, steam link, the community forums, steam workshop.
Get your head out of your ass, no other platform comes close to feature parity and putting back into improving pc gaming.
Also steam DRM is laughably easy to circumvent and they haven't shown any interest in over a decade of doing anything about it.
Plenty of other platforms spend more money on the platform than Steam. Definitely. Easy.
I mean, for one thing the console manufacturers are shipping a TON more hardware, often with very low margins. And they are all bigger than Steam and have as much of a software upkeep. They are spending more money on game development than Steam, too.
Steam Deck, Steam OS, the Index and Proton are at most on par with what Sony does just for the PS5 platform.
Oh, and to your first question, Steam does very much tell developers what they want them to do. They are a first party, and have their own preferences an policies. They are currently in court for banning developers from offering games cheaper on any other competing service, for instance.
you're so uninformed its hilarious. PS5 is a single hardware platform that almost certainly (if they continue as they historically have) on top of free bsd. their software stack is almost certainly an open source base with some small additions for developer friendliness on top. its small time compared to what steam does: multiple OS support with massive and varied hardware support.
Nor does sony contribute much back to the open source ecosystems they leech off of. meanwhile steam has been funding linux gaming improvements for over a decade now and are a huge reason that its as amazing as it is today.
the idea that sony spending a higher $ value vs steam is probably the most retarded thing i've heard all day. the $ value isnt what matters. its the impact/$. and steam leaves sony in the dust on this. again linux gaming wouldn't be anywhere near where it is without steam. meanwhile sony barely contributes anything.
Valve literally has funded the compatibility layer to bring DX games to linux. point to a single thing sony has done that's comparable.
Never mind all the benefits valve has ensure for gamers. a strong return policy. ongoing predictable sales. easy of use and cross platform support.
Never mind all the tooling they provide to developers of games.
Valve has very much earned the loyalty from gamers it has and i have no problem with them profitting off that fact. long as they keep up the good work we'll keep using and supporting their platform.
People get mad at me for caling Dunning-Kruger in these things, and it inevitably gets to that point, but...
...come on, what am I supposed to do with this?
For the record, Valve specifically avoided having a return policy until regulators threatened to impose one.
The first platform that implemented no-questions-asked return policy?
EA's Origin, believe it or not.
and your point? its still a better policy than both GOG and EA origins provided. and the regulators where in a country steam likely gave 0 thoughts about. and then applied the change everywhere for everyone.
this is literally a non-issue now. so anything more recent than 2013 that any reasonable person would give a shit about?
context for everyone else:
or anything relevant to any of the points I made or you just going to keep tossing out decade old information as if its relevant.
I mean, it's only relevant because you incorrectly gave them credit. The rest of it is just word salad, but that one was stating a fact and the fact was a lie, so I wouldn't want somebody to read it and get the wrong impression.
Also for the record, Steam's current refund policy is more strict than GoG, in that GoG's has no playtime limit, just a time-from-purchase limit, which is a fairly decent parallel to return policies in retail. Given the fact that there's no DRM on GoG games either is pretty meaningless, and it's anybody's guess whether GoG could sustain it with the kind of volumes and exploiting Steam faces, but now we're getting to levels of nuance well beyond writing misinformation-laden rants with no caps.
Yes, I gave them credit for have a generous policy for over a decade. which is a fucking fact. it isnt a fucking lie. lol. the mental gymnastics you're performing right now.
kindly fuck off and stop wasting everyones time.
I'll give you that my brain is getting quite sore from this conversation. I don't know if it's gymnastics, but man, it is quite draining.
And, for the record, you didn't give them credit for having a good refund policy, you first heavily implied they had "ensured" one for gamers, which they didn't and actively resisted doing, and then that theirs was more generous than GoG's, which is also not true. It's still written up there.
The only reason I don't think you were lying is I'm pretty sure you had no idea about any of that in the first place and you didn't bother to look it up. "Lying" implies knowing something is false, so I guess you're off the hook on that front.
Currently valve has never walked back a pro-consumer policy (afaik). so yes. they currently ensure one; its a policy I'd expect EA/ubi to drop at the earliest convenience or first indicator they could make more money without it. for example: see apples reaction to being told to fuck off with their market place antics vs valves. valve lost the case in one minor country and rolled out the policy globally. I can't imagine apple/google/ea/ubisoft doing that.
but apparently you can. you seem to think anyone who backs up valve is somehow been misinformed. no, we just know valve is the best consumer facing company around based on their current / past behaviors.
are they perfect? nope. but they are miles better than their competition like EA and microsoft. GoG is fine afaik and are not struggling. no one here has shit on GoG afaik beyond a 'missing functionality' argument. but they're also not supporting the open source ecosystem to the same extent valve is.
The problem EA/microsoft/ubisoft have is not a technically one its a reputational one. they've done and continue to done so much misbehavior people don't trust them at all and are not willing to support them and no amount of money thrown at the problem will fix such a problem. Which is why EA has resorted to trying to sue valve for checks notes not following the capitalist playbook.
valve understands what they currently have and until a change in leadership or gaben demonstrates he and valve are no longer a BDFL people like me will continue to support them over EA/microsoft/ubisoft.
your problem is you think gabe's wealth and the fact 10+ years ago they only added a return policy at the conclusion of a law suite somehow changes this equation. which it doesnt for many people, because the good behavior of valve is more valuable than a few dollars here and there to us.
Oh, hey, you acknowledged they're not perfect and most of their positioning is them understanding PR better than competitors. I'm gonna count that as an agree to disagree and stop talking to you because holy crap.
Valve hasnt increased their %age since steams inception. you can argue its too high. but its certainly not a squeeze which requires an unnecessary and increasing rate that is detrimental to the developers.
its hilarious how well the publishers propaganda arm has influenced you to your own detriment. do you know much EA and other publishers demand as their cut? 50%. valve as a publisher is actually a fucking discount.
I do wonder just how much a policy like this would effect Valves bottom line though.
This would be pretty amazing for small studios.
Steam makes a shit load of money. The server fees are basically a joke and they have 80 employees in the steam division.
The only things that is being invested in is Gabens fleet of mega yatchs, worth an estimated 1 billion, and costing between 75 and 100 million annually to maintain.
Valve has been fined in the EU for anti-consumer practices and received an F from the better business bureau. They are currently in the middle of another lawsuit.
30% is way too high and it's a joke to see actual consumers defend it.
This is likely 100% misinformation. Only EU lawsuit i found was about geo blocking games. Which is a game developer/publisher decision not valves.
From there we can extrapolate the rest of their comment is nonsense.
Geo blocking is anti-consumer.
BBB giving them an F (granted, this one is old) : https://kotaku.com/valve-is-not-psyched-they-got-an-f-in-customer-service-1691308332
Billion dollar yatch fleet and maintenance : https://luxurylaunches.com/transport/gabe-newell-luxury-yachts.php
80 employees (only came out because of an other lawsuit against them) : https://www.lavegagames.com/steam-is-run-by-fewer-than-80-staff-lawsuit-docs-reveal/
Gaben isn't your friend and probably mocks you during his high seas coke parties.
oh no, a person at the head of a company that has created a great environment has profited from it! the horror.
Gabe's wealth isnt a problem. if you dislike his yach the problem is in the taxation system of the country not the individuals wealth.
BBB hasnt been relavant for decades its a dead ratings system that was bought out years ago by corpo interests. citing them is like citing donald trump on medical treatments for covid.
oh no! 80 employees? the horror. thats literally what software is about. its economics of scale are insane. you dont need more than a couple dozen people if they're competent.
finally: geoblocking is a feature developers enable. they don't have to. steam doesnt force them to. if you dont like it don't by those games. I promise you there are plenty of games you can buy that dont have it.
really if this is all you have as complaints thats pretty small time. compared to google/apple/microsoft/EA/nabisco mistreatment of their employees, funding of fascist politicians, etc. quite frankly I have bigger concerns than gabe being wealthy.
Now do Musk and Bezos!!
All billionaire wealth is stolen wealth. All billionaires are bad. If you stopped bootlicking for a second, you would realize defending Gaben is defending the system. The fact that he can legally exploit it to steal from consumers and developers doesn't absolve him from doing it.