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Valve runs its massive PC gaming ecosystem with only about 350 employees
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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No harm meant. I do think Steam is the golden example of a big business done right. All I'm saying is that there's room for improvement.
We can make an educated guess. Amazon's S3 charges roughly $0.025 per GB, so an 100GB game would cost $2.50 for Steam to upload to a user. For a $30 game, that's around ~8.5% or just over 3 downloads before it's unprofitable.
Obviously Valve isn't paying consumer level S3 prices, and obviously users can download multiple times. But I would be extremely surprised if they didn't make a rather large margin on each sale
Total fair always room for improvement, no ones perfect.
Appreciate the good discussion!
Assuming there will never be any updates, 3 downloads is what regular gamer can do. First computer, second(friend's) computer and reinstallation on first computer.
$0.025 per GB is the most expensive option on S3 I could find rounded up. It would be absolutely insane if Steam were paying those prices when they have their own servers. I also used 100GB game size as a large number, and $30 as a small price tag (for an 100GB game).
I was trying to be charitable with the numbers and it still came out pretty positive
What is cheapest and at what speed?
I get it, but then there are all those heavy f2p games like War Thunder, from which Steam doesn't get anything.
You can look it up yourself, I was just giving a worst case scenario
aws.amazon.com doesn't seen to work in Russia
For storage or for download?
Download. It's also rounded up. Storage is negligible compared to bandwidth, especially considering Steam's business model
And their cost is going down over time while their revenues are increasing since they take a % off every sales and sales are increasing and so is the average price of games.